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Comment by Intermernet | Hacker News Reader

Collaborating would be contacting the Zig team through one of the many channels available and asking questions, offering suggestions etc. Posting critical blog posts without doing this first is counter-productive, and can even be seen as self promotion. After all, we're now discussing the blog posts, and not the actual issues. Would this have happened if the author had just sent an email to the mailing list or asked on Github?

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Nah, this is absurd. This guy or anybody else can write whatever they want, whenever they want, on their own blog. They are under zero obligation to create bug reports, file issues, check in on a chat channel, or contribute in any other way to an open source software project that does not employ them. Writing blog posts is a perfectly reasonable and normal community behavior.

The members of the Zig project are free to reach out to the author!

When you create a project in public people will write about it, tweet about it, complain about it, etc (if you’re lucky!).

It seems we have a different definition of collaboration. I assumed that it meant communication between the parties. Publishing blog posts has many purposes, but dirrect communication isn't one of them.

"They are under zero obligation to create bug reports, file issues, check in on a chat channel, or contribute in any other way to an open source software project that does not employ them." Correct, and absolutely fine, but not collaboration.

"Writing blog posts is a perfectly reasonable and normal community behavior." Correct, and absolutely fine, but not collaboration either.

"The members of the Zig project are free to reach out to the author!" Yes, but it's much easier, more efficient and direct for the author to have reached out to the Zig team.

"When you create a project in public people will write about it, tweet about it, complain about it, etc (if you’re lucky!)." Yes, but, once again, this isn't collaboration.

Intermernet said, "Posting critical blog posts [...] is counter-productive."

You said, "anybody [...] can write whatever they want". "They are under zero obligation ...". "Members of the Zig project are free to reach out ..."

Do you not realize that you have not at all addressed the point about what is the most productive way to criticize?

All you have done is go off about people's rights, freedoms, and lack of obligations. But nobody actually said "People shouldn't be able to post critical blog posts" or "People are obligated to participate by filing issues or contributing code to open source". So what was the point in saying this? Do you think people believe anything contrary to what you said?

The parent quite literally made a normative statement and I disagreed with it:

  > Collaborating would be contacting the Zig team through one of the many channels available and asking questions, offering suggestions etc.

If nothing else, this is attempting to define what counts as valid collaboration, and it's a definition I reject, so I disagreed with it. Good-faith experience reports are valid, useful, pro-social collaboration. Doing so is a perfectly productive way to criticize.

  > So what was the point in saying this? Do you think people believe anything contrary to what you said?

Apparently they do. The parent even made a veiled accusation that the author writing a good-faith blog post on their own blog about their own experiences "can even be seen as self promotion". Since when is sharing your good-faith critique about the design of a tool you've used something underhanded or nefarious?

Setting the bounds of valid community collaboration to "people can post on their own blog as long as I like it otherwise they're being mean" is not a set of values I subscribe to, so I felt it was worth it to articulate that.

"Good-faith experience reports are valid, useful, pro-social collaboration." Good-faith reports would be made directly to the Zig team.

Why is this counter-productive and self promotion? Does that mean we should all stop writing programming related blog posts? And move all the discussions into GitHub issues only?

You can keep writing blogs, but if you want to collaborate you should use the actual mechanisms set up by the project to do so. It's fine if you want to blog about this stuff, and it's often a means for developers to get their name out there and promote their opinions and ideas. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but if you actually have an issue with a project it's much faster, simpler, and, dare I say it, polite, to use the actual channels created for exactly this purpose.

When the inside channels set up by the project gaslight people into thinking there is no problem at all I think it is more appropriate to use blogs, where you have complete freedom to say what you want.

Also, blogs have been used since forever to give constructive feedback to other projects, even other programming languages. So I don't understand why it is suddenly not okey for the Zig project.

Blogs aren't constructive feedback because they aren't easily discoverable. If you see someone has something stuck in their teeth do you yell it to the world and hope they fix the problem, or do you first politely and discretely inform the person. Resorting to blogs as the first course of feedback isn't about helping a project, or collaborating, it's about advertising to the world.

Sorry to have to say this, but you don't have the authority to define what is and what is not constructive feedback. Polite, well written blogs like this are accepted by all people as constructive feedback.

You literally just told me I don't have the authority to define something, then you went on to define it as being accepted by "all people". Isn't that a bit of a double standard?

Blogs aren’t yelling to the world. They’re just a place you put your thoughts for other people to read or not read. Think of it like open source internal monologue.

If youre too young to have context for blogging then it’s not your fault. The intent of “blogs” is generally indeed advertising now a days.

Yes, I understand, I'm saying that they don't, except in second order effect, count as collaboration. That's it. That's the whole point.

This reads to me like an attempt at polishing a pig.

Just hide all issues people using your project stumble upon in internal mailing lists and project a polished facade.

This reads like an issue anyone can stumble upon with the answer being ”you’re holding it wrong”.

I want to find that from a quick search rather than wading through endless internal discussions.

The "endless internal discussions" are more likely to give you an actual answer with considered feedback from all interested parties. The quick search, although gratifying, is more often than not just an opinion.

Andrew wrote ONE SENTENCE and that's enough for you to diagnose him? That's enough for you to identify a pattern of behavior? Really?

He's "polishing a pig"? He's hiding "all issues" with Zig in internal mailing lists to "project a polished facade"? ALL?! You got all that from one sentence saying he wishes the author took a different approach?

Alright, fine. Here's my analysis of your character and lifelong patterns of behavior based on your first two sentences:

You just want to tear down everybody who is trying to do good work if they make any mistake at all. You look for any imperfection in others because criticizing people is the only approximation of joy in your existence. You are the guy that leaves Google reviews of local restaurants where you just critique the attractiveness of the women who work there. You see yourself as totally justified and blameless for your anti-social behavior no matter the circumstances, and you actually relish the idea of someone being hurt by you because that's all the impact you could hope for.

If that's not accurate to who you are, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that's just how it reads to me.

I am not talking about Andrew? I am sorry if that was not as clear as it needed to be.

Not sure where the tirade came from?

I am talking about the person responding here trying to decry OP for not hiding away his issues in internal communication channels.

The internal communication channels are where the people who can fix the problem are looking. They aren't looking at random blogs until it's too late to actually have a meaningful and calm discussion with the person raising the issue.

If the author had raised the issue on the actual channels that the Zig project requests people use, and then the Zig team had been dismissive or rude, then, yeah, for sure go writing blog posts. I'm not sure why this is such a hard thing to grasp. If you have an issue, raise it with the people who can fix the issue first. Don't immediately go screaming from the roof-tops. That behaviour is entitled, immature, insincere and unproductive.

> Don't immediately go screaming from the roof-tops. That behaviour is entitled, immature, insincere and unproductive.

Nobody is screaming here except for you.

You seem to be reading a lot into my replies that isn't there. I'm not sure why you're so offended. At no point have either of us actually addressed the grievances of the blog post's author. That's one of the many reasons they weren't the best option. It's like you feel I'm attacking your right to complain about things. I'm not. Complain away, it's healthy, but there are better ways to communicate with the people who can actually address the problem.

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