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Ask HN: How do you deal with social media pressure on your GitHub project?

• em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
  Too bad GitHub can't weight comments/issues by quality of contributor/user instead of only providing a binary choice of "only the contributors" vs "allowing everyone".
  • daenney 11y ago
    But how do you measure that quality? Based on amount of contributions? Based on +1's they've received on comments?
    • xmj 11y ago
      Based on lines changed, merge requests accepted/rejected, etc etc. You know, GitHub developers are quite smart. They could just write their own weighting algorithm if they wanted to. :-)
      • 672723074828 11y ago
        Those are absolutely awful metrics to use when measuring a developer's ability and talent, or the quality of this developer's contributions. They are also extremely easy to game, too.
        • xmj 11y ago
          Yes, that's why I trust GitHub to come up with a (proprietary, unreleased) algorithm a la PageRank that won't easily be game-able.
  • hluska 11y ago
    That is truly an excellent idea. Comments like this remind me why I love this community so much. Thanks for sharing!
• mahouse 11y ago
  Ignore it.
• cjbprime 11y ago
  You can temporarily close comments on an issue that's getting a lot of outside traffic. Usually social media traffic is very bursty like that.
  • ta140604 11y ago
    Exactly. It's an outrage machine, people who participate mostly want to get their daily fix of feeling that they're fighting for a good cause - and if you lay low for a few days or a couple of weeks, few if any will be persistent enough to bug you after that, as the focus will shift elsewhere. You may or may not want to issue a polite and carefully-worded statement, but don't cave in - something like "we've heard you and understand your position, thanks for letting us know". It might be different when the issue is used in intra-project political fight (like two companies competing for control over the project), but for your average Twitter raid that should be enough. Do not engage further, do not fight them, they are just self-righteous trolls - so, just don't feed them.
• buserror 11y ago
  "you got the source, feel free to send a merge request, thanks!" Problem sorted?
  • blowski 11y ago
    Sometimes the issue is that somebody's merge request has been rejected, so not necessarily.
    • buserror 11y ago
      I'm the author/maintainer of simavr: https://github.com/buserror/simavr https://github.com/buserror/simavr I've had to refuse some merge requests, I did it by mostly ignoring them, or explaining that it looks like a very large patch for a something that isn't necessarily wanted... Also I factor in the fact /I/ will have to maintain that patch in the future, as the contributor will likely disappear to other interests sooner or later, so if I don't like it, ultimately it's /my/ choice, even if it doesn't come down to a technical point... A good 'test' of a merge request is to see if the author is willing to make changes that you request.. It is a very good filter for 'motivation'; if the author doesn't reply, well, that's a merge request I'll close it 6 month next time I go down the list...
    • kybernetyk 11y ago
      Well, that someone is free to fork the project if he/she isn't happy with the current maintainers.
• aikah 11y ago
  > Lately a number of open source projects has faced tremendous pressure from people coming from Twitter and Reddit to have issues resolved a certain way. Can you point to a specific example? the only things I have seen is some brigading and cabal to pressure a project owner to remove a contributor from a project, but it was akin to a lynch mob, not related with programming in any way.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • Quanttek 11y ago
    This Google NTP stuff with SystemD comes to mind [1]. Everybody, especially HN, jumped on the hate train and spammed the issue [1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437
    • proveanegative 11y ago
      This is one example I had in mind when I made this thread; the issue that the grandparent mentions is another. I have seen a similar scenario play out with a few smaller projects' repositories but I am reluctant to mention them. There is also good-natured but meaningless noise like https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/5 https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/5. I believe this kind of support, while flattering at first, ultimately puts undue pressure on the volunteer contributor. On the plus side, the comments come from people using the project. Perhaps GitHub was wrong to get rid of the upvote button on issues unconditionally. Having the option to enable it would probably have helped the Gogs case.
  • xmj 11y ago
    The recent witch hunt against projects that don't have Code of Conducts. 'meh' did a masterful job with those: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/942 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/942 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/945 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/945
• ExpiredLink 11y ago
  If it's a hobbyist project you can ignore the "social media pressure". If you have commercial interests it's probably better to set up your own issue/feature/bug-tracking system independent of GitHub.
