I do, then, immediately close "thank you" issues so owners are not tasked with responding in any way, but still... And for any watcher, I imagine they are interested in notifications relevant to actual issues, not thank yous.
My opinion is the current best way to say thank you is probably a star. Beyond that, it would be nice if GitHub added a way to leave a thank you or testimonial or something like that. Or even a formal "the repo is in use by such and such app/company."
As a developer what I like even more than thank yous are thank yous that explain how my code helped you in some specific way.
i'll second this.
post some screenshots of the thing you've made with my thing, or how it's improved the user experience or performance improvement metrics. what has my project unlocked for you, e.g. new use cases that were not possible before. compare it to what was there previously. i build open source stuff to scratch my own itches. knowing that it scratches the itches of 10k people instead of just 1 is the best outcome -- maximized impact.
just a thanks is nice but ultimately lowest effort and not that gratifying.
I've deliberately not opened "Thank you" issues, because I didn't want to annoy the owner/watchers. Certainly frustrating there is no way to express gratitude.
Unstar however would become “No thanks”
Star too, donate too, whatever you'd like to do normally too but nothing beats actually using your words
Github launched Github Sponsors in 2019. It does basically everything you described aside from the "thanks" part.
"No I said don't do th.. ah forget it"
1. If you just wanna thank them, write an email
2. If you want to do so publicly, do so on a public channel (e.g. Blog post, HN, youtube channel, etc)
#2 possibly won’t even be seen by the target.
Opening an issue is seen by the whole team and becomes a place for the community to weigh in. Seems ideal until Github provides better.
https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...
#2 can be combined with #1 to let them know
In person interaction naturally flows towards gratitude. Online interactions, like the one I’m having right now feels disposable. I don’t see your face and we can’t form much human connection.
This leads to an online world of shallow interactions that leave us feeling alone an empty. Much like what happens to people that live in large dense cities.
Our online interactions are so shallow, we feel it is the responsibility a product we are buying to facilitate a particular form of interaction as opposed to simply taking it upon ourselves to do it.
I do think there is a generational "thing" where older people tend to see online interactions as superficial and unreal, while younger people see them as a natural extension of the IRL social sphere. As a younger person, I find it easy to point out that interactions with strangers present similar difficulties whether online or IRL.
Yes, because it is, but I'd dispute the claim that GitHub discourages it. If anything, the people who use GitHub are more willing/most likely to misuse bugtracker for not just support requests but also general discussion and comments like this. It seems like there's a (non) issue like this that gets linked at least once a month on HN. I click through, get annoyed with the person who opened it, read the maintainer's response, get annoyed with their endorsement/encouragement of the idea, close the window, and then file it away in my mind or my bookmarks or both as an example of how annoying it is to try to collaborate with people whose platform of choice is GitHub.
Post this stuff on Twitter, or a mailing list, or a discussion board. Or at the very least, be productive and file a bug that says something like, "I wanted to express my gratitude for this project, but the README doesn't link to any public venues for general discussion". You know: things that at least attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate bugs? Or just don't do any of that and keep posting this sort of thing on GitHub--but in that case, please kindly also curb your and your colleagues' whinging in all future instances where you find that someone has chosen not to host on GitHub and, upon with being asked to, they say "no" and point to things like this as being among the reasons why GitHub users can't be trusted to make responsible use of project infrastructure.
I think this would be a nice new Category in Discussions; ":heart: Thank you"
The "hassle" of doing KYC at one of the exchanges and verifying your identity is only once. The benefit of being able to receive little cash for privacy-preserving ads and use it to contribute to a healthier digital economy can last for a long time.
(I haven't used it yet)
I'm not sure that general purpose reviews/forums are the right way to address this issue, because those can generate negative feedback as easily as positive and generate additional stress for the maintainer. I think a simple dedicated "you can leave a public thank you message to the maintainer here if you want" text box would do the trick.
I just close the issue immediately after opening it. :)
Or perhaps just a built-in "endorsement" feature, which companies can use to indicate that they use a project and find it valuable, perhaps listed on the sidebar. Could also segue into paid sponsorship and support.
Insofar as GitHub provides package management, they could also prompt companies to endorse the packages they use.
All of this might get annoying, nasty, or inauthentic, of course. Would need to be careful...
IMO since GH tends to be somewhat aware of how people piggyback their platform, a README gratitude badge might be a good place to start. It can be as simple as a button click plus an optional prompt to add commentary. In fact, I might make this a smol project to see if it gets some traction.
After all, Github is more like a Social Coding Platform.
Indeed! It must equally feel inappropriate to close a gratitude issue.
Concretely, you answered your own question. The "star" button is the default way of saying "thanks" to a project which was useful to you.
> is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project?
I would say yes, it's very unusual. The general lack of basic civility is, in my opinion, just one more reason for the lack of diversity in projects and lowers the number of contributors to open source.
Not exactly, as star numbers are made public, meaning it's also a form of public approval.
In the olden times, we all just used email all the time for everything. It would've been bizarre for someone to work in open source and not have their email publically available. The funny thing is, I haven't shared my email on my GitHub either! I'm going to fix that today.