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Comment by swillis16 | Hacker News Reader

Github makes millions of dollars per year and has a huge amount of users so the product is proven good. While I understand the need to be appreciative of Github, giving the organization a bit of user feedback is not going to hurt them very much. The response assumes that this is written because of the "Dear Github" letter.

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While GitHub makes millions per year, it's important to keep in mind that "GitHub" and every other company is really just a collection of people like you and me. I'm sure their engineers are paid well, but money isn't everything, and it's nice (and motivating) to show up at the office and know there's people out there who appreciate the work you put in regardless of what you're being paid.

There's nothing wrong with showing gratitude from time to time, even if it's for a for-profit corporation if you truly appreciate what they do.

Is it important because they're GH or just because some people work there? Because in the latter case, you would have a LOT of letters to write.

every other company is really just a collection of people like you and me

That's cool and all, but wasn't the motivation for the first letter the lack of humanity from GitHub in communication with the userbase?

I don't think they deserve a cooing public letter to reassure them on the basis of humanity after they've decided to give "empty response or even no response at all" to what read like perfectly reasonable attempts to communicate with them.

I'm entirely willing to use person-to-person social standards for a company. I'll start with a trust-but-verity attitude, because leveraging a double standard in customer facing business is often a way for companies to take advantage of customers. Once they show they're not interested: fuck 'em.

Constructive feedback is fine, but "I have told you, you know that, but you are ignoring me, what's wrong" is a different story. My reaction to that is 1) it shows you already sent the feedback, what you want is to complain in public, and 2) I own you no shit.

That's a rather wild insinuation of the "Dear GitHub" authors' motivation. If your constructive feedback is ignored you have to start a public discussion to get the thing rolling again. That's not necessarily as selfish as you imply. There are a lot of people who would benefit from the addressed issues being resolved.

> I own you no shit

GitHub might owe them nothing, but it's in their own interest to address and resolve those issues and not just stash them away somewhere. Their biggest selling point is the great UI and the userbase. If the later becomes frustrated because issues with the former don't get resolved, that might be a huge problem for GitHub in the future. Today, there are viable alternatives after all.

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