Ask HN: How can we give positive feedback to open-source projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can we give positive feedback to open-source projects?

2 pointsLockAndLol3 comments

I keep running across quite rude and self-entitled individuals creating or commenting on tickets of open-source (OS) projects. On GitHub and Gitlab I simply add a thumbs-down to the relevant item and move on, lest the pertinent comments or tickets get side-tracked by offtopic discussions.

However, I do wonder if there's more that happy users could do to support OS developers and projects. Besides the obvious donation, I think it would be kind of disruptive to create a ticket to thank the author(s) for their time and work. Tickets are there, after all, to report issues or request improvements of some sort, not for cheer-leading. And often times the emails used in git commits either don't exist or aren't active.

IMO, it is important to find a way to provide positive feedback since the systems we have setup are there for constructive or negative feedback. The later has already driven good developers away from the community and only when they left did the community realise how far the bad elements had gone. Suddenly there were outpours of positive feedback with blog posts, forum posts, comments, tickets, etc. but by then, it's too late.

How can we drown out rude, self-entitled and demanding elements of our community that post things "if you don't implement this, you obviously don't care about your product" with nice things?

In my experience/opinion, there’s a project size / ticket volume at which an “off topic” ticket that provides positive feedback is problematic. For example, the Homebrew repos are definitely active enough that I’d feel like I was worsening signal/noise by opening an issue to say Thanks. But once projects reach that size, it’s much more likely that they have a well-defined internet presence, which makes it possible to provide the feedback elsewhere (Twitter, IRC, etc).

For smaller projects: I can’t speak for other people, obviously, but I’d happily accept the occasional GitHub issue saying “I used your project and it helped me do $thing, thanks!”

Days when I wake up to an email notification saying that somebody found my project useful are the best. And that’s true whether it was a direct email or a GitHub issue notification.

This is such an insightful post/question. I hope it gains traction and discussion here on HN, Thanks for posting it.

As an open source lurker/consumer I sometimes take a dive in to a projects' bug tracker if something glitches at a reproducible level and some of the tickets I've seen have been appalling.

The sense of entitlement in those has left me slack jawed on more than one occasion.

I've pondered on this a few times when debating whether or not to open source some of the stuff I work on from time to time and the conclusion has been a massive 'Nope'.

Not because I don't want to share for the good of humanity but because of this exact issue.

Criticism I can take (). The open tickets that either DEMAND that something be changed, those that have hit a valid bug (but failed to check the repo for open issues before raising a ticket) and then say that it is costing them $$$$ in downtime and (again) DEMANDING that it be fixed make me weep for the maintainers.

As to what the solution is – I’ve heard (via the grapevine & IRC chats) that receiving an email saying ‘Hi, thanks for making this.’ with a subject line like ‘Thanks dude’ makes a world of difference when having a bad day™.

Yet this is not enough to properly thank those that do Open Source.

Somehow I think that browsing an open source repo and searching for the ‘Help Wanted’ tags is something that all should do if they use an open source program regularly. Not all of it is CODING stuff. Sometimes it is a translation request (no coding skills needed), A request for ‘Does anyone else see this happening? If not will mark as ‘Closed’ etc. Also most will have a metric that maintainers can monitor about how many viewed which pages. Seeing a ‘help wanted’ bug be unviewed for months on end while being confronted with ‘WHY UR PROJECT NOT DO THIS?’ level of tickets is ….. depressing.

Hopefully others here on HN can chip in with what would make them feel valued and appreciated.

In general I do nothing pro bono or on spec anymore even if it seems promising or fun because people who are not paying feel an unlimited entitlement to waste your time.

I find people who can do math are usually victimized in situations like that. The business bullshitters can say what they want and get away from it but for me the business value of something that is 95% right is zero. I'll do the hard work to get to 100% and in a fit of mindlessness they wreck it and then deny that they did.

Business folks use this phrase 'get your hands dirty' when it comes to fleshing out ideas in a framework where contradictions will be exposed. The underlying mindset is how people thought about blacks in pre civil war america, how they thought about Chinese people in the 1890s us or how they think about dailies in India today. You can intimidate people to say 2 + 2 = 3 cause the party says so, but aspies and computers can't do it.

I remember a person on hacker news that thought open source software wasn't well documented enough who went ballistic when I told him he could fix passages he wanted to improve (e.g. you are going to research it to solve your immediate problem, maybe even write private notes about it. Why not put your notes where you can find them later?)

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