Hacker News Reader

> skim open issues

What do you go looking for with this? And what results make you consider/not consider the project based on what you find while skimming open issues?

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Sort the issues by # of reactions, and then read the top few.

Just like reading Amazon reviews.

See what people are complaining about and then answer whether you care about those things

I usually look for duplicate issues that aren’t being addressed, or if there’s just a lot of seemingly non-trivial ones that go unanswered

For me the presence of a stale bot that automatically closes issues after 30 days - like Bulma - is a major red flag.

Sweeping issues under the carpet actively makes your library worse, only because one really values the vanity metric of "closed/open issue ratio".

Github star count is another useless metric, often inflated by "star this on github" widgets on the homepage.

I wish the auto-close bot could be considered a red flag for the exact reasons you stated, but unfortunately it’s in effect on tons of actually good projects, so it’s not useful as a signal.

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