7 ms·

I do sometimes wonder if by trying to be "nice" to users and try to see the best intentions of commenters, many developers waste huge amounts of mental energy.

by kimixa 3y ago

I do sometimes wonder if by trying to be "nice" to users and try to see the best intentions of commenters, many developers waste huge amounts of mental energy. For context, I've really only worked on "fun" side projects, namely emulators and game remakes, where I've explicitly avoided any mention of donations or similar. Both as it's intended to be a distraction from my job, not become part of it. And generally avoid as many issues as possible around said money distribution within the project, and possible copyright problems that such things often skirt. And those sort of projects tend to be extremely limited in progress not by total interest, but skilled interest with the ability to contribute. I wish as many as 1% of the regular discussion participants in the community could contribute to that level. There's a natural belief that unless someone is egregiously out of line, all discussion around a project from users is allowed, even encouraged. But many people just can't seem to help themselves making "suggestions" (or, another reading, "demands"), and that can have a significant impact on motivation of volunteers. I believe the vast majority are from based in good intentions, wanting a "better" result, but arguably are mostly self-defeating in that I find the discussion around much of these things to be draining and demotivating. I want to have "fun" coding game remakes, not defusing drama in discord threads. But it's expected to have a "community" for all such projects, and not exclude non-direct contributors. Even writing it down here I'm worried I sound like I'm trying to curate a closed community of ego-boosting yes men. But I sometimes wonder if allowing this sort of open community is better in the long run.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Even writing it down here I'm worried I sound like I'm trying to curate a closed community of ego-boosting yes men. There's this weird trend that's been happening for some time now that tries to make non-fully-open groups look wrong, but honestly, has anything ever actually been done by such open groups? As far as I can tell, "closed community" is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for any kind of quality creative output (this includes individual projects as single-person closed group). Having a core of creators surrounded by distinct group of fans and secondary contributors is a natural organization that forms spontaneously.
- lukan 3y ago
  I think the linux kernel developement is quite open. But Linus is famous for telling people directly in not so nice words, that they are not helping. I don't think insults are the solution, but giving a clear no, is a skill many people struggle with. And if some cannot cope with that, blocking individuals also works.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    My understanding was that Linus is cooling his jets a bit?
    - lukan 3y ago
      Yes, he wants to stop using insults, which I think is good. But he still won't tolerate BS, or timewasting.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    It is also a cultural thing, being from Southern Europe took me some time to get used to the Northern Europe approach to be direct without any yes and buts.
  - o11c 3y ago
    Linux development is distributed (largely, between commercial entities), not really "open". If you aren't intimately familiar with the culture, you're likely to be ignored unless your issue also affects somebody who is.
    - lukan 3y ago
      Being open for collaboration does not mean anyone and anything is welcomed. But I could just write to the kernel mailing list (I think, it used to be like this) - but yeah, since I am not a kernel hacker, I do not have anything meaningful to contribute, I would be ignored, or told to shut up - as it should be. I won't go there and say "hey you know, it would be really good if linux would support xyz ASAP". I have no right to do this and this would not be welcome - yet in many other open source projects, this is quite the norm. People come with this expectation. Some even might have donated 5$ and think now they own the place. Well, no.
aumerle 3y ago
You dont need to wonder. Any long term maintainer of even semi popular open source projects will tell you that engaging with the peanut gallery is completely counter productive. Engage with people that have earned it in your eyes, whether by contributing to your project via code, assets, bug triage, writing a good and effortful bug report, whatever. Just ignore what the larger internet has to say about you and your creations.
- graemep 3y ago
  I think this is a wider social problem of the internet. Most people want to be helpful to others. This works fine when it is with a limited no of in real life interactions with mostly reasonable people. It can get wrecked by one or two unreasonable people, but the more fundamental problem is that it does not scale well, and the internet takes it to a far greater scale. It is one reason so many of us essentially work for free for FB and the like: we do things to help others (advice and information), and the side effect is creating content and data for FB.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    > Most people want to be helpful to others. This works fine when it is with a limited no of in real life interactions with mostly reasonable people. I don't think it has anything to do with the internet (whose scale pose many problems but not this one): anyone that founded a product/start up can tell you that people will give you “advices” and “suggestions” all the time when you talk about your project, and “don't listen to random suggestions from people you've just met” is one of the first advice you're being given when you're talking to other founders. It doesn't even need to scale above a handful of people to be a nuisance that harm your project if you listen to them.