  • pvinis 11y ago
    what are some nice ones?
    • ijager 11y ago
      I have been using Redmine for about 2 years now: http://www.redmine.org http://www.redmine.org
      • ExpiredLink 11y ago
        ... or Trac or even Bugzilla.
    • walterbell 11y ago
      Cloud-hosted JIRA is free for OSS projects.
    • scrollaway 11y ago
      Gitlab is an excellent self-hostable alternative to github. https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/
      • xmj 11y ago
        Maybe relevant: We're bringing GitLab to FreeBSD. :-) Check the ruby@ list for current status, things left to do, etc. https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ruby/2015-July/thread.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ruby/2015-July/t...
        • sytse 11y ago
          Thanks for that effort! Please let us know if we can help in any way.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• mpdehaan2 11y ago
  This was basically my life with building Ansible for three years. Given, I loved many aspects of it, but it was really hard and it took a major toll. (clarification: this has post has absolutely nothing to do why I am not working on it anymore) I've been considering a bit of a blog post on this (particularly the unknown parts of wide scale OSS projects), but basically open source projects get harder as you have more contributors. Time to review code properly (and to be overly friendly and helpful in doing so) often can completely eat into the ability for you to write and architect code properly, which strips out the ability to do the design that needs to be done. (and as you're doing this - taking maybe 15 minutes per patch, the odds of someone fixing the submission are I would guess about 25% - and you might need to do a couple dozens of these a day). People can get annoyed at filtering out of decisions unless you overcommunicate at a rate that is probably 5-10x times what is normally expected in normal business conversation. (I was already communicating at a rate that was probably 3-5x what most developers do on the lists, and generally got crucified for it, with myths building up about my character, etc). Often decisions have no right answer, there's a good and a bad, and either decision will irk someone, and you'll get negative blog posts about what you are doing in either direction. You optimize for the thing that will help the most people, and the one guy who doesn't have his obscure itch scratched will assume you are deliberately ignoring him. You eliminate a problem user so you can concentrate on 1000 people and doing real work, and then others jump all over you after the micro-incident (that they only saw part of). GitHub makes some things harder -- the issue tracker doesn't have issue templates, so you have to overcommunicate the need to fill out proper templates, and people also throw code at projects prior to asking what the code should be. I love GitHub for the OSS explosion it has enabled, but it is a chaotic way of managing a project as that project gets big. It also makes it very obvious when a project is buried behind a lot of incomplete contributions, but similarly doesn't provide good tools to sort and manage large numbers of incoming tickets. It makes it very obvious when those ticket numbers build up, and arguments happen on closed tickets. Twitter is probably one of the worst things, as there's a lot of passive aggressiveness on it. Twitter is an "argument machine". It doesn't provide context, but it does provide a place to rally a mob with pitchforks over the slightest percieved offense, that often should not have been an offense. Often you don't want people leaving trash on your lawn, but if you edit out the offensive things, the same people claim you are censoring them. My advice is dont try to acquire users too fast. The "Go" project recently said something like "we had to open source this once it was a certain way along". My conditioning from Red Hat was "do everything in the open", but that was not really something Red Hat always did, as they had a lot of projects with low contribution numbers. My ultimate feeling is that good projects have good central direction. Contributions can be good, and making a project around a base that encourages lots of shallow contributions can be a very successful strategy for making a successful project, if you do that, you end up doing a lot of custodial work and can't always hit the goals you want to hit. While it wasn't true in the last 5 years, now I feel the code is more important than the contribution process, and focusing on that allows the users to get a better experience. Users matter a lot - and folks trying to contribute matter a lot - but I don't like the way the inherant focus of contribution turns the creator of a thing into a project manager and a PR manager, and takes away their ability to innovate on the thing. Being able to work on code is great, but I'd still want to see contribution structured around a mailing list. Strongly encourage talking about code/ideas before submission, but most people will not read it and will submit directly anyway. I think part of my problem was the barrier to contribution was really low (and that was great) because it was pretty