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I think there is an exception to the don't +1 rule. I think saying +1 is fine as long as you follow up with an insightful comment. For example, explaining your

by rpedela 10y ago

I think there is an exception to the don't +1 rule. I think saying +1 is fine as long as you follow up with an insightful comment. For example, explaining your specific use case for the feature because that information could help whoever implements it.

trentmb 10y ago
> For example, explaining your specific use case for the feature because that information could help whoever implements it. Then just post that.
- koolba 10y ago
  > Then just post that. Having the +1 or -1 at the start of the comment helps a reader scan through quickly to find the pro/con comments. It's easier to track the conversation.
StavrosK 10y ago
I needed to +1 something (as in, saying "this affects me too" literally five minutes ago, and felt bad that wasn't more constructive, but it was the only way to send the maintainer a notification about the issue. If I had just thumbsupped it, nobody would have been notified and seen that it affects more than one person.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  Same here. When an issue goes unaddressed for a long time, yet the user base clearly needs it to be addressed, there has to be a mechanism by which the user base can make it annoying to the developers who continue to choose not to address it. Making it annoying for them, e.g. by a constant reminder that many people support some action to be taken, is the whole point. That way, projects can't simply define away critical changes that users have good reason for wanting. If it's easy for project maintainers to make a dictatorial or unilateral decision to ignore something a large body of users wants, and they can do that without paying any sort of annoyance penalty, it's super bad for the project. The mechanism of user needs no longer steers development priorities. I see this happen often on projects where someone wants publicity or credit for their work on something open source, and so prioritizes demo-ware aspects of the project, or showy new features, over critical long-term problems, refactoring workflows, or basic utilities that are sorely needed. Typically there are arguments of the sort, "I'm giving my development time for free, so leave me alone to work only on the aspects that I want" -- and these broadly form the basis of wanting to disallow +1-like pinging, annoying reminder behaviors. The trouble is no one cares what your motivations are for choosing to contribute to the project. No one who uses the open source project has any reason whatsoever to care that you found some cost/benefit tradeoff to be favorable, for personal reasons, and to motivate you to contribute. The project ecosystem generally just wants implementers who will prioritize things as-needed by large sections of the user base, and who will not complain if that means they don't get to use their "donated" time to work only on aspects they personally want. So it creates a natural tension. Getting rid of +1-like pedancy would be bad, IMO, because it puts all of the prioritization power into the hands of the people who are choosing what to do by their mere wants rather than project needs. I'd like there to be a mechanism that penalizes want-pursuit a little more.
  - adzicg 10y ago
    > Same here. When an issue goes unaddressed for a long time, yet the user base clearly needs it to be addressed, there has to be a mechanism by which the user base can make it annoying to the developers who continue to choose not to address it. instead of trying to annoy people who volunteered their own time to build something useful, why not submit a pull request instead? if it's that important to you, invest a bit more into solving the problem than just complaining online.
    - p4wnc6 10y ago
      That's very unrealistic. I may be a casual user of a tool, while the fix requires deep familiarity with internal parts. The age-old answer of "fix it yourself" is silly, unless project maintainers don't care if what they make actually helps people. In your comment there again is this mention that the dev time is volunteered, but this is a red herring. The time isn't useful just because it's volunteered. It has to be both volunteered and directed at effort that addresses something people need. If it's volunteered, but not directed at something people need, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they use some mechanism to indicate they feel dev resources aren't being allocated in a satisfactory way.
      - adzicg 10y ago
        > The time isn't useful just because it's volunteered. It has to be both volunteered and directed at effort useful depends on the target. something might be useful to you but not to other people. big part of successful product management is deciding on good market segments. as a casual user of a tool, you might not be in a segment that the project maintainers care a lot. annoying maintainers won't help at all if that is the case. learning about the code and fixing it will.
        p4wnc6 10y ago
        By definition though, we're talking about issues that get a huge steam of +1's, and are unequivocally extremely useful to a wide group of the project's users. When the project maintainers fail to prioritize the things that huge streams of users are +1-ing, I think that's a strong signal that the project maintainers just want to poke around their preferred aspects of the project, rather than address actual needs. In that sense, they aren't actually "volunteering" time -- they are receiving the compensation of their satisfaction of poking around only the parts of the code they like. They aren't doing it "for" anyone but themselves, and it's this idea that all open source contributions are "volunteered" and are given infinity free passes from criticisms about prioritization that causes a lot of the trouble. In order for the time to be "volunteered" it has to be directed at things that others are benefiting from. If few are benefiting and it's just a personal quirk, curiosity, or interest of some random developer -- who wants to tune out the +1 noise of people asking for things they actually need -- then that developer deserves zero praise or kudos for "volunteering" time or anything. There's no sense in which it's generous to fail to support aspects of a project that people need in order to instead support aspects of a project you personally happen to like. I think a lot of the +1 streams are about this kind of tension. Developers saying, "leave me alone ... I'm already doing this 'for free' -- what more do you want." And then cranky users saying in reply, "But you're not doing anything 'for free' -- you're picking the parts that bring you personal satisfaction and then trying to argue that those are higher priority than the things project users rely on and need."
JohnTHaller 10y ago
If you want to +1, use the voting feature. If you have a comment that will add to determining the problem or arriving at the solution, type that. +1 in comments is just noise.

by rpedela 10y ago

trentmb 10y ago

> For example, explaining your specific use case for the feature because that information could help whoever implements it. Then just post that.

koolba 10y ago
> Then just post that. Having the +1 or -1 at the start of the comment helps a reader scan through quickly to find the pro/con comments. It's easier to track the conversation.