    - lobocinza 3y ago
      I'm always wary of people that freely give advice/suggestions because they probably: * lack information * have a conflicting vision * are being dishonest I'm not a founder but I imagine that being integral to your own vision is the way to go. Attempting to cater to the conflicting needs of a diverse set of users isn't feasible for a startup. But anyway this isn't valid only for founders but also to life, friends and family.
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
The points you make aren't unreasonable. It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can't be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an earlier stage of the project, the support burden becomes too much to bear at which point the maintainer transfers ownership, and the project suffers from catastrophic consequences such as the xz backdoor we're talking about here, or other cases where the project mostly stalls and serves as an ego-boosting platform for the new maintainer, as was the case with PhantomJS[6] before it was shut down. This can also happen in your life, where a "friend" sees that you possess a certain skill, and then gradually tries to push an inordinate amount of their personal work related to this field onto you. Personally, I think it's best to use an approach with extremely clear communication as to what the maintainer can and cannot provide. This can be seen, for example, in yt-dlp[1], where the consumer is clearly informed upfront that not providing detailed information as requested will lead them to block said consumer; or sqlite where their position regarding contributed patches[2] and support[3] is similarly made clear. Having a shouty BDFL like Torvalds can also help improve code quality[4] and questionable contributions[5], though it is better that the shouty BDFL makes statements that are professional and do not show as much aggression; so for example, "Mauro, shut the fuck up"[7] would become "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace." [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&labels=triage%2Csite-bug&projects=&template=1_broken_site.yml https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&label... [2] https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html [3] https://www.sqlite.org/support.html https://www.sqlite.org/support.html [4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/ [5] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident [6] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541 https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541 [7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
- apantel 3y ago
  > "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace." This is just PC corporate speak. Linus is an actual human being who says what he really means.
traverseda 3y ago
>There's a natural belief that unless someone is egregiously out of line, all discussion around a project from users is allowed, even encouraged. I mean sure, but how do you intend to stop people? You can't stop them from setting up a forum somewhere. This is why github discussions is useful though. A feature request in a ticket is something that needs to be handled. A feature request in a discussion is just some users talking about stuff they think would be cool.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
c_joly 3y ago
Thanks for writing this! Your comment and the article have prompted me to explicit the social contract for my Open-Source project: https://github.com/cljoly/.github/pull/4/files#diff-eca12c0a30e25b4b46522ebf89465a03ba72a03f540796c979137931d8f92055 https://github.com/cljoly/.github/pull/4/files#diff-eca12c0a...
PaulRobinson 3y ago
I've been thinking about contributing to some open source projects, and starting a couple of things of my own, and the community aspect is a significant downside for me, and I say that as somebody who was quite active in several open source projects and things like the IETF years ago. I'm not saying the community shouldn't be there, it's just that the barrier to entry is so low, that people can "contribute" with very little effort, that's become a significant problem as Internet usage (and acceptance of shit-posting trolls as just being a cost of anything online), so the signal/noise ratio is awful and we end up in an easy slide to controversy and spite and the good actors wanting to walk away. I think this is why I don't do social media any more. I think it's why I'm not on the mailing lists I once was, or have interest in discord or a great many open community sites. It's just exhausting. HN, slashdot and some group chats in Signal with people I have known for many years is the closest I get to anything like that any more. I've thought about doing some blogging without comments and a means to contact me directly another way privately. I've thought about making contributions to other projects with my only conversations being about my own commits, but that doesn't work for leading my own projects if I want to be "nice". I think leading a project for me might involve _not_ letting others contribute to my version without clearing some arbitrary bar. No mailing list, no discord, no developer community. That doesn't feel optimal on some metrics, but it might be optimal for the metrics I care about.
