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+++
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title = "Dear Github Maintainers"
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date = 2016-01-15
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categories = "code"
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["github", "comments"]
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+++
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A rebuttal to "Dear Github".
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<!-- more -->
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So recently in Reddit, there is this thread going around about
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[Dear Github](https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github),
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which points some problems with Github issues pages.
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Thing is, most of the problems are not problems with Github itself, but by the
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community that grew around it.
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For example, the most annoying one is the huge amount of "+1" in comments. I've
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seen this and yes, it's annoying as hell. Lots of people come around and post
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a simple "+1" instead of really contributing. This is *not* an issue with
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Github, it is an issue with the community that instead of helping fixing a
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problem, thinks that posting "+1" to point that it is important to them is
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actual help. It isn't. I've seen issues with so many "+1" that if everyone
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who posted a "+1" actually submitted a single change, the bug would be fixed
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with spare lines.
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(Unpopular opinion: Github should have support for "+1", but actually *ban* it.
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It is unhelpful. If it's important to you, you should at least give a try to
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fix the issue instead of "+1" and giving yourself a pat in the back for
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"helping out".)
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Issues missing important information surely is a problem, but that's why you
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need to triage your issues. Is there any missing information? You can reply to
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the poster. "But why should I ask when I can put a form for the user to fill
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issues?" Dude, seriously? You're worried that you will lose 30 seconds of your
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life to ask something? Why don't you want to talk to your community, why you
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don't want to teach people how to properly report errors? Is it that hard to
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be part of a community?
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But the hurting point is the "if Github was open source, we would fix this
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ourselves". [Gitorious](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitorious) was open
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source and never had that much contribution from the community, to the point
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it was closed and moved to Gitlab. So I have to ask: If Bitbucket implemented
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this, would all of you move to it? My guess is an indignant "No", because
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Github means exposure while all the other public Git sites are not.
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To me, the whole list is not a list of problems with Github itself, but a
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problem with the open source (in the general, broad term) community that's
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growing around Github. We should worry about building communities, not building
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code with 400 forks, 1000s of "+1" comments and a single maintainer.
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