Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Just Wanted to Say Thanks

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 257 posts

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#31

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

civilized wrote: post #22

Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub.

This is what I wonder. I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?" For anyone tasked with maintaining a repo, any email notification of new issues must come with a certain level of dread. At least that's what it's like for me, even if I sincerely appreciate and enjoy receiving issues!

I do, then, immediately close "thank you" issues so owners are not tasked with responding in any way, but still... And for any watcher, I imagine they are interested in notifications relevant to actual issues, not thank yous.

My opinion is the current best way to say thank you is probably a star. Beyond that, it would be nice if GitHub added a way to leave a thank you or testimonial or something like that. Or even a formal "the repo is in use by such and such app/company."

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#32

Post by brigandish »

colonwqbang wrote: post #27
civilized wrote: post #22

Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub.

I don't know why this is on HN; is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project? Concretely, you answered your own question. The "star" button is the default way of saying "thanks" to a project which was useful to you.

I thought the star button was a convenient way to keep track of projects you're interested in.

> is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project?

I would say yes, it's very unusual. The general lack of basic civility is, in my opinion, just one more reason for the lack of diversity in projects and lowers the number of contributors to open source.

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#33

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

>On a wider note, my guess is that it would be healthy for the open source community at large to practice more gratitude.

I try my part to give kudos, where possible. Most of my kudos are around getting questions answered and problems solved, in venues like SO.

I tend to avoid using dependencies. When I do use them, I often try to share use cases, and spread the word.

The obverse, is that, when I find something to be unsuitable, or bad (in a totally subjective way), I generally don't bitch about it. I just leave it alone, and look for something else.

I am very hard on myself; but it isn't helpful for me to apply that to others.

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#34

Post by lukewrites »

compumike wrote: post #2

I was surprised to find that someone left a brief "thank you" issue on one of my open source projects (a Kubernetes hairpin proxy to fix issues with cert-manager and LoadBalancers) and it feels great to know that the right people are finding it and resolving the same problem that led me to build it. I humbly hope that sharing this might inspire more humanity and gratitude in the open source community.

Similarly, I got a shoutout/tag on a PR that used some of my code. It made my day, and made me assume that the org the engineer works in must be a pretty good place to work.

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#35

Post by civilized »

colonwqbang wrote: post #27
civilized wrote: post #22

Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub.

I don't know why this is on HN; is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project? Concretely, you answered your own question. The "star" button is the default way of saying "thanks" to a project which was useful to you.

One bit might be a bit less than people would like to express a large range of human emotions arising in a large range of circumstances.

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#36

Post by cuu508 »

yeray wrote: post #30

Perfect timing to plug my latest project currently in beta https://shoutouts.dev/ Any and all feedback is welcome :)

When logging in with GitHub, it asks for the following permissions:

* Verify your GitHub identity

* Know which resources you can access

* Act on your behalf

What does the last one mean, and why is it needed?

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#37

Post by elliottcarlson »

A game developer released their game as open source after the Steam discovery algorithm killed traffic to their game [1]. It was nice to see a thank you on their GitHub [2], and I recommend people try to support developers with both gratitude, and when possible financially if it is a project that truly helps you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589545 [2] https://github.com/egordorichev/BurningKnight/issues/223

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#38

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

colonwqbang wrote: post #27
civilized wrote: post #22

Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub.

I don't know why this is on HN; is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project? Concretely, you answered your own question. The "star" button is the default way of saying "thanks" to a project which was useful to you.

Two times recently I wanted to express thanks (or just ask a question) and couldn't. In both cases there was no way to message the person via GitHub because they'd not publically shared their email address. In one case there was no way to open an 'issue'. And in the other, it wasn't relating to a repo, but a really excellent tutorial.

In the olden times, we all just used email all the time for everything. It would've been bizarre for someone to work in open source and not have their email publically available. The funny thing is, I haven't shared my email on my GitHub either! I'm going to fix that today.

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#39

Post by yeray »

cuu508 wrote: post #36
yeray wrote: post #30

Perfect timing to plug my latest project currently in beta https://shoutouts.dev/ Any and all feedback is welcome :)

When logging in with GitHub, it asks for the following permissions: * Verify your GitHub identity * Know which resources you can access * Act on your behalf What does the last one mean, and why is it needed?

That's just a misconfiguration of the GitHub app I haven't gone around to fix yet. We certainly don't act on your behalf, we only check basic information.

Re: Just Wanted to Say Thanks

#40

Post by dheera »

dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #31
civilized wrote: post #22

Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub.

This is what I wonder. I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?" For anyone tasked with maintaining a repo, any email notification of new issues must come with a certain level of dread. At least that's what it's like for me, even if I sincerely appreciate and enjoy receiving issues! I do, then, immediately close "thank you" issues so owners are not tasked with…

I think it depends on the scale of the project. If it's a project that isn't full of all kinds of bug reports and issues already, thank you notes aren't a bad thing.

As a developer what I like even more than thank yous are thank yous that explain how my code helped you in some specific way.

Post reply on HN