modular at the smaller ends, and we quickly got overwhelmed. I like to thrash very complex codebases for not being contributor friendly, but the breathing room would have been nice. I guess there's no clear answer - holding things longer before open sourcing them might help. Making sure you have very high coding standards helps. But eventually you're just going to have that very large number of people. Most of everyone (95%) are awesome, it's just that the virtue of something being so open exposes you to everyone that might not be - and even those people are probably awesome, the nature of low-bandwidth communication on the internet probably just exposes you to misunderstandings and you end up stressing out over things vs being the friends you normally would. Ignore what you can - it's a problem when others don't understand this and bug you about every single comment and interaction, and judge you on it. The ratio of complaints to thank you's is not always worth the pay at times, so just make sure you're doing it because you care about it, and find the best way to make it work for you, even if that's moving something to redmine and bitbucket :)
• bkor 11y ago
  Delete/hide the comments and a public announcement on the bug what types of comments are acceptable/unacceptable. As someone else said, it is usually very obvious. Many comments within 24 hours on a bug that is usually bike shed worthy. Bugs comments should be technical in nature. Basically no (endless) discussion _if_ something should (not) be done. It should be about _how_ to do something (implement/fix bug/etc). The deleting (hiding for anyone but admins) is usually pretty effective. Once they understand that you have way too much time on your hands, then they'll stop pretty quickly. What's important is not to get aggressive though. Try turning the attention into something positive and give some tips (how things work and how to get something done). E.g. sometimes bugs do get forgotten and some attention will get them fixed. But that doesn't need 10-15 comments after eachother. My experience is with Bugzilla btw.
• xmj 11y ago
  > When your project faces this pressure how do you act to ensure that meaningful discussion happens and decisions are made that are the best for your actual users and contributors in the long run? Make sure you know who your users are. Keep in touch with them, reach out, do "community building". They will tell you things about your product/software/system you would otherwise never hear. That way, you can also filter out issues from known troublestarters as noise, and, much like in Casablanca, it's a "round up the usual suspects" thing. You could probably write a bot to filter them out, very similar to the ggautoblocker whose perl sources *are on GitHub, just, the other way 'round.
  • xmj 11y ago
    > You could probably write a bot to filter them out, very similar to the ggautoblocker whose perl sources *are on GitHub, just, the other way 'round. I just did that, actually.
• osstard_s 11y ago
  Got to be honest, from personal experience on github and sourceforge, I have found that some people will not take polite feedback, they will not listen, they will not be reasonable, and they will suck all your energy - if you let them. Basically ignore and block the time sinks as soon as possible. And don't feel bad about it - you would quickly remove a tick, mosquito, leech or other parasite from yourself, remove them equally swiftly from your workflow.
• logicrime 11y ago
  This sure smells fishy... If you're running an open source project and users are pouring into the cracks to say that they don't like something, it's an obvious sign of what they want. Open-source is supposed to be about the community, maybe you should try listening harder to them. Users aren't just sheep that use your product, they're an integral part of the entire process, equal in value to the developers. edit: Who woulda thought that HN devs didn't give a shit about users? As if we didn't know that already...
  • ams6110 11y ago
    Open source is about whatever the developers want it to be about. They can be building it for themselves, for users, or for some weighted combination of both.
  • Heliosmaster 11y ago
    On the other hand, forking is completely legit. It happened already in the past and will happen in the future, for major disagreements. Open source mantainers don't owe it to the community, if the community ultimately does not behave.
  • detaro 11y ago
    Users are often valuable, unless they try to do something that doesn't align with the general goals of the project. People that don't use your project and still feel the need to butt in, even less so.
  • stray 11y ago
    Open source is about the idea that information should be free -- That wondrous things can be built when we are free to build upon the work of others. Users are people who benefit from the fact that we've generously offered the results of our work without expectation of pay. It has been my experience that those customers/clients who pay the most are the least demanding. Which is the primary reason that I generally only work on proprietary systems now. Because as renumeration approaches zero, hassle approaches infinity.
