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I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal wi

I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Honestly, always give them the "We'll review your PR once it's ready".
sergiotapia 6y ago
I have a pretty simple project with 2.4k stars, and have met nothing but good people eager to help, and bending over backwards to help me help them. My project's "niche" may have something to do with it.
- hazz99 6y ago
  What is it / what niche?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sergiotapia 6y ago
    https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo - niche is: "self-hosted apps"
- marcandre 6y ago
  Application domain may have something to do with it, language also. As a maintainer of Javascript and Ruby libraries, the difference in entitlement and cluelessness is remarkable.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    The Ruby community has always struck me as friendly and welcoming.
- klenwell 6y ago
  This is encouraging to hear. My company built a tool to improve website accessibility. It fills a niche. We're almost ready to open source it. Basically just need to make the Github repo public. The one thing that gives me pause is the prospect of having to manage a bunch of unfriendly feature requests and bug reports. Here's hoping we find ourselves in a virtuous niche.
kick 6y ago
You can just...ignore people, on the Internet. It's a really useful thing! Once you accept that not all requests/insults/questions/comments are equal, and some are drastically less valuable than others, it becomes pretty easy. The initial mental barrier you have to break to do so is hard to get around, though.
gitgud 6y ago
In my experience, it depends what the project is and who is attracted to the github issues. If it's a user-facing project, then people will approach the project's "github issues" as a company's support line, and feel a bit more entitled. If it's a library or plugin for developers, people generally have more empathy and appreciation towards the maintainers.
smcameron 6y ago
I have a github project with a few hundred stars. Almost all feedback is pretty good. It's not a library though, and I don't distribute binaries, so this instantly weeds out anybody not willing to compile things themselves. That's probably a huge factor. It also only runs on linux. Maybe that's a factor too. Choose your audience.
franciscop 6y ago
I have few projects on 1k+ stars; the ones that are more beginner-friendly are normally where I get most unrelated requests. I used to help people where possible, but now I just don't have the time (or TBH, motivation). So I closed the issues on those two projects that got most low-quality issues. People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues. This cemented my decision, oh the entitlement of some people.
- noitsnot 6y ago
  I think that's understandable. You closed issues for bugs you didn't resolve.
  - sgillen 6y ago
    Maybe you know the OP, but in my experience a lot of issues are not bug reports but very low quality, uninformed or unreasonable requests or questions. Like questions made about basic functionality that is answered in the documentation/faq, or requests for features that are completely outside the scope of the project. Another popular category is requests for basic education e.g. “how does DQN work?”. That’s fine if it’s one person but when it’s 100 it gets overwhelming.
    - stickfigure 6y ago
      Sure. On the other hand, sometimes people put a lot of time and effort into isolating an issue and writing up the best description they can manage. Closing the issue is a one-click FU to the people who are doing their best to help. Some users are overly entitled, but some maintainers are self-absorbed douchebags. I've seen both sides.
      - cellularmitosis 6y ago
        I will never understand this point of view. The author has already given you possibly hundreds of hours of free labor simply by publishing the project. But now, because they won’t give you a few more, they’re a douchebag? Even if they close all issues with no comment, they have given you a such _massive_ head start vs having to write the entire project yourself from scratch. How can you be anything but grateful?
laurentdc 6y ago
I agree it's an audience problem. I had a Wordpress plugin up and I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it". But also had some C libraries for Arm STM32 and only ever got solid pull requests and people eager to help. You see the same thing in IRC / Discord channels of those technologies.
- chii 6y ago
  > I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it" which will be interesting to see if you ask them for payment for fixes, would they pay?
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    They’d probably consider it ransomware lol
  - tasogare 6y ago
    That’s exactly what I would do. It’s very similar to people asking you to fix their computer for free when you have tech skills. Ask money (even just 5€) and 90% of requests fade away. The one that remains are willing to pay (and more than a few bucks).
    - Drdrdrq 6y ago
      Are you saying you would solve all my sw problems for 5€? Deal! Let me send you this project I have... :) Be careful.
- freedomben 6y ago
