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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

There's a reasonable amount of FOSS developers here, so let me ask a question.

Often times I'll run across a FOSS project that claims to solve a problem I have, encounter a bug that makes the project useless for my purposes, and discover that said bug has had an open entry in the issue tracker for years. This even occurs in major FOSS software with paid developers working on it.

Clearly no one actually cares about the bug, and "chiming in" is apparently considered rude. So I ignore your software and move on. Whatever, you don't owe me anything.

Then some day I respond to a forum post by someone asking about experiences with your software, and relate mine. Apparently this is also rude, and I should have filed a bug report.

I guess my question is: is there any scenario under which one can actually provide feedback other than praise that you will accept?

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> Clearly no one actually cares about the bug, and "chiming in" is apparently considered rude.

I clarified this a bit more in my article.

> Then some day I respond to a forum post by someone asking about experiences with your software, and relate mine. Apparently this is also rude, and I should have filed a bug report.

... that is definitely not what I said. What I said was this:

> Unconstructively whining about software on [insert social medium here].

I'm not sure how this means you can't post constructive critical feedback. That's certainly fair game.

I actually came to this HN thread specifically looking for the word “chime” because it seemed so at odds w/ what I would personally consider rude.

I hope you don’t think this comment is also rude!

Anyway, let me say, ripgrep is an amazing fucking tool. Really love it. <3

I maintain some open source projects, and honestly, I've never considered chiming in on an open bug ticket rude. I also have never considered relating your experiences about my project on a forum rude, either. Don't get me wrong, I've had plenty of negative experiences with rude posts from users, but neither of these qualify to me unless the posts themselves are rude.

Something like this is fine with me: "I'm having this issue as well. It's unusable for me without this feature, because my use case is such that..." In fact, this is downright helpful, because I may be able to offer an alternative solution using already-implemented functionality.

Here's the same post, but rude and unhelpful: "I'm having this issue as well. This project is useless without this."

People often judge the merits of a project based on their own use-case and nothing more. If they can't use it for their use-case, they can't imagine any other use-cases where it's useful, and so the project is deemed useless (or some other hyperbolic, universal judgement of worth).

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