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Comment by notsrg | Hacker News Reader

Gitter is a great idea in theory. In practice it's just been a place for my questions to go unanswered.

Personally, I don't think that it's even a right format for questions which are not part of a larger discussion (e.g. deciding on details of some issue or PR).

I have never seen link to gitter in google search results, and answers vanishing forever (not sure how good gitter search is though) does not sound good. Once I joined a few channels because I wanted to ask maintainers a quick question if $xyz sounds feasible or am I strongly misunderstanding things, because had some ideas how I could contribute. These were rather popular repos and all channels were full of low effort questions that could be either google-able or answered by spending a few minutes playing around.

I co-maintain an open source project on GitHub that's somewhat popular (>1.5k stars). We set up Gitter because I preferred Slack which my collaborator didn't use, and he preferred Gchat which I didn't use, and Gitter looked like a reasonable middle ground. Since then it's mostly been a communication channel between us two. We do get a user question once in a while, and I do answer when I get a notification email. Basically, for users it's like opening an issue, just less formal.

That doesn't sound like a Gitter issue but a lack of activity in that particular project/community.

Some projects prefer email/github issues over chat as there isn't an active community around it 24/7 for anyone to just jump in and ask away.

I maintain an open source project where we have set up Gitter awhile ago. So far -even with a really small community like ours- I'm answering questions and interacting with users regularly.

Totally not a gitter platform issue, but these platforms aren't really distinguishable from their user communities at the end of the day.

If Facebook only had 2-3 of your friends on it, no one would be impressed by the features and sophistication, they wouldn't get that far.

https://gitter.im/explore/tags/curated:frontend

There are some channels with thousands of users and high activity.

* VueJS 12,000+

* Webpack ~10,000

* angular.js ~8,500

* boostrap ~6,000

* docker ~4,000

* gulp ~2,500

* eslint ~1,000

* ansible <1,000

That is just not fair to say that gitter is the reason your questions go unanswered. Gitter is a chat technology. It depends on who you're chatting with not the underlying technology. Its like calling and ordering pizza, and then blaming your phone because the pizza is cold.

Gitter has been a huge part of freeCodeCamp's community since the beginning. Thousands of people have asked questions there, and most of them have gotten helpful answers quickly. This is thanks to the experienced developers who contribute their time and expertise in there.

Like IRC, it's a great platform to ask and answer questions on. Find the right rooms and talk to the right people.

This reminds me of something I want to share with HN. I've put a lot of thought into how technologists seem to forget to think about how their tools will be adopted and used in a collective sense. They seem to not design their tools for the end result.

https://medium.com/@xpe/designing-effective-communication-67...

> Can your product provide a great user experience for the group sizes and compositions you want to support?

> Can your product maintain the tone and engagement levels you seek?

Probably slightly orthogonal to your post, but @aurynn on Twitter has had some thoughts about UX in relation to open source:

https://twitter.com/aurynn/status/882411143611924480

https://twitter.com/aurynn/status/882036680869371904

Confronting, but accurate.

This sounds like more of a problem of the projects that you are interacting with more so than the platform?

I could say the same thing about many IRC channels, heck, even the internet in general.

I've found gitter really good for popular projects, you can ask fuzzy questions that aren't suitable for something like stack overflow.

some gitter communities are pretty dead though.

It depends on the project & maintainers, not the tool. When I was learning webpack a couple years ago I had a great experience asking for help in their gitter.

Used it for a locomotivecms (ruby) question, got it answered in a VERY (happily) surprising manner, and proudly supported its development.

Great tool when used effectively.

It may work better integrated directly with Gitlab as they will probably pay close attention to the community development.

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