  At the risk of stereotyping a bit here (from personal experience), Wordpress users tend to be a lot less technical than C programmers, and I find the less technical the audience, the more entitled they tend to be. My theory is that because they don't sling code themselves, they just don't understand how much work and effort goes in to making good software. Because they don't understand it, they tend to not appreciate it.
a_cool_username 6y ago
I partially maintain a GitHub project with ~1500 stars, many of my users are not very technically skilled. I rarely encounter entitled/mean/crazy people - we probably average one obnoxious contributor a year, two or three if you count the ones who go away when you politely tell them it's not going to happen. I get a lot of PRs and reasonably well-written issues from users whose profiles indicate it's their first contribution. I think a lot of this has to do with the effort you put into community management. We put tons of energy into making it easy to make good contributions: PR/issue templates, we're on slack, we respond to emails, we make it as easy as possible to get your code in as long as it passes tests. It's a lot of effort and I can't imagine doing it for something that was just a personal project, but I think that's how the bigger projects deal with it.
- franciscop 6y ago
  Totally agree. I have 100+ repositories open sourced (Just launched this website yesterday! https://statux.dev/ https://statux.dev/), a handful of them with 1k+ stars, and for the most part it's just me maintaining those. This is besides my fulltime job, friends and hobbies. So I don't really have much time for growing a community, I've done some effort in the past when I had more time and it worked fairly well, but I found it to be very project-oriented in general so if you do many smaller projects (as opposed to few large ones) the community approach doesn't scale well. I don't encounter many mean/crazy people! I can count them with one hand. I find few entitled people, but most people I've found are nice.
maple3142 6y ago
Same experience. I have a project that can be used by non programmers, and it also gained some popularity in some community. So, I often found people who don't know how to set it up by following the README opening issues ask how to do that. What's more, they don't even bother to search issues before creating a new issue.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 6y ago
Yeah, I feel that for sure. I MITMed my robot vacuum and wrote a little python library for it. I assumed that it would, like my other open source code, get approximately no attention. Even at a couple hundred stars, it became a notable pain in the ass. When that vacuum died, freeing me from any sense of responsibility for the code, it was a sweet day indeed.
- giantDinosaur 6y ago
  Oddly cute story. :)
daenz 6y ago
Author of a project with > 5k stars here[0]. I honestly haven't had any experience with mean people for the nearly 10 years since I started it. I've had maybe one or two pushy people, but it was mostly justified (I hadn't pushed a release in like 3 years). They were pushing me to find a maintainer if I wasn't going to answer some of the open requests. 0. https://github.com/amoffat/sh https://github.com/amoffat/sh
digianarchist 6y ago
Have you ever wandered into the issues section on Github for say a jQuery slider library or Wordpress plugin? Oh boy you'd have thought people had paid thousands of dollars for the code the way people talk to the maintainers.
jondubois 6y ago
I was surprised to hear that many open source developers get so many 'mean and entitled people' complaining on their project channels. My project https://socketcluster.io/ https://socketcluster.io/ has almost 6K stars on GitHub and all I only ever get are people praising it - Sometimes I worry that people may even be over-praising it and self-censoring criticism (maybe they just like me as a maintainer). I think in its 7 year history, I only remember 1 or 2 complaints out of a total of several hundreds or maybe thousands of feedback comments, messages or emails. I do appreciate criticism though and those few critiques have been valuable. I think maybe it has to do with: 1. Hype. 2. What percentage of developers were forced to use your tool/library against their will by their employers or forced upon them as a dependency of some other tool. If a project is overhyped, then developers will be disappointed by reality and they will complain. The best you can do is try to set realistic expectations. If a developer was forced to use your library by their employer (or it was forced upon them as a dependency of another tool/library that they're using and your dependency was throwing some weird error) then they will also complain. The best you can do about that is try to make your library work 'out of the box' as well as possible and make it work well in as many environments and operating systems as possible. Regulating hype by setting realistic expectations can also help prevent employers from forcing their developers to use a library. You should use more technical terminology instead of business buzz words when describing your project. You want to attract developers, not project managers.
cxr 6y ago
It's simple. On the whole, GitHub just kind of sucks. It's about time that programmers recognize that a "Delete GitHub" movement is as valid and as needed as "Delete Facebook" or "Delete Twitter". GitHub is not really about software development. GitHub is yet another social networking site, only it's for busywork masquerading as Real Important Programmer Stuff.

