Hacker News Reader

Comment by rigmarole | Hacker News Reader

Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!)

#3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.

View on HN

In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments.

I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.

All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.

Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.

As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.

But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.

Since the time of that thread, the dev team has grown, and WhiteNoise has joined the team officially in charge of bugs. I don't know the full systems they use in the background.

But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.

For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.

Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com