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

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.

I'm at a loss for words. I don't know whether to be angry that there's discrimination or the person playing the victim card and demanding change on a github out of all places. When the hell did github issues tracker turn into an all out debate forum?

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.

Yeah I'm not really 100% in agreement with my own comment to be honest, it ignores the very real existance of malicious trolls for one, but it just annoyed me that every single comment was assuming a standpoint of "assume anyone who disagrees with you is wrong".

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.