StavrosK 10y ago

I needed to +1 something (as in, saying "this affects me too" literally five minutes ago, and felt bad that wasn't more constructive, but it was the only way to send the maintainer a notification about the issue. If I had just thumbsupped it, nobody would have been notified and seen that it affects more than one person.

p4wnc6 10y ago
Same here. When an issue goes unaddressed for a long time, yet the user base clearly needs it to be addressed, there has to be a mechanism by which the user base can make it annoying to the developers who continue to choose not to address it. Making it annoying for them, e.g. by a constant reminder that many people support some action to be taken, is the whole point. That way, projects can't simply define away critical changes that users have good reason for wanting. If it's easy for project maintainers to make a dictatorial or unilateral decision to ignore something a large body of users wants, and they can do that without paying any sort of annoyance penalty, it's super bad for the project. The mechanism of user needs no longer steers development priorities. I see this happen often on projects where someone wants publicity or credit for their work on something open source, and so prioritizes demo-ware aspects of the project, or showy new features, over critical long-term problems, refactoring workflows, or basic utilities that are sorely needed. Typically there are arguments of the sort, "I'm giving my development time for free, so leave me alone to work only on the aspects that I want" -- and these broadly form the basis of wanting to disallow +1-like pinging, annoying reminder behaviors. The trouble is no one cares what your motivations are for choosing to contribute to the project. No one who uses the open source project has any reason whatsoever to care that you found some cost/benefit tradeoff to be favorable, for personal reasons, and to motivate you to contribute. The project ecosystem generally just wants implementers who will prioritize things as-needed by large sections of the user base, and who will not complain if that means they don't get to use their "donated" time to work only on aspects they personally want. So it creates a natural tension. Getting rid of +1-like pedancy would be bad, IMO, because it puts all of the prioritization power into the hands of the people who are choosing what to do by their mere wants rather than project needs. I'd like there to be a mechanism that penalizes want-pursuit a little more.
- adzicg 10y ago
  > Same here. When an issue goes unaddressed for a long time, yet the user base clearly needs it to be addressed, there has to be a mechanism by which the user base can make it annoying to the developers who continue to choose not to address it. instead of trying to annoy people who volunteered their own time to build something useful, why not submit a pull request instead? if it's that important to you, invest a bit more into solving the problem than just complaining online.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    That's very unrealistic. I may be a casual user of a tool, while the fix requires deep familiarity with internal parts. The age-old answer of "fix it yourself" is silly, unless project maintainers don't care if what they make actually helps people. In your comment there again is this mention that the dev time is volunteered, but this is a red herring. The time isn't useful just because it's volunteered. It has to be both volunteered and directed at effort that addresses something people need. If it's volunteered, but not directed at something people need, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they use some mechanism to indicate they feel dev resources aren't being allocated in a satisfactory way.
    - adzicg 10y ago
      > The time isn't useful just because it's volunteered. It has to be both volunteered and directed at effort useful depends on the target. something might be useful to you but not to other people. big part of successful product management is deciding on good market segments. as a casual user of a tool, you might not be in a segment that the project maintainers care a lot. annoying maintainers won't help at all if that is the case. learning about the code and fixing it will.
      - p4wnc6 10y ago
        By definition though, we're talking about issues that get a huge steam of +1's, and are unequivocally extremely useful to a wide group of the project's users. When the project maintainers fail to prioritize the things that huge streams of users are +1-ing, I think that's a strong signal that the project maintainers just want to poke around their preferred aspects of the project, rather than address actual needs. In that sense, they aren't actually "volunteering" time -- they are receiving the compensation of their satisfaction of poking around only the parts of the code they like. They aren't doing it "for" anyone but themselves, and it's this idea that all open source contributions are "volunteered" and are given infinity free passes from criticisms about prioritization that causes a lot of the trouble. In order for the time to be "volunteered" it has to be directed at things that others are benefiting from. If few are benefiting and it's just a personal quirk, curiosity, or interest of some random developer -- who wants to tune out the +1 noise of people asking for things they actually need -- then that developer deserves zero praise or kudos for "volunteering" time or anything. There's no sense in which it's generous to fail to support aspects of a project that people need in order to instead support aspects of a project you personally happen to like. I think a lot of the +1 streams are about this kind of tension. Developers saying, "leave me alone ... I'm already doing this 'for free' -- what more do you want." And then cranky users saying in reply, "But you're not doing anything 'for free' -- you're picking the parts that bring you personal satisfaction and then trying to argue that those are higher priority than the things project users rely on and need."

JohnTHaller 10y ago

If you want to +1, use the voting feature. If you have a comment that will add to determining the problem or arriving at the solution, type that. +1 in comments is just noise.