I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

Honestly, always give them the "We'll review your PR once it's ready".

sergiotapia 6y ago

I have a pretty simple project with 2.4k stars, and have met nothing but good people eager to help, and bending over backwards to help me help them. My project's "niche" may have something to do with it.

hazz99 6y ago
What is it / what niche?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sergiotapia 6y ago
  https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo - niche is: "self-hosted apps"
marcandre 6y ago
Application domain may have something to do with it, language also. As a maintainer of Javascript and Ruby libraries, the difference in entitlement and cluelessness is remarkable.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The Ruby community has always struck me as friendly and welcoming.
klenwell 6y ago
This is encouraging to hear. My company built a tool to improve website accessibility. It fills a niche. We're almost ready to open source it. Basically just need to make the Github repo public. The one thing that gives me pause is the prospect of having to manage a bunch of unfriendly feature requests and bug reports. Here's hoping we find ourselves in a virtuous niche.

kick 6y ago

You can just...ignore people, on the Internet. It's a really useful thing! Once you accept that not all requests/insults/questions/comments are equal, and some are drastically less valuable than others, it becomes pretty easy. The initial mental barrier you have to break to do so is hard to get around, though.

gitgud 6y ago

In my experience, it depends what the project is and who is attracted to the github issues. If it's a user-facing project, then people will approach the project's "github issues" as a company's support line, and feel a bit more entitled. If it's a library or plugin for developers, people generally have more empathy and appreciation towards the maintainers.

smcameron 6y ago

I have a github project with a few hundred stars. Almost all feedback is pretty good. It's not a library though, and I don't distribute binaries, so this instantly weeds out anybody not willing to compile things themselves. That's probably a huge factor. It also only runs on linux. Maybe that's a factor too. Choose your audience.

franciscop 6y ago

I have few projects on 1k+ stars; the ones that are more beginner-friendly are normally where I get most unrelated requests. I used to help people where possible, but now I just don't have the time (or TBH, motivation). So I closed the issues on those two projects that got most low-quality issues. People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues. This cemented my decision, oh the entitlement of some people.

noitsnot 6y ago
I think that's understandable. You closed issues for bugs you didn't resolve.
- sgillen 6y ago
  Maybe you know the OP, but in my experience a lot of issues are not bug reports but very low quality, uninformed or unreasonable requests or questions. Like questions made about basic functionality that is answered in the documentation/faq, or requests for features that are completely outside the scope of the project. Another popular category is requests for basic education e.g. “how does DQN work?”. That’s fine if it’s one person but when it’s 100 it gets overwhelming.
  - stickfigure 6y ago
    Sure. On the other hand, sometimes people put a lot of time and effort into isolating an issue and writing up the best description they can manage. Closing the issue is a one-click FU to the people who are doing their best to help. Some users are overly entitled, but some maintainers are self-absorbed douchebags. I've seen both sides.
    - cellularmitosis 6y ago
      I will never understand this point of view. The author has already given you possibly hundreds of hours of free labor simply by publishing the project. But now, because they won’t give you a few more, they’re a douchebag? Even if they close all issues with no comment, they have given you a such _massive_ head start vs having to write the entire project yourself from scratch. How can you be anything but grateful?

laurentdc 6y ago

I agree it's an audience problem. I had a Wordpress plugin up and I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it". But also had some C libraries for Arm STM32 and only ever got solid pull requests and people eager to help. You see the same thing in IRC / Discord channels of those technologies.

chii 6y ago
> I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it" which will be interesting to see if you ask them for payment for fixes, would they pay?
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  They’d probably consider it ransomware lol
- tasogare 6y ago
  That’s exactly what I would do. It’s very similar to people asking you to fix their computer for free when you have tech skills. Ask money (even just 5€) and 90% of requests fade away. The one that remains are willing to pay (and more than a few bucks).
  - Drdrdrq 6y ago
    Are you saying you would solve all my sw problems for 5€? Deal! Let me send you this project I have... :) Be careful.
freedomben 6y ago
At the risk of stereotyping a bit here (from personal experience), Wordpress users tend to be a lot less technical than C programmers, and I find the less technical the audience, the more entitled they tend to be. My theory is that because they don't sling code themselves, they just don't understand how much work and effort goes in to making good software. Because they don't understand it, they tend to not appreciate it.

