Gaining a permanent reputation for petty authoritarianism, even with contributors who clearly want to help
versus
gaining one (1) point on GitHub
Truly craven that this is coming from an automated bot. The extent to which social media likes have broken peoples' brains is something to behold.
I don’t think I have ever starred anything on Github. I think in this sort of situation I would add the star and remove it once the fix is added.
I'm of two minds on this:
1) Good: This adds "just" a touch of friction to things. You can't just do a drive-by on the project like so many thanks to ill-advised "social good" corporate review policies (screw you, Google, for pioneering that). You have to at least star it which at least signifies some level of commitment, identity, and existence.
2) Bad: This causes an inflation war between those projects that do this organically and those that force people to star them. It squashes the signal in the idea of stars.
Github is going to have to remove identity from the stars if they want to stop this from descending into chaos.
I agree with this. If you use some software (and its author cares about internet points), you can at least give it that star. It's better than paying with money, and if you are requesting a feature it makes even more sense to pay with a single click of a mouse. Show some appreciation, people
Seems obnoxious without a doubt, and particularly egregious if reporter is bringing/offering a fix. But maybe I should try to be open-minded about this? Issues that provide even badly written bug reports are probably doing a service to the project itself. Feature requests OTOH might just be internet strangers requesting free labor on someone's generously-public yet resource-starved passion project. In the 2nd case, and without speculating on why the project owner would even care.. maybe fake internet points in lieu of other payment is the least people can do. That said though, obviously if everyone does this, it will erode the signal of what stars are supposed to mean. Hmm.
Not sure which is more gross: having a bot farm for imaginary internet points, or the people defending the practice.
No clout, no work seems reasonable if on the nose. At least you don’t have to subscribe to a newsletter.
This is unethical if (1) the condition was not made clear before the issue is written, and (2) the user cannot delete their report before it is published. (It is not in the current issue template, and I don't know if it was there.)
1. The issue writer will invest time and efforts, and publish their findings. Nobody's time is free: the maintainer's time is precious, and so is a user's.
2. Now, _after_ the issue is published, the maintainer additionally asks for a certain condition (give money or a star) to be satisfied.
What if the issue writer does not want to give that thing? The maintainer is now in an unfair position: they can still read the published issue, improve their software, but is not obliged to give any feedback or even credit the reporter.
It would be fairer if the condition was clearly conveyed to the reporter before they write any words. The system should simply not allow these issues written by the dissents to be created in the first place, and in that case the funny duck would also not appear before our eyes.
What are stars even worth? Certainly not the number of possible contributors this chases away (I see issue reporters as contributors as well since they’re spending effort finding/debugging what you would have to do at some point anyways)
All this for a measly 1500 stars
Reminds me of how how people give trivial stuff away for "free" in online marketplaces, but ask to be paid with a good review before handing it over. Do that a few hundred times and whoa, you're an amazingly rated seller!
This is Trump demanding that everyone at a meeting say something good about him.
A star is me saying "I admire this".
This is saying "hey you, admire me."
Super gross. How is anyone here trying to say that's reasonable?
And aside from being low, forget that, it's also stupid because it hurts your own self. Some users do submit feature requests in a demanding entitled manner, but most don't and even those that do are all still useful information about what the users want.
This user is only submitting an idea for consideration, and offering to do the work themselves if the idea is agreed with.
The devs* response to this is utterly bizarre in that context. "I won't hear your idea unless you like me." ??? The user is trying to GIVE them something!
Not all gifts are desirable of course but the value or fitness of the pr was never even considered in this case. They are refusing to even look in the bag to see if it's a turd or a gold brick unless the user claims to like them.
* devs bot, aka, which would seem to pretty squarely hit the acceptable use terms that specifically covers stars and automation and authentic user interactions. Not only is the devs policy a form of automation in that it's a plain mechanistic rule no different from a line of code, and is also a transaction like buying amazon reviews, on top of that it's literally a bot implementing the policy!
The mean goose avatar for the bot is perfect.
This is ridiculous. Not every issue means someone likes or even uses the codebase.
Automated scanners, fuzzers, security researchers, and people who found an issue via a dependent codebase, are all examples where an issue might be filed but the person otherwise has no interest.
What a nonsense thing to have. It's not harmless, especially for large projects. It'll discourage and even runs the risk of artificially covering up potential security issues.
The reactionary way to respond to this seems to be to think this is somehow authoritarian, internet point gathering or just petty.
What some might not realize is the sheer volume of requests that maintainers of popular open source software projects have competing for their attention on a daily basis (I do not speak from experience but from reading/listening to reports from those that do).
Adding a bit of friction to any of those attention grabbing things, like here through the use of an bot, is a good way of reducing that noise at least somewhat. It isn't a perfect system, but it is the one this maintainer choose to use.
>understood
iconic
Why the negative sentiment against this? It doesn't cost people anything to star a project. Whether it is a PR or not, the maintainer still had to review and maintain the code and that is time they will spend. The more stars a project gets, the more support it gets. It's not like you pay for stars or it is burdensome to click on the star button.
I wonder if this goes against github's "no automated starring" policy [0] (that people have been banned for in the past). Maybe "coordinated inauthentic activity" ?
Either way, feels sleazy.
[0] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/acceptable-use-polici...