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

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.

Simple, give directions and follow up.

Those threads prove to me that it has become very time and effort efficient to mob swarm things on the internet. You can spend five minutes a day making some project's life miserable.

When you see "I got a message on Google plus from one of my fellow dev buddies from the F# community linking this discussion." you pretty much know that the mob doesn't have any real interest in your project other than to spend a couple of minutes to show their outrage. This is basically why people still put a lot more weight on letters, fax, and phone calls.

In the context of the original, "tremendous pressure from people coming from Twitter and Reddit to have issues resolved a certain way", i.e. a social media campaign to use politics vs. "merit" in making a particular decision, even if the decision is correct as the original notes, I'm willing to label that "input" as illegitimate, and dismiss it (politely or not).

It's very dangerous to give into that sort of pressure, for the next "request" might be very wrong. Although depending on the nature of the situation, that can be even more dangerous, since it has been demonstrated this can cost you your job or career.

(I'm afraid I'm come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to do future projects under a pseudonym, I have unPC discussion comments going back to the '80s that are still on-line last time I checked, all the way to this 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9815052 .)

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.