I don't think locking a thread is going to do harm. If I don't want you to participate in my issue tracking, I can choose to ignore you, or now I can choose to

I don't think locking a thread is going to do harm. If I don't want you to participate in my issue tracking, I can choose to ignore you, or now I can choose to lock the issue. You either continue to request attention from me, or won't come back to my software. This can happen before locking is brought to us by Github, but this feature can help reduce noises. There are people who follow the repo and actually get spams from following repos they like to keep an eye on. You have your choice to write about someone's angry ignorance on your blog or hackernews and people just won't care. They can even hide the repo or delete the repo once and for all. Is this a good way to deal with people publicly? Yes to some, no to many. It's a choice. You either opt-in or opt-out.