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I'm not so sure +1's or emojis are useful, except for maybe a few cases like you have a very large audience and they all send a thumbs-down emoji to protest a b

I'm not so sure +1's or emojis are useful, except for maybe a few cases like you have a very large audience and they all send a thumbs-down emoji to protest a bad product or design decision -- recent c#/dotnet for example. Or the reminder ping from an affected user who is still interested in and using your project. The problem I believe is that a +1 or another reaction to an issue is simply a sample from all developers that viewed the project that bothered to leave a note. Chances are people are not using an open source project if they see a reasonably filed issue a long time ago that either was not addressed in any fashion whether it be a principled statement on why it can't be addressed yet, or that the project isn't interested in working on it. That obviously only works for small projects without a product manager. The issue persists on the large projects as well. The issue reactions set is just a sample of the all developers set that used or looked at the project. The only way to really know what is going on is telemetry and crash reports. Larger companies with thousands of crash reports, bug reports, and features requests can cluster them and figure out what to work on, along with a touch of good taste. Good taste is unfortunately important too. Unfortunately for telemetry a lot of people think it is a privacy issue... which it can be if the developer implements it poorly. And looks like GitHub only exposes traffic overall to your site [1] so you never know the population size is for people that are possibly affected by that issue -- so the relative +1 count is not reflective of reality. You might have a fighting chance if you use self-hosted GitLab or something with which you can grab granular traffic stats. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/viewing-activity-and-data-for-your-repository/viewing-traffic-to-a-repository https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/viewing-activity-and...

matkoniecz 4y ago
For me (participating in a small open source project) upvotes are useful - it is a confirmation that anyone else cares about that idea and that someone read what is being proposed and at least is not protesting. Multiple times I have no preference between two issues and worked on one with more reactions.
plorkyeran 4y ago
It's often not immediately obvious if a request is something a lot of people want but only one person took the time to write up, or if it's a very niche thing that only that person cares about. People who +1 an issue are not a great data set, but it's a lot better than nothing and it's basically zero effort to check. If I'm looking for something to work on and there's two issues that look like they'll take similar amounts of time, both seem like good ideas to implement, and I'm not sure which is more valuable, the number of +1s is a pretty decent tiebreaker.

matkoniecz 4y ago

For me (participating in a small open source project) upvotes are useful - it is a confirmation that anyone else cares about that idea and that someone read what is being proposed and at least is not protesting. Multiple times I have no preference between two issues and worked on one with more reactions.

plorkyeran 4y ago

It's often not immediately obvious if a request is something a lot of people want but only one person took the time to write up, or if it's a very niche thing that only that person cares about. People who +1 an issue are not a great data set, but it's a lot better than nothing and it's basically zero effort to check. If I'm looking for something to work on and there's two issues that look like they'll take similar amounts of time, both seem like good ideas to implement, and I'm not sure which is more valuable, the number of +1s is a pretty decent tiebreaker.