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  > I think this is why I don't do social media any more Guess what you’re doing here, buddy.
  - mrob 3y ago
    IMO, it's not social media unless there's a social graph. HN has no way to follow or otherwise establish some relationship with specific users, so it's just a forum, not social media.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Classic phpBB style forums had smaller populations, there might not have been a follow feature, but the relationships formed naturally. HN doesn’t really feel like one. I don’t really know how I’d classify the differences specifically…
bregma 3y ago
Thank, you for participating in the open source community by sharing your opinion. Your contribution is valuable but not consistent with the direction we are currently going in at this time. Please don't let this stop you for further participation.
- apantel 3y ago
  There are no stupid contributions, just stupid people.
figassis 3y ago
Usually, I try to use projects in languages I work with so if the issue is not important enough for me to make a PR, then it’s not important enough. One thing I wish were possible is to sponsor an issue. I don’t usually sponsor open source projects, but I would likely sponsor a lot of issues just to speed up resolution. I think this could move a lot of projects in the right direction. Depending on difficulty, the maintainer could define a budget to have it in the roadmap with a reasonable timeline defined by them, maybe measured in quarters.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  As long as that money is held in escrow. Otherwise vaporware would make a killing.
  - spitfire 3y ago
    You could Make them supply a test case that unlocks the escrow. This both makes a bar that the bug creator has to pass, filtering some of the drive by time wasters, and gives a reward to the developers for fixing it.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  An issue is that the maintainer may have other priorities. By sponsoring an item you "force" them to look at that sooner.
  - figassis 3y ago
    Probably, it is their choice to fix the issue and collect. An unresolved issue in the agreed timeline automatically refunds the money. Maintainer has the option to request more time. Donors can accept or reject. Ideally multiple people would sponsor an issue, so some percentage of funding would back out as deadlines are missed, but not all funding. Incentive is more delay, less reward.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
My layperson’s opinion is that anything to do with gaming is particularly riddled with people that interact poorly with maintainers. Again, purely my opinion: gamer culture invites a particular sort of Dunning-Kruger-prone ‘power user’ type. Every gamer community carries with it a corpus of baseless, fictitious, technical information. “The developers didn’t do this because x”, “it’s ridiculous that they didn’t just y”, “They just aren’t listening to users!” I’m not much of a gamer at all. But the once in a blue moon where I dip my toes in, it’s not that long before I’m met with a forum post or reddit comment making some technical assertion that sounds incredibly presumptuous if not downright incredibly unlikely.
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  You need to look no further than what was happening on the xz commit threads post disclosure; there were multiple people preaching as to how to do "real" software development.
- anotherhue 3y ago
  The gamers seem to have particularly short fuses. It's like they skipped the socialisation phase of childhood development.
- TillE 3y ago
  My favorite know-nothing gamer meme these days is "bad optimization". What they mean is that the performance is worse than what they would expect (?) on a given hardware configuration and game settings. They haven't poked around with RenderDoc, they don't have the debug symbols to profile the CPU code, they have zero idea what kind of work the software needs to do, they simply know the lazy devs have failed to "optimize" their game.
  - account42 3y ago
    You say this as if any game is actually as optimized as it could be which if you know anything about game development is an absurd assertion. Games are throwaway software programmed under strict deadlines. "Good enough" is the natural result of that. And yes, I have traced games' GPU and library usage due to bugs and performance issues. It's never a question if performance could be introduced but always just a question of how much effort/time it would take.
jasoneckert 3y ago
I'm always surprised at how much developers and maintainers will willingly put up with. For example, if you visit the Matrix feed for the Asahi Linux project, you'll see hoards of trolls and time-wasters that are regularly engaged by Asahi team members who are giving them the benefit of the doubt, when they really should be removing those posts without comment or acknowledgement. I believe this masochistic behaviour stems from a combination of both general optimism and dedication to a particular cause. The more that developers are passionate about what they are doing, the more they are willing to engage with the peanut gallery.
- kabes 3y ago
  I recently discovered a bug in the react-hooks-form library. The author there does the absolute minimum of interaction. Issues not following exactly the template or lack a repro gets closed immediately without any comment, actual bugs also see very limited comment or openness to discussion. It felt a bit weird at first, but I do get the author and the library is succesful, maybe exactly because of this approach. It made me reconsider some of the effort I spend in my open source projects with useless issues / comments.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  For me it's easy to get very excited about any attention or interest at all as meaning "This project is finally worth something and all this effort wasn't wasted!" and start thinking "the customer is always right!"
