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Comment by ninkendo | Hacker News Reader

What form should this ignoring take, in your eyes? I’ve never maintained an open source project but I’d imagine this is the hard part, how to politely decline the peanut gallery’s feedback. Do you disable GH issues? Leave them open and ignore them? Decline with some boilerplate language? How do you stop people from being mad that you’re ignoring them? (IME these types of people are likely to take things personally and start harassing you or complaining loudly in other forums…) These are the kind of things that stress me out just thinking about it, if a project of mine actually got popular.

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Say no, politely, with your reasons. If they continue to argue: 1) Unwatch the issue/block emails realted to the issue (setup tooling for this) 2) If they continue to harass just block them, they are a waste of your precious time and energy

And yes they will go cry on reddit or HN or their own blogs and call you names. Ignore it. Be happy in the knowledge of the thousands or millions of people whose lives you have improved by your labor. Most of them wont bother to say thank you, but a few will, rememebr those. And be happy in the knowledge that the worlds is a better place because you exist in it, in however small a way.

The key is to realize that human psychology is by default not well equipped to deal with the internet. We tend to react much more strongly to criticism than praise. Recognize that in yourself, and gradually change it.

This is certainly a good idea for the individual who is running a FOSS project.. But I think the projects with maintainers who bend over backwards for people are more often the ones that end up chosen and kept as dependencies when there are for example hundreds of compression libraries to choose from.

The distribution game is kind of stacked for the most likely to burn out to be the most likely to be important in the stack and in desperate need of help.

It makes sense that this could have been an easy mistake to make in the past. Responsive people seem more interested and engaged. But I wonder if it would be best seen as imprudent now? If highly responsive maintainers are susceptible to burnout, then maybe people should consider those other algorithms.

Especially considering the responsiveness here is responsiveness to the peanut gallery.

It would probably be good for the maintainers too. If being responsive is seen as a way to have a bigger impact, people might be inclined to become more responsive and burn out.

But I think the projects with maintainers who bend over backwards for people are more often the ones that end up chosen and kept as dependencies when there are for example hundreds of compression libraries to choose from.

You're not wrong, and that's the first mistake: the individual running a FOSS project wants to see their project succeed and willingly bends over backwards to make it so.

The more you care about popularity, or even acceptance, the more vulnerable you are.

Don't even engage to begin with. Embrace elitism. Embrace the natural order. "The lion needn't be polite to the sheep." ;p Plus, they're probably Chinese intelligence agency bots.

I have a tag for my issue tracker that's called “maybelater” which is my polite version of “wontfix” (which I also have); I use it for stuff that might be reasonable, but I have no intention of (ever?) working on.

If you're working on open source as a hobby (as I do), you should make this very clear to your users. You work on stuff you want to, at the pace you find enjoying. You don't take contributions you think will be hard to maintain. You make it clear you don't owe anyone anything. You also accept that, often, the best answer to an issue/contribution/disagreement is a fork.

You say, "Sorry, I don't have the bandwidth for this right now. I am closing this issue for now but it can be reopened if anyone else is sufficiently motivated to submit a patch."

> How do you stop people from being mad that you’re ignoring them? (IME these types of people are likely to take things personally and start harassing you or complaining loudly in other forums…)

You don't (and can't) stop people from being unreasonable, mad, angry, or upset. That is their own choice. What you describe is bullying, plain and simple. Being nice to them because they might escalate later is counter-productive to your own mental health and gives them agency over your own time and energy. With bullies, the only way to win is to not play the game.

Based on my experience running open source projects for a couple of decades, not replying/engaging is the only way.

Don't reward incompetence with a response -- are they paying attention, have they done their homework? (paraphrasing Maria Popova)

A relevant term is "help vampire". The original post describes how to spot them, and suggestions for addressing it.

https://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

One example of a useful technique

https://serenityos.org/ apparently only makes source code available. There are no binary images of the OS to install

I think Andreas said this functions like a little test -- if you're not willing to build it from source, then you might not be a good contributor. Or you might not be seriously interested in the project's goals.

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Likewise, my shell project provides source tarballs only, right now - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/

It is packaged in a number of places, which I appreciate. That means some other people are willing to do some work.

And they provide good feedback.

I would like it to be more widely available, but yeah I definitely see that you need to "gate" peanut gallery feedback a bit, because it takes up a lot of time.

Of course, it's a tricky balance, because you also want feedback from casual users, to make the project better.

  Decline with some boilerplate language?

It works for corporate triage. If your project is big enough it might be your best bet.

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