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I got a weird reverse one a few years back, to the effect of "your result is great, best I've seen, but the code is awful and I think you're not a good developer". What can you do? I just said something like "thanks, if you have any specific feedback please open an issue".

One thing that's nice about getting this via GitHub is, at least the rude comment maybe gets a couple of :thumbsdown:s on it, which can help you brush it off.

I used to really care about my own code quality in OSS but these days I just think it's a miracle if I manage to write any code (for the same reasons described in that video: full time job + family and other social obligations, eg I also do volunteer work most weekends).

The way I see it, writing working code is more important than writing "good" code most of the time. That's not to say I don't try and follow some degree of standards. My code usually contains a crap load of tests, definitely tries to follow the language idioms, etc. But I just don't try and get clever where I don't need to. Sometimes this means code isn't well optimised - however I can pick that up in a subsequent bug fix if that particular feature proves useful / popular.

Thus I have had one or two people comment before saying "it's not very well coded" and I usually just reply "it's very much living project where some code is working POC and other code has been rewritten and improved (sometimes many times over). However if you have any specific concerns or tips, I'd welcome them. Or better yet, chuck me a PR"

Funny thing about that: Complainers always seem to think that the code that they could have written but didn't is better than the code that you could write and did. The trifling fact that theirs does not, in fact, exist never seems to register with them.

My answer would've been "fuck you", followed by blocking said user in all my repos.

The internet is such a vacuum, though. Having someone actually read your code at all is kind of like a massive compliment. That they take the effort to email you about how much they hate it... In a weird way, it's kind of gratifying.

Great artists are never recognised in their time ;-) But seriously, I think you can think of it the same way. Would an artist ever make a new work if they didn't think they could make something better than their previous work? So there will always be truth about the deficiencies in a work. But can the reviewer understand the good parts?

Sometimes I get great pleasure in pieces of code that I wrote that I think nobody else will appreciate. It's kind of like an inside joke. If someone can't see it, it's not really unexpected -- perhaps more surprising if someone does see it.

I try to enjoy the fact that someone read my code. The hate mail is just the proof :-D

My usual response is "Then go use those alternatives instead of bothering me. It works fine for me."

The majority of the things I "throw out there", I know perfectly well will not be useful to a significant number of users, and that's fine. I just do it because it costs very little, and someone might find it useful.

(In case you were wondering, I'm not going to show the stuff I've put out here for a variety of reasons, sorry.)

I would be happy if I could find an appropriate way to get more visibility for one of my open source projects (a snapshot backup system, called Snebu). My problem is that I don't want to feel spammy by throwing out references whenever an opportunity comes up (like I just did here), however on the flip side the more people that use it, the more support tickets that will come in that may ask for things that are outside of the design scope. And I would feel bad if I can't make something work for everybody.

> So what to do with that?

Negative feedback is the only form of valueable feedback. If you want to make your software better you should listen to negative feedback. Of course negative feedback often comes with emotional baggage but you should be above that kind of thing. The right strategy is actually to ignore positive feedback (because it is mostly worthless) and ask the people that give you negative feedback for more specifics and to be more precise about what they don't like.

No, being abused by someone is not valuable and even very mature, confident people find it hard to handle emotionally. Negative feedback is helpful if presented politely or neutrally. Otherwise the form destroys the value of the content. (And by the way, positive feedback can be very valuable as well.)

> even very mature, confident people find it hard to handle emotionally.

One of the defining qualities of being "mature" and "confident" is to be able to fade out the emotional components and concentrate on the substance. This is the essential quality that seperates children from adults.

If you are fazed by some comments of random people on the internet then you are neither "mature" nor "confident". You either got to grow up or you will have a hard time.

> positive feedback can be very valuable as well.

Only for marketing, which you won't need if your product is good anyways. For example nobody did any "marketing" for git (except that Linus called his competitors "stupid and ugly" which was actually more like anit-marketing) but git is used by everybody because it is generally really good.

> If you are fazed by some comments of random people on the internet then you are neither "mature" nor "confident". You either got to grow up or you will have a hard time.

Not sure if you're trying to troll here, but being fazed by negativity is a perfectly normal human response. Framing it as a matter of maturity or confidence seems disingenuous to me. One can be trained to handle it better and turn it around or into something productive (i.e. conflict training for health care professionals) but the response remains.

Why does negative feedback come with an obligation to slave away for a person that doesn't even care about what you are doing?

If you want your product to be good you have the "obligation" to listen to negative feedback. But you don't have the "obligation" to make a good product. If you don't care about your product you are going to ignore the feedback anyways.

> a person that doesn't even care

This is a misconception. People giving emotially loaded negative feedback actually "care" about your product much more than the average user.

> Your product sucks is not "negative feedback". It useless statement.

If you are paid and want to go fish to see if you can turn that into actual feedback, go ahead. It will take a lot of time and energy to pull something out, that will be useful. Posting your project to hn, various reddits or just twitter will get you a lot of more constructive feedback for less effort.

Besides I don't like rude people, responding to them just validates to them, that rudeness pays.

Negative feedback can fall into two categories:

* constructive - which are polite and informative

* deconstructive - which are basically just someone being an arsehole.

The former stuff can be great at time but the examples being discussed fall firmly in the latter category.

Getting actually constructive feedback is super rare. When you ask emotionally engaged poeple to be more specific and precise about their problem they usually rationalize their anger and stop being angry when they actually notice what exactly they are angry about.

Constructive feedback shouldn't be angry nor emotionally charged. That's just bad feedback.

I also don't think constructive feedback is super rare either. But I guess it depends on the project. eg some projects might have an appeal to different communities who are less often less patient with maintainers.

I think it's also worth remembering that maintainers do also need to be patient with the community. Sometimes I've seen maintainers not handle themselves well even when that feedback is PR fixing a bug or security vulnerability and there's no comment, suggestion nor anything else about the existing code base. In those instances you either just have to accept the maintainers vision (even when you disagree with it) or fork their project and maintain it yourself (which I've had to do before).

Ultimately though, most people I interact within OSS are friendly enough.

Those sort of emails are really hard to deal with, especially when it is something you spent a lot of time working on.

I like the idea from the talk of just blocking them outright.

I learened not to engage. It only ever once turned out, that the user actually spent quite a bit of time and contributed something as a result of me engaging futher and not just ignoring the e-mail. I guess some people may just be grumpy for whatever reason, and it will bubble up in the conversation.

But I don't usually care for the positive words that much either. I guess it's nice that my sw is helping someone, and whatnot, and great, but it's usually just a preface to some request or issue someone's having, often times solvable by reading the man page, or using --help, or checking if there's a newer version and trying that before bothering the authors.

The only people that stand out are those that just send a thank you without anything else. Quite rare.

What'd probably be more interesting to receive is just a thank you note and some info about what the user is using the sw for. That might as well be inspirational, at the very least, and perhaps an opener for some collaboration. I think I received such a message 2-3x in the last 15 years. Very rare! Maybe people need a bit of probing in the README to send such messages. :D

>What'd probably be more interesting to receive is just a thank you note and some info about what the user is using the sw for.

Good idea, I will try to start doing that.