forgotmyinfo 3y ago
Boomer hat: it's just toxic positivity, and the frustrating trend lately of assuming that everyone is equally skilled when writing software. Everyone's input is valid, or else you're just being negative and overly critical. I'm not saying everyone need to be Linus Torvalds circa 2012, but I do think more people need to be a bit less precious and sensitive, especially when receiving direct communication about their abilities. You don't need ego-boosting yes men, you just need to work with more experienced folks, and that's okay. But the problem is that there is an army of people online who will take offense to that, and I don't know what the solution is. Best of luck.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Another old person opinion: the issue tracker of an open source project needs to be firmly anchored into the needs of the maintainers and not the users. The argument that bugs/issues need to be kept open forever unless they're fixed and the rejection of WONTFIX as a reason for closing them needs to die in a goddamn fucking fire. When the maintainer decides to close an issue because they're just not getting to it in this lifetime the users need to suck it up.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
Apologies in advance for the swear words, but this deserves swear words. WHO FUCKING GRANDSTANDS ENDLESSLY ABOUT CYBERTHREATS AND THE NEED FOR BETTER SECURITY? WHO FUCKING SITS ON BILLIONS IF NOT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FUNDING? That would be the FUCKING GOVERNMENTS OF THE FIRST WORLD. Whose modern economies increasingly rest on open source to a degree they possibly don't understand. Yes I understand part of this comes from funding from another part of these governments. Oh well, cat and mouse. Once we wrung our hands over these governments having power over these. Well, these days we are facing far more totalitarian state threats and totalitarian wannabes in the private sector. Government save me, as the less totalitarian option! Linux and BSD the operating systems should UNQUESTIONABLY be funded to the degree of multiple billions per year by, I'll just put it, "NATO". Here's the true value of open source in this model: it is the perfect public record, unlike untold other aspects of government output. You must produce public vetted code in Linux/BSD. This person should not have been "a person". This should have been 5 people, funded likely at least 10-50k/year for their roles. The described "hit" by the intel services of course is frighteningly easy. But what is most horrid is that this poor person is being subject to very common abuse that comes from non-state-actor manipulation. The article says it: "this is where our software comes from" -- this poor dude that is trying to help and being abused by state actors on one hand, and ridden thanklessly and for no monetary or fame benefit by massively deep pocketed corporations, governments, and billionaires. For all of Linus's famous swearing abilities, he hasn't used it to address this publicly. He should be dressing down all corporations and governments at this point that need Linux. There isn't a "going back" from Linux at this point to some closed source option. Linus and Linux have massive sway here. They could threaten to stop work on the kernels. I guess fundamentally, this makes me angry because this is basically bullying the nerd in high school to get his homework/answers. The nerds need to realize their power here. Other vulnerabilities snuck through the commit chain? I get that, usual spy stuff. They actually kind of messed up here. Usually it is within the "cordiality" of things, just quietly ride the overworked unpaid nerd to benefit. Here they inadvertently exposed the real truth of everything: the hidden contempt we treat these people with as a society.
InvaderFizz 3y ago
With a personal repo I maintain, I once had someone look me up on linked in, and then file a support ticket with my employer demanding I reply to his issue on github. He was asking for handholding following a clearly documented process and ignored all the warnings. Needless to say, I did not assist him in any way and closed the issue as wontfix. I've also had people demand that I expand the narrow scope of my project to cover a whole class of devices with completely different APIs, instead of the sole focus on the series from the same manufacturer of devices I own and use. Closed as wontfix as well with a clear statement that I will not be expanding the scope, but am more than happy to link to their project covering it.
atoav 3y ago
This is fundamentally a problem of perspective. As the guy using software X you believe you are doing open source maintainers a favour by going there and telling them about a thing that is wrong or missing in your opinion. But we all should realize that any interaction also comes with a cost. If you report a problem and don't manage to describe it well it doesn't help the maintainers one tiny bit, in fact it might just create work and a bad feeling. So my approach is to "just" write stellar bug reports including ways of bisecting where the problem might come from.
account42 3y ago
> But it's expected to have a "community" for all such projects, and not exclude non-direct contributors. By whom? You don't have to accept such expecteations - plenty of projects that just throw code over the wall and do fine.

