6 ms·

This is a really good article. One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I woul

by elyobo 7y ago

This is a really good article. One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature." to be rude. I would have thought it was helpful feedback; more people indicating the value of a feature seems helpful in assessing whether it's worth doing (if it's not obvious for other reasons).

LVB 7y ago
I was mulling over that sentence too. While I’d probably not characterize them as rude per se, those little pings do intrude more than, say, adding another upvote on the issue. I already know there is a lot more that I’d like to do than have time for, and having these personal pleas add a little more guilt to the mix without providing any more substance are often a negative (especially when there are lots of them).
- elyobo 7y ago
  Yeah, that's fair, in the context of GH where you have the option of doing the thumbs up instead, a "me too" style comment is a little rude.
carllerche 7y ago
As an OSS author, unless I ask for that feedback, “me too” comments both add noise to my inbox and come off as entitled. It feels like the author of the comment expects me to implement a feature for them because they want it. I don’t maintain OSS as a product, I maintain it because it is code that I need for my personal use cases and I benefit by having others participate in QA and feature dev. This probably does not apply to OSS projects that are products built by companies.
phreack 7y ago
Thought the same... maybe what he finds rude is the comment itself in cases (like Github) where you can react to the comment with a thumbs up to say the same thing, instead of a new comment that sends a notification and maybe even an email. There needs to be a non-rude way to show support for a constructive idea.
- elyobo 7y ago
  Yeah, I didn't think of that, and several people have pointed it out in the responses :) Agreed completely, if the silent :+1: option is there then a content free "me too" is a bit rude.
atoav 7y ago
I help with UX in a FOSS project. When it comes to comments of that kind, the problem is that they are usually quite low effort. The person thought: "X is a good idea" but never once considered giving proper reasons, exploring other possible solutions, thinking aboit how it should actually look like and so on. In my opinion a good feature request does all that legwork. The goal (my goal) is to arm the maintainer with a action-plan that they can pull out of the drawer and start working on immidiately. If this doesn't work — seeing that the other side did the legwork can still be motivating and creates a good climate. Just imagine we are not talking about code, but about cool Lego-towers for a moment. If you want the other kid to add a certain detail to the tower, the least you can do is explain it to them properly. Better is to inspire their creativity alltogether: who says your idea is the only/best way to solve the problem?
- elyobo 7y ago
  Yes, that's a fair point. Just "me too" doesn't convey a lot of extra information. Would "me to, because this would help solve my scenario xyz" be more helpful? What about "me too, because I also have the exact problem described" (which at least conveys that they've put more thought in to it than a totally light weight "me too")?
  - atoav 7y ago
    > Would "me to, because this would help solve my scenario xyz" be more helpful? Quite definitly. But even more helpful would be if you listed all scenarios you can think of where this would be helpful, even ones that are not useful to you, but might be to others. Then you think about how it would impact existing functionality (both positively and negatively), would it be the consistent thing to do? Where could be traps and pitfalls? Maybe even ad a mockup of hoe it would look. If you did that, the maintainer sees that you didn't just demand a feature drive-by-shooting-style, but you did the actual legwork of fleshing the thing out. Don't marry your own ideas, others might be inspired by you and have a even better way of solving this. If you are writing one sentence you are doing to little usually (in my eyes).
    - 7y ago
DarthGhandi 7y ago
The number of big projects with over a dozen identical comments saying "Same problem" is quite astounding. At what point does the maintainer turn off notifications? 5? 20? Perhaps the point was that unless you have something useful to add to a GitHub issue then don't comment. People don't want Reddit style pun threads here and yet to hear complaints about that being enforced, in fact the opposite. GitHub issues is similar in that sense. Everything has its place and time.
- elyobo 7y ago
  Yes, I think that adding the thumbs up feature (which people still use badly) was a good solution to that. It lets you give a "me too" response without cluttering up the comments, and without spamming the maintainers with notifications either - but if they do look they can see people expressing interest.
- Chris2048 7y ago
  If the issue is a bug (as opposed to a feat request) maybe it's useful to know how common it is? It would imply its not just a one-off issue with a particular users setup.
- chinesempire 7y ago
  > with over a dozen identical comments saying "Same problem" That's an UI problem. If a bug affects 100% of the users no matter what or just a few of them, in some weird condition and setup, is completely different. There should be a way to be prioritize or sort bugs by popularity.
why-oh-why 7y ago
It depends on the phrasing. If you’re just saying “me too” you’re just annoying the maintainer instead of adding a silent +1 reaction. If you add one more use case that might help the maintainer reconsider the feature, then I’d find it acceptable. Sometimes the issue opener didn’t explain the utility that well or wrote some example that made it sound like it would be a niche feature and not worth it.
- elyobo 7y ago
  Yeah, I wasn't thinking of GH specifically, but if you have the silent thumbs up option, then a "me too" with no meaningful contribution is a bit rude.
kelnos 7y ago
I probably wouldn't call it rude, but I'd say it's definitely unwanted. It just adds annoying noise to my inbox. In my time working on FOSS, it's pretty rare that more "votes" would make me more likely or more interested in implementing a particular feature. I certainly would have been interested in knowing what features were most important to users, but I think a drive-by "me too" on a feature request is a poor sample of what users overall really want. And regardless, for some projects, at some times, you just feel like working what you feel like working on, and more users clamoring for a particular feature just doesn't motivate you.
floatingatoll 7y ago
There are two unstated assumptions underlying “helpful feedback” that need to be considered and re-evaluated. First, the assumption that ‘voting’ is an appropriate and helpful form of social interaction with someone who has not expressly invited that participation from others. Second, the assumption that a group expression of a statement is emotionally equivalent to a single individual’s expression of the same statement. These are not universally shared assumptions, especially in open source.
lenkite 7y ago
If one doesn't have proper additional reasons for their chiming, thats what the vote button is for. Otherwise the useless text is just taking up valuable screen estate and making people scroll un-necessarily.
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
I reckon that if you have to process a lot of communications about your project(s), and because you are the maintainer you HAVE to pay attention, comments like that are high noise, low signal, and while one of them is fine, dozens or hundreds of those a day just cost energy without bringing anything back.
pauljurczak 7y ago
Just chiming in to say that I was also surprised by this statement.
burntsushi 7y ago
Thanks! > One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature." to be rude. I mentioned on r/rust that "rude" is perhaps too strong of a word. I was more or less thinking of things that annoyed or grated on me, and then just kind of lumped that in with "rude." To be sure, I do not get to lay claim to a universal definition of rudeness. :-) But yeah, I think others responding to you pretty much summed up why it can be mildly annoying. And to be clear, I do think part of this is on me: I'm working on trying to let such minor things like this slide more. It's a process.
CathedralBorrow 7y ago
After thinking about it I agree with him. If you are going to stand up to speak in a community meeting, you should have something more thoughtful to say than "I agree with what that guy said".