a_cool_username 6y ago

I partially maintain a GitHub project with ~1500 stars, many of my users are not very technically skilled. I rarely encounter entitled/mean/crazy people - we probably average one obnoxious contributor a year, two or three if you count the ones who go away when you politely tell them it's not going to happen. I get a lot of PRs and reasonably well-written issues from users whose profiles indicate it's their first contribution. I think a lot of this has to do with the effort you put into community management. We put tons of energy into making it easy to make good contributions: PR/issue templates, we're on slack, we respond to emails, we make it as easy as possible to get your code in as long as it passes tests. It's a lot of effort and I can't imagine doing it for something that was just a personal project, but I think that's how the bigger projects deal with it.

franciscop 6y ago
Totally agree. I have 100+ repositories open sourced (Just launched this website yesterday! https://statux.dev/ https://statux.dev/), a handful of them with 1k+ stars, and for the most part it's just me maintaining those. This is besides my fulltime job, friends and hobbies. So I don't really have much time for growing a community, I've done some effort in the past when I had more time and it worked fairly well, but I found it to be very project-oriented in general so if you do many smaller projects (as opposed to few large ones) the community approach doesn't scale well. I don't encounter many mean/crazy people! I can count them with one hand. I find few entitled people, but most people I've found are nice.

maple3142 6y ago

Same experience. I have a project that can be used by non programmers, and it also gained some popularity in some community. So, I often found people who don't know how to set it up by following the README opening issues ask how to do that. What's more, they don't even bother to search issues before creating a new issue.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wpietri 6y ago

Yeah, I feel that for sure. I MITMed my robot vacuum and wrote a little python library for it. I assumed that it would, like my other open source code, get approximately no attention. Even at a couple hundred stars, it became a notable pain in the ass. When that vacuum died, freeing me from any sense of responsibility for the code, it was a sweet day indeed.

giantDinosaur 6y ago
Oddly cute story. :)

daenz 6y ago

Author of a project with > 5k stars here[0]. I honestly haven't had any experience with mean people for the nearly 10 years since I started it. I've had maybe one or two pushy people, but it was mostly justified (I hadn't pushed a release in like 3 years). They were pushing me to find a maintainer if I wasn't going to answer some of the open requests. 0. https://github.com/amoffat/sh https://github.com/amoffat/sh

digianarchist 6y ago

Have you ever wandered into the issues section on Github for say a jQuery slider library or Wordpress plugin? Oh boy you'd have thought people had paid thousands of dollars for the code the way people talk to the maintainers.

jondubois 6y ago

I was surprised to hear that many open source developers get so many 'mean and entitled people' complaining on their project channels. My project https://socketcluster.io/ https://socketcluster.io/ has almost 6K stars on GitHub and all I only ever get are people praising it - Sometimes I worry that people may even be over-praising it and self-censoring criticism (maybe they just like me as a maintainer). I think in its 7 year history, I only remember 1 or 2 complaints out of a total of several hundreds or maybe thousands of feedback comments, messages or emails. I do appreciate criticism though and those few critiques have been valuable. I think maybe it has to do with: 1. Hype. 2. What percentage of developers were forced to use your tool/library against their will by their employers or forced upon them as a dependency of some other tool. If a project is overhyped, then developers will be disappointed by reality and they will complain. The best you can do is try to set realistic expectations. If a developer was forced to use your library by their employer (or it was forced upon them as a dependency of another tool/library that they're using and your dependency was throwing some weird error) then they will also complain. The best you can do about that is try to make your library work 'out of the box' as well as possible and make it work well in as many environments and operating systems as possible. Regulating hype by setting realistic expectations can also help prevent employers from forcing their developers to use a library. You should use more technical terminology instead of business buzz words when describing your project. You want to attract developers, not project managers.

cxr 6y ago

It's simple. On the whole, GitHub just kind of sucks. It's about time that programmers recognize that a "Delete GitHub" movement is as valid and as needed as "Delete Facebook" or "Delete Twitter". GitHub is not really about software development. GitHub is yet another social networking site, only it's for busywork masquerading as Real Important Programmer Stuff.