by kimixa 3y ago

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> Even writing it down here I'm worried I sound like I'm trying to curate a closed community of ego-boosting yes men. There's this weird trend that's been happening for some time now that tries to make non-fully-open groups look wrong, but honestly, has anything ever actually been done by such open groups? As far as I can tell, "closed community" is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for any kind of quality creative output (this includes individual projects as single-person closed group). Having a core of creators surrounded by distinct group of fans and secondary contributors is a natural organization that forms spontaneously.

lukan 3y ago
I think the linux kernel developement is quite open. But Linus is famous for telling people directly in not so nice words, that they are not helping. I don't think insults are the solution, but giving a clear no, is a skill many people struggle with. And if some cannot cope with that, blocking individuals also works.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
  My understanding was that Linus is cooling his jets a bit?
  - lukan 3y ago
    Yes, he wants to stop using insults, which I think is good. But he still won't tolerate BS, or timewasting.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It is also a cultural thing, being from Southern Europe took me some time to get used to the Northern Europe approach to be direct without any yes and buts.
- o11c 3y ago
  Linux development is distributed (largely, between commercial entities), not really "open". If you aren't intimately familiar with the culture, you're likely to be ignored unless your issue also affects somebody who is.
  - lukan 3y ago
    Being open for collaboration does not mean anyone and anything is welcomed. But I could just write to the kernel mailing list (I think, it used to be like this) - but yeah, since I am not a kernel hacker, I do not have anything meaningful to contribute, I would be ignored, or told to shut up - as it should be. I won't go there and say "hey you know, it would be really good if linux would support xyz ASAP". I have no right to do this and this would not be welcome - yet in many other open source projects, this is quite the norm. People come with this expectation. Some even might have donated 5$ and think now they own the place. Well, no.

aumerle 3y ago

You dont need to wonder. Any long term maintainer of even semi popular open source projects will tell you that engaging with the peanut gallery is completely counter productive. Engage with people that have earned it in your eyes, whether by contributing to your project via code, assets, bug triage, writing a good and effortful bug report, whatever. Just ignore what the larger internet has to say about you and your creations.

graemep 3y ago
I think this is a wider social problem of the internet. Most people want to be helpful to others. This works fine when it is with a limited no of in real life interactions with mostly reasonable people. It can get wrecked by one or two unreasonable people, but the more fundamental problem is that it does not scale well, and the internet takes it to a far greater scale. It is one reason so many of us essentially work for free for FB and the like: we do things to help others (advice and information), and the side effect is creating content and data for FB.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Most people want to be helpful to others. This works fine when it is with a limited no of in real life interactions with mostly reasonable people. I don't think it has anything to do with the internet (whose scale pose many problems but not this one): anyone that founded a product/start up can tell you that people will give you “advices” and “suggestions” all the time when you talk about your project, and “don't listen to random suggestions from people you've just met” is one of the first advice you're being given when you're talking to other founders. It doesn't even need to scale above a handful of people to be a nuisance that harm your project if you listen to them.
  - lobocinza 3y ago
    I'm always wary of people that freely give advice/suggestions because they probably: * lack information * have a conflicting vision * are being dishonest I'm not a founder but I imagine that being integral to your own vision is the way to go. Attempting to cater to the conflicting needs of a diverse set of users isn't feasible for a startup. But anyway this isn't valid only for founders but also to life, friends and family.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