by elyobo 7y ago

LVB 7y ago

I was mulling over that sentence too. While I’d probably not characterize them as rude per se, those little pings do intrude more than, say, adding another upvote on the issue. I already know there is a lot more that I’d like to do than have time for, and having these personal pleas add a little more guilt to the mix without providing any more substance are often a negative (especially when there are lots of them).

elyobo 7y ago
Yeah, that's fair, in the context of GH where you have the option of doing the thumbs up instead, a "me too" style comment is a little rude.

carllerche 7y ago

As an OSS author, unless I ask for that feedback, “me too” comments both add noise to my inbox and come off as entitled. It feels like the author of the comment expects me to implement a feature for them because they want it. I don’t maintain OSS as a product, I maintain it because it is code that I need for my personal use cases and I benefit by having others participate in QA and feature dev. This probably does not apply to OSS projects that are products built by companies.

phreack 7y ago

Thought the same... maybe what he finds rude is the comment itself in cases (like Github) where you can react to the comment with a thumbs up to say the same thing, instead of a new comment that sends a notification and maybe even an email. There needs to be a non-rude way to show support for a constructive idea.

elyobo 7y ago
Yeah, I didn't think of that, and several people have pointed it out in the responses :) Agreed completely, if the silent :+1: option is there then a content free "me too" is a bit rude.

atoav 7y ago

I help with UX in a FOSS project. When it comes to comments of that kind, the problem is that they are usually quite low effort. The person thought: "X is a good idea" but never once considered giving proper reasons, exploring other possible solutions, thinking aboit how it should actually look like and so on. In my opinion a good feature request does all that legwork. The goal (my goal) is to arm the maintainer with a action-plan that they can pull out of the drawer and start working on immidiately. If this doesn't work — seeing that the other side did the legwork can still be motivating and creates a good climate. Just imagine we are not talking about code, but about cool Lego-towers for a moment. If you want the other kid to add a certain detail to the tower, the least you can do is explain it to them properly. Better is to inspire their creativity alltogether: who says your idea is the only/best way to solve the problem?