• tomasien 11y ago
  I saw this as a possible helpful tool. They actually sent some un-solicited emails to folks running large projects (which they definitely should not have done but seem to feel bad about) so it got a lot of bad will off the bat, but it seems helpful. https://githelp.io/ https://githelp.io/
  • ahmdrefat 11y ago
    Thank you for mentioning it, and yes we've done this mistake and we've apologized for everyone. And GitHelp is about open source support, where we encourage users to take of all thier support request from GitHub and have them on GitHelp where they can have a better more professinal support services than just a simple Q&A
• evan_ 11y ago
  Maybe this is crazy but you could listen to them, treat their comments as valid, give a clear indication that you understand what they are saying, and then seriously consider their concerns? Too often I see people shut down and go into a kind of "you can't tell me what to do" coma and lash out. That doesn't solve anything.
  • hga 11y ago
    What if their comments are not "valid"? What if their agenda is stirring up shit, not the health of your project at all? To take an extreme but existing example (urbit), what if they want your project to die because they (think) they don't like you, a person working on the project?
    • 672723074828 11y ago
      A bad thing to do is to start thinking such things to begin with. Just because somebody expresses an idea that you personally disagree with it does not mean that they are "trolling", it does not mean that the idea is "invalid", it does not mean that they're trying to "stir up shit", and it does not mean that they're trying to "kill" an open source project. Always respond to their concerns with professionalism, courtesy, and tact. The absolute worst thing to do is to start censoring them. I've seen this happen with a number of GitHub projects in the past. People occasionally come along with ideas that some, or sometimes even just one, of the core contributors does not agree with. Even when the newcomers are participating in good faith, I've seen intolerant GitHub project leaders start deleting perfectly good comments, closing perfectly valid issues, rejecting perfectly good pull requests, deleting perfectly good wiki content, and otherwise engaging in behavior that is much more harmful than anything the newcomer could managed to have engaged in. When I see that happening to new contributors, especially when it's a small project involved, then I know it's time to move on from that project, both as a user and contributor. I refuse to be associated with such nonsense.
  • mwfunk 11y ago
    I think you're assuming a lot about what's going on on the receiving end of those comments. You're assuming that what you suggest is even an option for them, and that the people who don't devote hours (if not days) per week to doing what you suggest are avoiding it out of selfishness or ignorance or laziness. You may also be vastly overestimating the signal to noise ratio of that input. It's true that some people are just crappy maintainers, but there's rarely enough information to make that determination. Ultimately, most of these maintainers are volunteers doing what they're doing in their spare time out of love for their craft, and they have no social or professional obligation to let other people dictate the direction of their project. The nice thing about open source is that if there is a critical mass of users who are unsatisfied with the state of the world, they can fork it and take it in the direction that they want. Yes, "just fork it" is often used as a cliched excuse for shutting down conflicting viewpoints, but it's such an effective excuse because it's also a true statement. What if there isn't a critical mass? What if there's an important project which has received and ignored perfectly reasonable user requests, or even patches that "just have to be merged", but there's no critical mass for forking? Sadly, that's how pretty much everything else in the world works as well. Like democracy and capitalism, it's the worst system in the world except for every other one. Everybody has a laundry list of complaints about their most-used software, and has thought to themselves, "if only they would change this one thing", "if only they would just merge my patch", "if only they would listen to me", then everything would be great. What the "if only's" of the world don't see is that for every popular project, there are dozens if not hundreds or thousands or millions of people who each have their own "if only" which in many cases are contradictory if not outright wrong. If someone just doesn't have time to work on their passion project and drink from that firehose at the same time, I do not judge them for choosing to focus on their own code.
• click170 11y ago
  Maybe what Github needs is a way to put an issue or all issues for a project into Review Mode where every comment posted to the issue by a non-contributor must be reviewed and accepted by project members before it is posted. This would allow non-contributors to post comments of value (as decided by the contributors), and would make it harder for trolls to spam the discussion. This would place additional overhead on the project maintainers, but IMO this is more ideal because emails from trolls and people not contributing to the conversation can easily be ignored by filtering out messages from that Github user. It would not be perfect but it might be better than what we currently have?