The points you make aren't unreasonable. It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can't be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an earlier stage of the project, the support burden becomes too much to bear at which point the maintainer transfers ownership, and the project suffers from catastrophic consequences such as the xz backdoor we're talking about here, or other cases where the project mostly stalls and serves as an ego-boosting platform for the new maintainer, as was the case with PhantomJS[6] before it was shut down. This can also happen in your life, where a "friend" sees that you possess a certain skill, and then gradually tries to push an inordinate amount of their personal work related to this field onto you. Personally, I think it's best to use an approach with extremely clear communication as to what the maintainer can and cannot provide. This can be seen, for example, in yt-dlp[1], where the consumer is clearly informed upfront that not providing detailed information as requested will lead them to block said consumer; or sqlite where their position regarding contributed patches[2] and support[3] is similarly made clear. Having a shouty BDFL like Torvalds can also help improve code quality[4] and questionable contributions[5], though it is better that the shouty BDFL makes statements that are professional and do not show as much aggression; so for example, "Mauro, shut the fuck up"[7] would become "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace." [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&labels=triage%2Csite-bug&projects=&template=1_broken_site.yml https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&label... [2] https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html [3] https://www.sqlite.org/support.html https://www.sqlite.org/support.html [4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/ [5] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident [6] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541 https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541 [7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

apantel 3y ago
> "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace." This is just PC corporate speak. Linus is an actual human being who says what he really means.

traverseda 3y ago

>There's a natural belief that unless someone is egregiously out of line, all discussion around a project from users is allowed, even encouraged. I mean sure, but how do you intend to stop people? You can't stop them from setting up a forum somewhere. This is why github discussions is useful though. A feature request in a ticket is something that needs to be handled. A feature request in a discussion is just some users talking about stuff they think would be cool.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

c_joly 3y ago

Thanks for writing this! Your comment and the article have prompted me to explicit the social contract for my Open-Source project: https://github.com/cljoly/.github/pull/4/files#diff-eca12c0a30e25b4b46522ebf89465a03ba72a03f540796c979137931d8f92055 https://github.com/cljoly/.github/pull/4/files#diff-eca12c0a...

PaulRobinson 3y ago

I've been thinking about contributing to some open source projects, and starting a couple of things of my own, and the community aspect is a significant downside for me, and I say that as somebody who was quite active in several open source projects and things like the IETF years ago. I'm not saying the community shouldn't be there, it's just that the barrier to entry is so low, that people can "contribute" with very little effort, that's become a significant problem as Internet usage (and acceptance of shit-posting trolls as just being a cost of anything online), so the signal/noise ratio is awful and we end up in an easy slide to controversy and spite and the good actors wanting to walk away. I think this is why I don't do social media any more. I think it's why I'm not on the mailing lists I once was, or have interest in discord or a great many open community sites. It's just exhausting. HN, slashdot and some group chats in Signal with people I have known for many years is the closest I get to anything like that any more. I've thought about doing some blogging without comments and a means to contact me directly another way privately. I've thought about making contributions to other projects with my only conversations being about my own commits, but that doesn't work for leading my own projects if I want to be "nice". I think leading a project for me might involve _not_ letting others contribute to my version without clearing some arbitrary bar. No mailing list, no discord, no developer community. That doesn't feel optimal on some metrics, but it might be optimal for the metrics I care about.

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
> I think this is why I don't do social media any more Guess what you’re doing here, buddy.
- mrob 3y ago
  IMO, it's not social media unless there's a social graph. HN has no way to follow or otherwise establish some relationship with specific users, so it's just a forum, not social media.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Classic phpBB style forums had smaller populations, there might not have been a follow feature, but the relationships formed naturally. HN doesn’t really feel like one. I don’t really know how I’d classify the differences specifically…

bregma 3y ago

Thank, you for participating in the open source community by sharing your opinion. Your contribution is valuable but not consistent with the direction we are currently going in at this time. Please don't let this stop you for further participation.

apantel 3y ago
There are no stupid contributions, just stupid people.