elyobo 7y ago
Yes, that's a fair point. Just "me too" doesn't convey a lot of extra information. Would "me to, because this would help solve my scenario xyz" be more helpful? What about "me too, because I also have the exact problem described" (which at least conveys that they've put more thought in to it than a totally light weight "me too")?
- atoav 7y ago
  > Would "me to, because this would help solve my scenario xyz" be more helpful? Quite definitly. But even more helpful would be if you listed all scenarios you can think of where this would be helpful, even ones that are not useful to you, but might be to others. Then you think about how it would impact existing functionality (both positively and negatively), would it be the consistent thing to do? Where could be traps and pitfalls? Maybe even ad a mockup of hoe it would look. If you did that, the maintainer sees that you didn't just demand a feature drive-by-shooting-style, but you did the actual legwork of fleshing the thing out. Don't marry your own ideas, others might be inspired by you and have a even better way of solving this. If you are writing one sentence you are doing to little usually (in my eyes).
  - 7y ago

DarthGhandi 7y ago

The number of big projects with over a dozen identical comments saying "Same problem" is quite astounding. At what point does the maintainer turn off notifications? 5? 20? Perhaps the point was that unless you have something useful to add to a GitHub issue then don't comment. People don't want Reddit style pun threads here and yet to hear complaints about that being enforced, in fact the opposite. GitHub issues is similar in that sense. Everything has its place and time.

elyobo 7y ago
Yes, I think that adding the thumbs up feature (which people still use badly) was a good solution to that. It lets you give a "me too" response without cluttering up the comments, and without spamming the maintainers with notifications either - but if they do look they can see people expressing interest.
Chris2048 7y ago
If the issue is a bug (as opposed to a feat request) maybe it's useful to know how common it is? It would imply its not just a one-off issue with a particular users setup.
chinesempire 7y ago
> with over a dozen identical comments saying "Same problem" That's an UI problem. If a bug affects 100% of the users no matter what or just a few of them, in some weird condition and setup, is completely different. There should be a way to be prioritize or sort bugs by popularity.

why-oh-why 7y ago

It depends on the phrasing. If you’re just saying “me too” you’re just annoying the maintainer instead of adding a silent +1 reaction. If you add one more use case that might help the maintainer reconsider the feature, then I’d find it acceptable. Sometimes the issue opener didn’t explain the utility that well or wrote some example that made it sound like it would be a niche feature and not worth it.

elyobo 7y ago
Yeah, I wasn't thinking of GH specifically, but if you have the silent thumbs up option, then a "me too" with no meaningful contribution is a bit rude.

kelnos 7y ago

I probably wouldn't call it rude, but I'd say it's definitely unwanted. It just adds annoying noise to my inbox. In my time working on FOSS, it's pretty rare that more "votes" would make me more likely or more interested in implementing a particular feature. I certainly would have been interested in knowing what features were most important to users, but I think a drive-by "me too" on a feature request is a poor sample of what users overall really want. And regardless, for some projects, at some times, you just feel like working what you feel like working on, and more users clamoring for a particular feature just doesn't motivate you.

floatingatoll 7y ago

There are two unstated assumptions underlying “helpful feedback” that need to be considered and re-evaluated. First, the assumption that ‘voting’ is an appropriate and helpful form of social interaction with someone who has not expressly invited that participation from others. Second, the assumption that a group expression of a statement is emotionally equivalent to a single individual’s expression of the same statement. These are not universally shared assumptions, especially in open source.

lenkite 7y ago

If one doesn't have proper additional reasons for their chiming, thats what the vote button is for. Otherwise the useless text is just taking up valuable screen estate and making people scroll un-necessarily.

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

I reckon that if you have to process a lot of communications about your project(s), and because you are the maintainer you HAVE to pay attention, comments like that are high noise, low signal, and while one of them is fine, dozens or hundreds of those a day just cost energy without bringing anything back.

pauljurczak 7y ago

Just chiming in to say that I was also surprised by this statement.

burntsushi 7y ago

Thanks! > One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature." to be rude. I mentioned on r/rust that "rude" is perhaps too strong of a word. I was more or less thinking of things that annoyed or grated on me, and then just kind of lumped that in with "rude." To be sure, I do not get to lay claim to a universal definition of rudeness. :-) But yeah, I think others responding to you pretty much summed up why it can be mildly annoying. And to be clear, I do think part of this is on me: I'm working on trying to let such minor things like this slide more. It's a process.

CathedralBorrow 7y ago

After thinking about it I agree with him. If you are going to stand up to speak in a community meeting, you should have something more thoughtful to say than "I agree with what that guy said".