Comment by tylermenezes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylermenezes | Hacker News Reader

I've been really disappointed in how, despite the huge amount of funding recently, Signal is still operating like a small community-powered OSS project.

I once opened an issue for 15-second freezes after sending each message, +1'd by other users, and my bug report was closed and locked with a very rude message from one of the (paid!) developers to "Please, when you open a bug, talk about the user impact."

Seriously... are you kidding me? You have $50M and you're going to close and lock a bug about 15sec lag when sending messages because it's not obvious what the user impact is?

And if I, as a former developer, YC alum, etc. can't open a bug report without getting a rude lecture from the Signal team (seriously fuck you Scott Nonnenberg), what hope is there for a casual user? I went back to re-read it just to make sure I wasn't exaggerating, and nope! It makes me mad thinking about what would happen if my non-technical friends needed help. They'd just switch.

I really want Signal as a concept to succeed, but after having used it for years and seen the bugs, and the disregard the developers have for users, I think something like Telegram is unfortunately the better bet.

> And if I, as a former developer, YC alum, etc.

This actually makes you the least important type of bug reporter (and reeks of entitlement). Given Moxie's personal views especially, you probably aren't going to win any points for either of those, especially not the last one.

Andrew Torba is YC alum, too. It's not good on its own.

On top of this, the response wasn't that rude, especially given you didn't follow the template:

I've closed this, because it's not a bug. It's a single scenario-free trace without a debug log, and without connection to a user scenario. Please, when you open a bug, talk about the user impact. Follow the bug template.

It does sound like you're talking about interactivity problems, which is something we've been talking about here: #2613

If you'd like to get involved (which you seem to with that trace!), please check out the current beta build, which has a potential fix for the interactivity problems.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/2703

You seem extremely over-entitled.

Seriously I read that bug report and I would say the same thing to OP... especially since the issue was largely a duplicate of an already existing issue. He also was hardly lectured.

Also not sure why he feels the constant need to bring up their $50M endowment... OP is no question entitled.

Why would you mind if the user is entitled? I've regretted all the negative energy I've redirected back onto my users. I feel as though there's a lot to learn about how signal could do a better job scaling to a large scale project because I think Signal makes the same mistake as your that I used to.

I've had a lot of problems filing bugs with signal and signal projects. I've given up on filing bugs cause they are ignored because of some aspect of your byzantine issue policy. I am totally a huge supporter of signal's ideals but signal is well funded now."I'm not a YC alum" I read as if I were in your shoes. Not everything has to be an attack. Stay positive.

> user is entitled?

Is #2703 a user report or a developer report? Why would a user use GitHub and not https://support.signal.org/? Who is directing any sort of negative energy, when the reporter is swearing publicly at the developer?

right, that's what i mean by redirecting. Taking negative energy and slinging it back. It's lame. Learn from everyone

There's no negative energy in the response quoted.

That's totally false. There's lots of valuing one person over another based on what they said and felt. Then rejecting that user due to failing signal's byzantine bug reporting system

You're projecting your feelings about YC onto me. I don't think being a developer or YC alum makes me more entitled to good support.

As I said in my original post, if I can't figure out how to "properly" report a bug with a tech background, how do you think a regular user is going to?

> especially given you didn't follow the template

The information he told me I was missing ("talk about the user impact") was /not in the template./ The template was also not, at the time, configured to show in the issue tracker editor, it was only in the wiki. I don't think it should be on the average user to dig that up.

The user impact of freezes upon every sent message in a messaging app is also comically obvious.

You also concluded your initial report with a pretty hostile and unnecessary comment about their funding, so I'd say their response was far kinder than you'd get from a lot of other projects.

(I know this is a free product, but you've raised a bunch of money to fund development, and if you're going to require users to be on a recent version, it's not really acceptable for the recent versions to be so buggy...)

If I was running a project geared for the long-term, I wouldn't treat $50 million like "$50 million to spend", but as a $50 million endowment where the goal is to not spend the principle.

There is also the matter of scale however: if you could grow your users, maybe you could secure more funding/donors long term as well

But its obviously a lot more likely to be around long term if they don't blow all their cash in a short term attempt at grabbing a few more users and hope to get more later.

I sent in a pull request for Signal-Desktop this month and am yet to receive any reply whatsoever for 20 days now.

Their hostility towards f-droid and saying it's too small potatoes gives me a very bad feeling about their security and that the play store version actually is safe.

You can decompile the app. Dalvik bytecode is easy to read. FDroid wouldn't make validating the security any easier.

> YC alum

Ah, ego!

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