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.
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".
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 .)
Comments
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.
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".
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 .)