figassis 3y ago

Usually, I try to use projects in languages I work with so if the issue is not important enough for me to make a PR, then it’s not important enough. One thing I wish were possible is to sponsor an issue. I don’t usually sponsor open source projects, but I would likely sponsor a lot of issues just to speed up resolution. I think this could move a lot of projects in the right direction. Depending on difficulty, the maintainer could define a budget to have it in the roadmap with a reasonable timeline defined by them, maybe measured in quarters.

withinboredom 3y ago
As long as that money is held in escrow. Otherwise vaporware would make a killing.
- spitfire 3y ago
  You could Make them supply a test case that unlocks the escrow. This both makes a bar that the bug creator has to pass, filtering some of the drive by time wasters, and gives a reward to the developers for fixing it.
johannes1234321 3y ago
An issue is that the maintainer may have other priorities. By sponsoring an item you "force" them to look at that sooner.
- figassis 3y ago
  Probably, it is their choice to fix the issue and collect. An unresolved issue in the agreed timeline automatically refunds the money. Maintainer has the option to request more time. Donors can accept or reject. Ideally multiple people would sponsor an issue, so some percentage of funding would back out as deadlines are missed, but not all funding. Incentive is more delay, less reward.
  - saagarjha 3y ago

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago

My layperson’s opinion is that anything to do with gaming is particularly riddled with people that interact poorly with maintainers. Again, purely my opinion: gamer culture invites a particular sort of Dunning-Kruger-prone ‘power user’ type. Every gamer community carries with it a corpus of baseless, fictitious, technical information. “The developers didn’t do this because x”, “it’s ridiculous that they didn’t just y”, “They just aren’t listening to users!” I’m not much of a gamer at all. But the once in a blue moon where I dip my toes in, it’s not that long before I’m met with a forum post or reddit comment making some technical assertion that sounds incredibly presumptuous if not downright incredibly unlikely.

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
You need to look no further than what was happening on the xz commit threads post disclosure; there were multiple people preaching as to how to do "real" software development.
anotherhue 3y ago
The gamers seem to have particularly short fuses. It's like they skipped the socialisation phase of childhood development.
TillE 3y ago
My favorite know-nothing gamer meme these days is "bad optimization". What they mean is that the performance is worse than what they would expect (?) on a given hardware configuration and game settings. They haven't poked around with RenderDoc, they don't have the debug symbols to profile the CPU code, they have zero idea what kind of work the software needs to do, they simply know the lazy devs have failed to "optimize" their game.
- account42 3y ago
  You say this as if any game is actually as optimized as it could be which if you know anything about game development is an absurd assertion. Games are throwaway software programmed under strict deadlines. "Good enough" is the natural result of that. And yes, I have traced games' GPU and library usage due to bugs and performance issues. It's never a question if performance could be introduced but always just a question of how much effort/time it would take.

jasoneckert 3y ago

I'm always surprised at how much developers and maintainers will willingly put up with. For example, if you visit the Matrix feed for the Asahi Linux project, you'll see hoards of trolls and time-wasters that are regularly engaged by Asahi team members who are giving them the benefit of the doubt, when they really should be removing those posts without comment or acknowledgement. I believe this masochistic behaviour stems from a combination of both general optimism and dedication to a particular cause. The more that developers are passionate about what they are doing, the more they are willing to engage with the peanut gallery.

kabes 3y ago
I recently discovered a bug in the react-hooks-form library. The author there does the absolute minimum of interaction. Issues not following exactly the template or lack a repro gets closed immediately without any comment, actual bugs also see very limited comment or openness to discussion. It felt a bit weird at first, but I do get the author and the library is succesful, maybe exactly because of this approach. It made me reconsider some of the effort I spend in my open source projects with useless issues / comments.
eternityforest 3y ago
For me it's easy to get very excited about any attention or interest at all as meaning "This project is finally worth something and all this effort wasn't wasted!" and start thinking "the customer is always right!"

