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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?

#31

Post by Matt3o12_ »

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…

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 don't care because I'm just going to use my fork and I would have done that anyways if my feature was declined in the mailing list. If the author finds it useful and wants it back upstream, then, I'm happy to have helped.

The great thing about open source is that you can basically do whatever you want with the software and git hub makes that easy by allowing to just fork the repo, hack together the features you want (and post it back upstream).

Otherwise, great summary!! Really appreciate it

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

#32

Post by blumentopf »

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 features and patches creep in of which I'm wondering why nobody dared saying "no".)

The Linux kernel community solved growth by delegating responsibility to subsystem maintainers. Such a hierarchical model is not supported by GitHub. Also, the kernel community's process of submitting and discussing patches on mailing lists, while somewhat arcane, raises the barrier of entry and keeps at least a portion of the Twitter mob out.

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

#33

Post by hluska »

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".

That is truly an excellent idea. Comments like this remind me why I love this community so much. Thanks for sharing!

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

#34

Post by tomasien »

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/

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

#35

Post by mattdesl »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #31
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…

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 rely on a GitHub fork rather than the module itself.

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

#36

Post by evan_ »

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.

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

#37

Post by xmj »

aikah wrote: post #6

> 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.

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

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

#39

Post by hga »

evan_ wrote: post #36

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.

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?

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

#40

Post by jordsmi »

xmj wrote: post #37
aikah wrote: post #6

> 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.

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
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