this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
351 points (88.4% liked)
Programming.dev Meta
2365 readers
12 users here now
Welcome to the Programming.Dev meta community!
This is a community for discussing things about programming.dev itself. Things like announcements, site help posts, site questions, etc. are all welcome here.
Links
Credits
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If ideas are free, why do Fortune 500 companies routinely bribe their customers to tell them about the experience so far?
Because feedback from people using your software is valid and valuable. Feedback from power users of your software (admins of instances) is even more valuable.
I understand why you feel the way you feel, but this isn’t how a healthy project is run.
You say the devs time would be better spent developing and I agree. Interesting that they took time out of their day to issue a ban and then come here to weakly defend it. It’s almost like they could have just ignored the OP and none of this would have happened.
In the first part I disagree, fortune 500 aren't looking for ideas they are gathering data, the difference here is one of quantity. And they will at least usually not gather free form things unless they have significant resources to commit to sorting through it. Or it's specifically payed support.
Feedback is valuable only if actionable, if the feedback can't be acted on because one dev largely already said yes and the other one largely thinks there is more important stuff right now it's not actionable. That's why companies have teams specifically for market research or marketing or whatever, they don't usually let the devs gather it themselves. And in the case of big open source projects with full time staff handling the issues on the GitHub might be partially done by a not dev team. Or a dev team member that's not a dev themselves.
Yes the dev can choose to spend time bickering about this here, I don't really care and I never said he should develop instead, I might think it's stupid but again who cares. Ignoring would perhaps have been better but blocking for 7 days is almost like ignoring, just that the trigger is blocked for 7 days as well, completely reasonable to do if it was actually annoying, and it might've been considering it was two largely unnecessary comments.
I even agree with you that the devs seem sorta toxic and maybe their project management style is unhealthy, but they are devs, as long as they continue to develop a reasonable software who cares how it's run. They are not pr or even project managers, they are devs, maybe they chose their job by what they can do and just ended up having to do the community management on GitHub as well because their software is open source.
If they actually had active control over the future of the software in the general sense, i.e. if it was closed source i would be concerned with the characters running the project. But it's open source, the future doesn't depend on specific devs, it's explicitly set up so that the current devs could die or delete it or whatever, and in response anyone willing could create a fork with a scheduler and anything else they might want, it even works with a federated approach so any fork would be backwards compatible.