Hacker News Reader

Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

That took a long long time for them to respond. It's day 29 now. In fact, they could have communicated something after even a week - probably something similar to what they have actually written, only more 'We're looking at your list and we'll try to get back to you as soon as possible'.

Where is Jono Bacon in all of this?

edit: OK, I feel kind of bad for mentioning Jono because I've watched him do awesome things over the years. I've sent him an email out of the blue asking him to respond - hopefully he gets it.

View on HN

I agree with you, and when Jono made his post on the original Hacker News thread, I immediately followed him on twitter and even CC'd him on tweets that had people talking about things hoping that he'd respond to them, at least post a public post outside of the HN thread saying that they're working on things... But he was more worried about promoting the community leadership summit.

Kind of sad honestly. Not very good community leadership by ignoring your own community to promote a community leadership conference.

To be fair, he was flying into linux.conf.au all the way in Geelong - that's a long flight. It could well have been that he's recovering - I notice that his last blog post was February 1st.

And of course I'm kicking myself that I missed the conference entirely. Sigh. Next year I guess.

You are not kidding about the long flight. I wish someone could move Australia a little closer to California. :-)

Hope to see you at linux.conf.au next year, chris_wot! :-)

Thanks Jono :-)

They did sort of respond on the initial HN thread though. Commenting means committing and if you do the wrong decision in haste, you might screwed up in the process (as an individual or a company). Is 29 days too long? Maybe.

They do address the slowness on the commit too and they provided a timeline.

Oh, I'm glad they did respond :-) In fact, I actually think that if they hadn't responded they would be seeing an exodus of projects.

Given that the issues being highlighted in that letter are long standing though, I don't think it would have been hasty to say that they appreciate the feedback and they are reviewing.

It's great of course that they responded on HN. But the fact that they only responded on HN and had no way of responding on their own site is... a bit embarrassing actually! At least I sort of feel that they should feel that way.

I actually pay for their lowest monthly tier as my needs are very limited. I largely like GitHub and will stick with them, but they just have to do something about their community engagement. If they don't, then someone is going to eat their lunch!

edit: kind of surprised at how some are responding to my comment - what did I say that was so wrong? I'm genuinely curious - it's not just me saying and thinking this, after all!

My apologies for the lack of public responsiveness. Thanks, chris_wot, for jumpstarting the discussion.

As outlined in Brandon's post linked here, we have been taking some time to really delve into the core of these issues and explore what the best solutions are. This has involved some internal discussion as well as reaching out to various parts of our community to gather feedback and perspectives. We take these concerns really seriously and want to ensure we can explore the best long and short-term solutions. As you can probably understand, we want to have some of our ducks in a row before sharing some next steps.

Rest assured that even though there has not been much publicly shared yet, we are definitely exploring ways to address these issues.

I have to assume he's been told not to speak about details until the executives came up with a plan. If that is the case, GitHub management is really making his job a living hell. Why have someone whose job it is to work with the community if everything has to be micro-managed by higher-ups?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com