• jakejake 11y ago
  Developing a thick skin and not feeling like every request is a life-or-death situation - this is what you need to have. You have to take the input and make adjustments as necessary, but continue to steer the project toward your vision. You also should decide how much time you will devote to the project and then not go over to avoid burnout or interfering with your life/work. My most popular product at the moment has maybe 150k installs and I could spend the rest of my life trying to appease every request. I can only imagine a massively successful software project must be a deluge of requests.
• datashovel 11y ago
  I have always felt that the "uncivil" parts are typically coming from people who have to depend on others to accomplish what they want. There has to be a certain amount of anxiety that comes from being asked to do something that you may not know how to do yourself. e.g. Someone who is not a developer themselves. On the other hand, if you notice alot of developers complaining, my first thought would be that the code may not be modular enough that the developer feels they can comfortably make changes themselves without knowing what it will do to the overall code base. Wherever there is reasonable dissent, it seems it would be a perfect opportunity to reorganize that part of the code so that many different opinions can be happy about the end result.
• gumby 11y ago
  You (or they, depending on how you consider things) have a simple tool to solve the problem: let them fork and do what they want. It sounds like I'm trivializing the issue but I"m not (see below). Take a kindly approach: "Clearly I have a disagreement as to the right way to proceed so let's stop arguing and both go down our respective paths." Don't worry about the obnoxious folks: be kind and take them at their word. If they pick up the ball, perhaps they will be proven right and you'll switch, perhaps they'll be proven wrong and that experiment won't have hurt your project, or perhaps they'll be proven trolls (by not picking up the ball), in which case you can saefly ignore them. And when I say this is a simple tool: it took me months to arrange the first "legitimate" (in the sense that it was accepted as a mainstream activiy) open source fork, which was GCC back in 1997. Until then forking a project while done (often companies would hack something unsupportable into, say, gdb), was considered grossly dangerous. It took literally months of discussion to split egcs off from mainline gcc (and to become, in fact, mainline gcc). I had to write a really long, careful message (https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html) to justify it. Nowadays you can fork away with abandon. Take advantage of it.
• sytse 11y ago
  At GitLab we're considering a feature that will reduce the noise of +1's and other emoji's, we're been planning it for a while but you could compare it to Slack's function: leaving an emoji doesn't generate a comment.
• waxjar 11y ago
  I think GitHub needs a "+1" button for issues. It'll give maintainers some insight as to what priority to give an issue, without spamming them with e-mails. Asking users not to comment with comments such as "+1", or even turning off comments, hides this information. This will solve the issue partly.
  • sebie 11y ago
    I think a optional "+1" would be better. And / or something like an optional post format -- if you want a poll you can enable "+1" 's. If not just disable it or change the post format.
  • xmj 11y ago
    > This will solve the issue partly. On the contrary; it will turn the whole thing into something that can be gamed even better by those who are good at rallying, organizing mobs, and shaming people into doing what the mob organizers can't do on their own.
• Ayietim1 11y ago
  Simple, give directions and follow up.
• Ayietim1 11y ago
  Give direction, follow up and place relevant minders aty pre-determined intervals. http://ayietim.wordpress.com http://ayietim.wordpress.com
• jerrac 11y ago
  Depending on the issues effected, I'd shut off comments/issues until the social media storm is over. If it's a longer term issue, then throw up a Discourse/forum instance somewhere and close any effected issues with a comment along the lines of "go talk about it here, where you won't negatively effect development work." You could also just turn off GitHub issues and move to a different system. Maybe make all new issues go into a forum/google group, and then when a valid issue comes along, allow a contributor to create a issue on GitHub. Off topic: I think there's a huge opportunity for someone to shake up how support requests/bug reports/issues/tickets/etc. work. Part of that would be building tools that help developers manage support requests while still being newbie friendly. As well as issues like social media pressure. If anyone's working on something like that, I'd love to give feedback. I've had ideas on the subject, but haven't had the time to pursue it myself.
• gsudarkoff 11y ago
  Managing scale is managing scale. There are numerous business books written on this subject. In a nutshell: build a scalable org structure (delegate, get yourself out of the loop when possible), explicitly define policies and processes, establish quality controls and do NOT compromise on quality, invest in communication and training...