As a maintainer, the +1s get very annoying and can actually get in the way of useful work being done.

At best it makes the comment thread hard to follow. At worst, it causes some people to start filtering their bugmail to /dev/null.

This is why some issue trackers have a dedicated voting system. Even then, people will still ignore it and reply with "+1" or "me too". sigh

https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/256 is exhibit A for why this is a waste of time. The maintainer says it's a priority, they're working on it, etc. and there's another couple hundred comments from people who aren't helping out but are willing to distract the maintainer with a +1.

Yeah, but it's symptomatic of needing voting for issue priority. Comments aren't the place for indicating you'd like something to be fixed.

Two things here: - the +1s show some level of interest, but enough to dive in the code, so it's half interesting, and half useless - also, once you've reached a certain number of +1s....well, it's just noise and annoying. 50 +1...500+1...