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Comment by pierrec | Hacker News Reader

This is only meta, but something needs to be done to prevent Github threads from getting flooded by useless replies as soon as they gain some popularity. And there is far worse than this one - some will have you scrolling through an avalanche of meme gifs.

I know that these "+1" aren't entirely useless in that they show support - but people can show support by other means, and on other websites (for example, by simply upvoting the HN submission). This just plagues any possible discussion and turns the whole thing into a circus.

Of course, any form of moderation will make people complain even more, so I can understand why nothing has been done yet. Edit: Maybe a feature to fold nonconstructive comments would be a partial solution at least. In cases like this, they can even be automatically detected.

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It's a UX issue, github needs a "thumbs-up" button

I've advocated pretty hard for this feature and it turns out this used to be a thing but was removed way back in the day (years now). There is somewhat of a movement surrounding this feature, and Github wants to hear more support from the community before moving forward bringing it back. If you support this feature request, please send an email to support@github.com expressing your support for it. For me, I hate that projects will lock-to-contributors a popular issue they don't want to implement because of the +1 comment spam. I can think of two very huge projects that did this in the last couple of months. Github definitely needs a thumbs up / upvote mechanic.

Hopefully someone who really wants this feature won't just spam them with a thousand "+1" messages. ;)

This is not an actual Github-sanctioned issue/feature request, but take a look anyways for your enjoyment: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/9

I think banning one-liners is a good start.

I'm not sure about that. If you take a look at (for example) the awful change on Stack Overflow made by Shog9 to mitigate short comments (and what he believes are therefore bad comments), you'll see the huge backlash and also notice how many people can and do leave thoughtful comments with only a single line or less. I think it is an impossible problem to judge the quality of content by its quantity. The +1 comment is an extremely niche type of comment "problem" that can be mitigated successfully by outsourcing the functionality to a simple upvote widget, but I think that's as far as you can get in judging comment quality without making very broad statements that quash some quality content by mistake.

Honestly, Shog9 is the single biggest reason why my participation in Stack Exchange has dwindled to prettymuch nothing. It's as if he wakes up one morning and decides "I know! I'll make a huge change to Stack Overflow that will piss thousands of users off! ^-^"

What's just as annoying is that as far as I'm aware, he has never admitted that he's been wrong about anything. Ever.

Why do you think that?

single line filter evasion text here

That would disallow you from voicing that opinion so succinctly.

Instead, you would have to add a line that either gives more depth to your opinion (why do you think it would help?) or that just serves as use,es filler. I bet many people would opt for the latter, as it is easier to write.

Unfortunately, I don't think we have technology to measure the amount of content in a comment.

Hell, just a counter for people subscribed to an issue.

Bountysource has a browser extension which does this:

https://www.bountysource.com/extension

It's possible to "lock" [0] conversations on GitHub. This means that only collaborators of the repository are able to add comments to the issue/pull request.

[0] https://help.github.com/articles/locking-conversations/

> I know that these "+1" aren't entirely useless in that they show support - but people can show support by other means, and on other websites (for example, by simply upvoting the HN submission).

That's not linked to or visible from Github, and assumes the repository owner watches HN or reddit or what have you.

Other systems have ways to simply note that you're affected by an issue without having to spam it, but Github has nothing for that: subscriptions to a bug thread are (AFAIK) not available to the repository owner, and there's no "+1" button, the only way to show interest or that you're affected is a bump comment. Which admittedly isn't nice, but how else is the repository owner going to know this issue affects more than just one person living in a cave on a lost island in the middle of the pacific? Issues are not treated based solely on their "popularity" or on the number of people they affect, but that's an important signal when prioritising.

> Maybe a feature to fold nonconstructive comments would be the solution - but how to determine which ones are nonconstructive?

Repository owners can remove comments, FWIW. Of course unless they also lock the thread that will most likely lead to an avalanche of now outraged claims of censorship.

I think the point is to apply social pressure. I agree that it can be obnoxious, but I would argue that is part of the social contract one makes with public repositories. It can also be managed on the recipient's side as well (email settings & filters).

Or open-source teams can promote the use of ZenHub [1] and adopt the +1 feature just like thousands of non-open source devs have done within their own companies every day.

[1] https://www.zenhub.io

Disclosure: I work with the team that built ZenHub, please forgive my shameless plug :) figured the discussion went off on a tangent anyway, might as well resolve the side issue so we can return to the matter at hand!

That it's Chrome-only is a non-starter for me.

You people are everywhere pushing ZenHub for this +1 stuff. The vast majority of people who want a +1 feature want it on Github natively and not on some third-party for-profit browser extension.

> This is only meta, but something needs to be done to prevent Github threads from getting flooded by useless replies as soon as they gain some popularity.

Make it private?

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