Comment by liorgrossman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by liorgrossman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That's a great question, I agree this might become a problem down the line, when bad players might try to pressurize package maintainers into fixing problems.

We haven't encountered this problem yet, and believe most developers are decent enough to honestly rate a package based on their experience, as opposed to using it as a leverage.

Few things we're thinking about:

* Allowing maintainers to flag such reviews (for our review)

* Allow users to upvote/downvote reviews, and flag bad behavior (spam, extortion) to stir away bad players.

* Allowing maintainers to publicly to reviews

* Gathering enough data (about review and other previous user reviews) to conceal "bad" or non-useful reviews, in a similar manner to other platforms.

What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions?

I think a very good metric would be the number of maintainers of a package and how well funded they are.

E.g. React has a huge resource pool and people are getting paid for development, while some (most?) packages are single dev with no funding.

Perhaps making this kind of metrics visible would introduce some humility for people pressuring latter maintainers.

That's a great point. Showing project funding is something we had in mind (and in the mockups) but didn't make it to the MVP. We would probably have to integrate with Open Collective and other data sources.

Maybe you could let people put bounties on issues, and pay the developers.

Interesting, that is something that we had in mind in the past. I know there are few good websites doing that, starting with simple bounties like IssueHunt and ending with more complex models like Tidelift. I'm not sure how well those work, honestly.

One similar thing we were thinking of is giving maintainers the platform to easily provide paid support if they want to. Not sure about that one either, although I know some companies/people make money from providing support for OSS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com