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

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

#41

Post by mpdehaan2 »

blumentopf wrote: post #32
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #14

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…

I think parent referred more to contentious issues (e.g. sexism, systemd hate) rather than uncontrollable growth of a project. That said, excellent post, thank you! The opposite of course are projects with too few contributors that accept any patch out of desperation, be it reasonable or not. (ZFS on Linux comes to mind, it's a super nice community and Brian Behlendorf does a great job as project lead but sometimes f…

Yeah we'd had contentious issues on the various feature lines (systemd-analogous), absolutely no issues (that I was made aware of) on the -ism lines. The points about various feature items totally hit home though :)

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

#42

Post by click170 »

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?

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

#43

Post by andybak »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #14

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…

> (...) 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.

Django enforces this strongly. Anything other than trivial pull requests will be ignored. Contributors are strongly advices to start a discussion on the dev mailing list before working on code and for anything big there's now a formal process for 'Django Enhancement Proposals' (obviously modelled on Python's PEPs)

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

#44

Post by daenney »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #2

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".

But how do you measure that quality? Based on amount of contributions? Based on +1's they've received on comments?

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

#45

Post by xmj »

jordsmi wrote: post #40
xmj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/942 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/945

My god those comments are a shitshow

Meh is a genius in handling those people, you do have to admit that.

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

#46

Post by xmj »

daenney wrote: post #44
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #2

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".

But how do you measure that quality? Based on amount of contributions? Based on +1's they've received on comments?

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. :-)

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

#47

Post by xmj »

scrollaway wrote: post #30
pvinis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are some nice ones?

Gitlab is an excellent self-hostable alternative to github. https://about.gitlab.com/

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/t...

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

#48

Post by jakejake »

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.

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

#49

Post by titanomachy »

mattdesl wrote: post #35
Matt3o12_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got some great points there but I don't think contributing a change without asking get before is bad even if it misses the project goals. I sometimes need a feature and posting it on mailing lists, etc tasks too long (considering the contribution is only going to be a few lines ~100). If it misses the goal of the project, I don't reallt care. It has fulfiled the licensing agreement (to post code back upstream). I…

There is a sense of pressure to merge PRs, though. When you have a lot of open PRs it starts to discourage further contributions. And if you reject a lot of PRs, or if you are too strict about it (i.e. nit-picking their PRs) it can also create a negative atmosphere that discourages further contributions. Also... when you deal with dependencies in a package manager (like npm dependencies), it is less than ideal to rel…

> There is a sense of pressure to merge PRs

So quickly outline the reason why it's not ready for merge, and if the contributor doesn't respond in a reasonable window you can reject the PR with a clear conscience. If someone else takes an interest and offers to clean up the code, you can reopen the PR.

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

#50

Post by toolz »

xmj wrote: post #45
jordsmi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god those comments are a shitshow

Meh is a genius in handling those people, you do have to admit that.

I don't know that I would go that far. He was very abrasive, whereas his core message could've been plenty to stop the nonsense he always added a little bit of aggression to keep the drama going.

If he was a genius, you probably wouldn't ever have known the issue existed. At least it seems that way to me.

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