forgotmyinfo 3y ago

Boomer hat: it's just toxic positivity, and the frustrating trend lately of assuming that everyone is equally skilled when writing software. Everyone's input is valid, or else you're just being negative and overly critical. I'm not saying everyone need to be Linus Torvalds circa 2012, but I do think more people need to be a bit less precious and sensitive, especially when receiving direct communication about their abilities. You don't need ego-boosting yes men, you just need to work with more experienced folks, and that's okay. But the problem is that there is an army of people online who will take offense to that, and I don't know what the solution is. Best of luck.

lamontcg 3y ago
Another old person opinion: the issue tracker of an open source project needs to be firmly anchored into the needs of the maintainers and not the users. The argument that bugs/issues need to be kept open forever unless they're fixed and the rejection of WONTFIX as a reason for closing them needs to die in a goddamn fucking fire. When the maintainer decides to close an issue because they're just not getting to it in this lifetime the users need to suck it up.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

Apologies in advance for the swear words, but this deserves swear words. WHO FUCKING GRANDSTANDS ENDLESSLY ABOUT CYBERTHREATS AND THE NEED FOR BETTER SECURITY? WHO FUCKING SITS ON BILLIONS IF NOT TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN FUNDING? That would be the FUCKING GOVERNMENTS OF THE FIRST WORLD. Whose modern economies increasingly rest on open source to a degree they possibly don't understand. Yes I understand part of this comes from funding from another part of these governments. Oh well, cat and mouse. Once we wrung our hands over these governments having power over these. Well, these days we are facing far more totalitarian state threats and totalitarian wannabes in the private sector. Government save me, as the less totalitarian option! Linux and BSD the operating systems should UNQUESTIONABLY be funded to the degree of multiple billions per year by, I'll just put it, "NATO". Here's the true value of open source in this model: it is the perfect public record, unlike untold other aspects of government output. You must produce public vetted code in Linux/BSD. This person should not have been "a person". This should have been 5 people, funded likely at least 10-50k/year for their roles. The described "hit" by the intel services of course is frighteningly easy. But what is most horrid is that this poor person is being subject to very common abuse that comes from non-state-actor manipulation. The article says it: "this is where our software comes from" -- this poor dude that is trying to help and being abused by state actors on one hand, and ridden thanklessly and for no monetary or fame benefit by massively deep pocketed corporations, governments, and billionaires. For all of Linus's famous swearing abilities, he hasn't used it to address this publicly. He should be dressing down all corporations and governments at this point that need Linux. There isn't a "going back" from Linux at this point to some closed source option. Linus and Linux have massive sway here. They could threaten to stop work on the kernels. I guess fundamentally, this makes me angry because this is basically bullying the nerd in high school to get his homework/answers. The nerds need to realize their power here. Other vulnerabilities snuck through the commit chain? I get that, usual spy stuff. They actually kind of messed up here. Usually it is within the "cordiality" of things, just quietly ride the overworked unpaid nerd to benefit. Here they inadvertently exposed the real truth of everything: the hidden contempt we treat these people with as a society.

InvaderFizz 3y ago

With a personal repo I maintain, I once had someone look me up on linked in, and then file a support ticket with my employer demanding I reply to his issue on github. He was asking for handholding following a clearly documented process and ignored all the warnings. Needless to say, I did not assist him in any way and closed the issue as wontfix. I've also had people demand that I expand the narrow scope of my project to cover a whole class of devices with completely different APIs, instead of the sole focus on the series from the same manufacturer of devices I own and use. Closed as wontfix as well with a clear statement that I will not be expanding the scope, but am more than happy to link to their project covering it.

atoav 3y ago

This is fundamentally a problem of perspective. As the guy using software X you believe you are doing open source maintainers a favour by going there and telling them about a thing that is wrong or missing in your opinion. But we all should realize that any interaction also comes with a cost. If you report a problem and don't manage to describe it well it doesn't help the maintainers one tiny bit, in fact it might just create work and a bad feeling. So my approach is to "just" write stellar bug reports including ways of bisecting where the problem might come from.

account42 3y ago

> But it's expected to have a "community" for all such projects, and not exclude non-direct contributors. By whom? You don't have to accept such expecteations - plenty of projects that just throw code over the wall and do fine.