Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

Ideally an issue is not a conversation between a “user” and a “maintainer” though, but a place for a community to coordinate around a bug or feature request. I wouldn’t open an issue unless I thought someone more than me might find the topic useful, and so I also don’t feel like I have an obligation to participate in the conversation – after all, it’s not about me, but about ways to improve the code. I find it somewhat offensive when people post to request support on something that can’t reasonably be useful to anyone else.

View on HN

> Ideally an issue is not a conversation between a “user” and a “maintainer” though, but a place for a community to coordinate around a bug or feature request.

What do you mean by this? A bug report or feature request will generally come from a “user” and is likely of interest to a “maintainer”. What should the two do if not converse? Neither the maintainer nor the user really knows whether or not an issue will be “reasonably useful to anyone else” without talking about it.

Those personas are not mutually exclusive. Projects that divide the two don’t tend to be successful, leading to maintainer burnout, and autoclosed issues.

Sadly it seems about 90% of people don't have your mentality :(

And the worse fact is, in terms of sponsorships the 10% of people who are more helpful in the issue queues and are already helping make maintainers lives easier are often the ones who consider sponsorship or other means of support.

That's great, but it's disheartening that the people who feel entitled to an answer about a support question are almost 100x less likely to show any kind of support to open source projects (monetary or otherwise).

This makes total sense. 10% of your users are superfans they read / understand everything you publish. They are so into it they give support (word of mouth, helping onboard others, bug patches, they will test alpha builds and give money/time where possible).

90% of users don't understand your product as well. They haven't totally bought in. They will need more support/handholding in order to convert. People are trying to get your product to work for their situation and if they can't 90% will go away and 10% will ask (usually dumb questions).

Your unhappy with the 10% who can't get it working but want your product to work enough to bother to ask?

I guess you can feel that way. Those 10% do represent an opportunity to get a group of people who want to use your product to onboard. The ones who tried and failed and never asked a question will probably never come back. If you ultimately want more support you are going to need to convert this group (or invest more time in advertising hoping to get more superusers/fanboys)

> it’s not about me, but about ways to improve the code

This is true for me, but I also would admit that it's not all altruistic.

Specifically, I will report problems that may be rare for others and unlikely to be reproducible by the maintainer. I often provide information about the operating system, version, etc. in those cases to put a reasonable amount of effort into it, but I don't always expect it to be fixed by the maintainer.

However, if I determine later that the bug was caused by something else, I'll go find the bug I created and add a comment indicating that it was fixed or related to another problem, if it's simple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com