One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature." to be rude. I would have thought it was helpful feedback; more people indicating the value of a feature seems helpful in assessing whether it's worth doing (if it's not obvious for other reasons).
I help with UX in a FOSS project. When it comes to comments of that kind, the problem is that they are usually quite low effort. The person thought: "X is a good idea" but never once considered giving proper reasons, exploring other possible solutions, thinking aboit how it should actually look like and so on.
In my opinion a good feature request does all that legwork. The goal (my goal) is to arm the maintainer with a action-plan that they can pull out of the drawer and start working on immidiately. If this doesn't work — seeing that the other side did the legwork can still be motivating and creates a good climate.
Just imagine we are not talking about code, but about cool Lego-towers for a moment. If you want the other kid to add a certain detail to the tower, the least you can do is explain it to them properly. Better is to inspire their creativity alltogether: who says your idea is the only/best way to solve the problem?
Yes, that's a fair point. Just "me too" doesn't convey a lot of extra information. Would "me to, because this would help solve my scenario xyz" be more helpful? What about "me too, because I also have the exact problem described" (which at least conveys that they've put more thought in to it than a totally light weight "me too")?
> Would "me to, because this would help solve my scenario xyz" be more helpful?
Quite definitly. But even more helpful would be if you listed all scenarios you can think of where this would be helpful, even ones that are not useful to you, but might be to others.
Then you think about how it would impact existing functionality (both positively and negatively), would it be the consistent thing to do? Where could be traps and pitfalls? Maybe even ad a mockup of hoe it would look.
If you did that, the maintainer sees that you didn't just demand a feature drive-by-shooting-style, but you did the actual legwork of fleshing the thing out. Don't marry your own ideas, others might be inspired by you and have a even better way of solving this.
If you are writing one sentence you are doing to little usually (in my eyes).
> But even more helpful would be if you listed all scenarios you can think of where this would be helpful, even ones that are not useful to you, but might be to others.
The danger with this is encouraging overengineering. It's easy, particularly if someone else is going to be doing the work, to say, "Maybe someone out there might someday want to do X, Y, or Z"; causing a maintainer to put a whole lot of effort and extra complexity into their code for use cases which nobody uses.
In fact, when only a single person wants a feature, there's a similar risk, that I'll put a whole lot of extra effort and complexity into the code for a use case which only one person thinks they want; and that after it's implemented, they decide they don't like it and go somewhere else anyway.
That's why I didn't understand why he considered "I would also use this feature" comments to be rude or unhelpful. I would think knowing that at least two (or three or four) people wanted a feature would be helpful feedback in knowing what kinds of things were worth adding extra complexity.
Perhaps in his mind they took the tone of, "Hey yeah, we're all waiting for you to do this work for us for free; what's the hold-up? Get cracking!" Which of course would be a bad attitude; but looking at the exact thing he quoted, I'd say that's more about what he's reading into it than what the commenter actually said.
I was mulling over that sentence too. While I’d probably not characterize them as rude per se, those little pings do intrude more than, say, adding another upvote on the issue. I already know there is a lot more that I’d like to do than have time for, and having these personal pleas add a little more guilt to the mix without providing any more substance are often a negative (especially when there are lots of them).
The number of big projects with over a dozen identical comments saying "Same problem" is quite astounding. At what point does the maintainer turn off notifications? 5? 20?
Perhaps the point was that unless you have something useful to add to a GitHub issue then don't comment.
People don't want Reddit style pun threads here and yet to hear complaints about that being enforced, in fact the opposite. GitHub issues is similar in that sense. Everything has its place and time.
Yes, I think that adding the thumbs up feature (which people still use badly) was a good solution to that. It lets you give a "me too" response without cluttering up the comments, and without spamming the maintainers with notifications either - but if they do look they can see people expressing interest.
If the issue is a bug (as opposed to a feat request) maybe it's useful to know how common it is? It would imply its not just a one-off issue with a particular users setup.
As an OSS author, unless I ask for that feedback, “me too” comments both add noise to my inbox and come off as entitled. It feels like the author of the comment expects me to implement a feature for them because they want it. I don’t maintain OSS as a product, I maintain it because it is code that I need for my personal use cases and I benefit by having others participate in QA and feature dev.
This probably does not apply to OSS projects that are products built by companies.
> One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature." to be rude.
I mentioned on r/rust that "rude" is perhaps too strong of a word. I was more or less thinking of things that annoyed or grated on me, and then just kind of lumped that in with "rude." To be sure, I do not get to lay claim to a universal definition of rudeness. :-)
But yeah, I think others responding to you pretty much summed up why it can be mildly annoying. And to be clear, I do think part of this is on me: I'm working on trying to let such minor things like this slide more. It's a process.
I probably wouldn't call it rude, but I'd say it's definitely unwanted. It just adds annoying noise to my inbox. In my time working on FOSS, it's pretty rare that more "votes" would make me more likely or more interested in implementing a particular feature. I certainly would have been interested in knowing what features were most important to users, but I think a drive-by "me too" on a feature request is a poor sample of what users overall really want.
And regardless, for some projects, at some times, you just feel like working what you feel like working on, and more users clamoring for a particular feature just doesn't motivate you.
There are two unstated assumptions underlying “helpful feedback” that need to be considered and re-evaluated.
First, the assumption that ‘voting’ is an appropriate and helpful form of social interaction with someone who has not expressly invited that participation from others.
Second, the assumption that a group expression of a statement is emotionally equivalent to a single individual’s expression of the same statement.
These are not universally shared assumptions, especially in open source.
It depends on the phrasing. If you’re just saying “me too” you’re just annoying the maintainer instead of adding a silent +1 reaction.
If you add one more use case that might help the maintainer reconsider the feature, then I’d find it acceptable. Sometimes the issue opener didn’t explain the utility that well or wrote some example that made it sound like it would be a niche feature and not worth it.
Yeah, I wasn't thinking of GH specifically, but if you have the silent thumbs up option, then a "me too" with no meaningful contribution is a bit rude.
I reckon that if you have to process a lot of communications about your project(s), and because you are the maintainer you HAVE to pay attention, comments like that are high noise, low signal, and while one of them is fine, dozens or hundreds of those a day just cost energy without bringing anything back.
Thought the same... maybe what he finds rude is the comment itself in cases (like Github) where you can react to the comment with a thumbs up to say the same thing, instead of a new comment that sends a notification and maybe even an email. There needs to be a non-rude way to show support for a constructive idea.
Yeah, I didn't think of that, and several people have pointed it out in the responses :) Agreed completely, if the silent :+1: option is there then a content free "me too" is a bit rude.
After thinking about it I agree with him. If you are going to stand up to speak in a community meeting, you should have something more thoughtful to say than "I agree with what that guy said".
If one doesn't have proper additional reasons for their chiming, thats what the vote button is for. Otherwise the useless text is just taking up valuable screen estate and making people scroll un-necessarily.
One thing that I found surprising was that the author considered comments along the lines of "Just chiming in to say that I would also really like this feature." to be rude. I would have thought it was helpful feedback; more people indicating the value of a feature seems helpful in assessing whether it's worth doing (if it's not obvious for other reasons).