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Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

This is what I wonder. I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?" For anyone tasked with maintaining a repo, any email notification of new issues must come with a certain level of dread. At least that's what it's like for me, even if I sincerely appreciate and enjoy receiving issues!

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."

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> I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?"

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.

I star projects that have caught my attention and might be relevant for my work, or that I will need to reference later. I don't see how this relates to a display of gratitude.

Wouldn’t “star” express gratitude?

Interest, relevance? Yes. Gratitude, not so much.

Might thought exactly. I wonder if GitHub would change Star to Thanks.

Unstar however would become “No thanks”

Saying "thank you" expresses an infinite amount more gratitude than someone taking half a second to click a button. Please don't boil positivity down into just another dopamine fix. It's so fucking fake.

Star too, donate too, whatever you'd like to do normally too but nothing beats actually using your words

If you put it that way, I think GitHub could enable a platform feature to collect finance contributions from fans/users. Heck, even licensing costs. That makes open source programmers earn some money as well - of course along with a text field to say “thanks”.

https://github.com/sponsors

Github launched Github Sponsors in 2019. It does basically everything you described aside from the "thanks" part.

This feels like corp every meeting I've been in hahah

"No I said don't do th.. ah forget it"

Yeah that’s the issue: “star” doesn’t have clearly defined semantics, so everyone uses them in their own way. In addition to bookmarking, I do star for gratitude because having repos with stars is very advantageous for contributors. I really appreciate getting stars on many levels.

I think it depends on the scale of the project. If it's a project that isn't full of all kinds of bug reports and issues already, thank you notes aren't a bad thing.

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.

> 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.

While opening an issue might be the lowest effort option I think there are two better options:

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)

#1 only targets one person.

#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.

So do both, letting them know about #2 in #1?

> l until Github provides better.

https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...

#1 can be written to more than one person

#2 can be combined with #1 to let them know

I do that sometimes. I sent an email recently to thank the author of XLD [0], an excellent piece of software hosted on Sourceforge, where I don’t have an account. I wouldn’t say it’s about low effort, so much as not taxing the recipient: with an email a person may feel more compelled to reply than with an opened and immediately closed issue.

[0] https://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html

I always look for a Twitter account or something to send my gratitude to. It feels like a more natural place to do it than in an issue. The only downside is that a tweet only goes to one person, while if you open an issue, all contributors can see it more easily.

What I usually do is append something like "thank you for the effort" (and sometimes explain how good this project is for my use case) when I open a new issue or comment on an existing one.

Opening and then closing "thank you" issues solves the annoyance problem, doesn't it? It's a NOOP for the maintainer, but it gets the message across. /$0.02

Sure, but it's not an issue with the project, it's a message to the developer(s). While it is a NOOP, it is not something which should appear in the ("technical") stats.

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