> it feels like you are doing something productive when you're using Slack, but the majority of time you're actually not

That's been my main complaint about GitHub throughout its meteoric rise. Its public contribution graphs and user profiles littered with hundreds of dead forks certainly encourage this behavior.

And I say this not as a person who has an unreasonable disdain for things like business processes and engineering tools (such as bugtrackers); I tend to favor (good) process more than other people—I've had personal projects where I'm the only contributor and user, and yet if you peek into the bugtracker you'll see hundreds of comments from me explaining exactly what's going on wrt the root cause and any fixes, and all known issues at any given time have an appropriate bug on-file.

But when I use GitHub, it's like every interaction ends up getting sidetracked either due to input from users trying to feel productive by leaving comments that are ultimately value-negative, or some weirdo contributor responding to my bug report as if I'm filing a support request and who then tries to "help" me by explaining how I can work around it (I have no problems working around it—in fact, by the time you're hearing from me, that's old news. But this is a bugtracker! For, you know, tracking bugs!), or the peanut gallery using the bugtracker like it's a phpBB forum dedicated to general chatter and expressions of gratitude related to the project (instead of, you know, tracking bugs!).

The worst is when somebody is showing off a project, I take a look, find something like a simple typo, and let the person know, and then they ask me to file a PR. First, I'm probably not even interested in your project even as a leeching user. Secondly, if you can't be bothered to do anything about this thing in your own project that you already understand that that you probably already have opened in your IDE right now, do you really expect me to clone the repo, poke around until I understand the busted directory structure you're using to organize the code, locate the appropriate source file, commit it, and then use GitHub's needlessly convoluted pull request workflow that involves pushing those changes to a third fork and asking you to review them? Do you understand that all this is happening on top of the assumption that I even have a GitHub account in the first place? Why don't you just Alt-Tab over there and help yourself instead of offloading work onto some random stranger who has no vested interest in your project but who decided to spend a little effort typing out a message that would be of interest to the person currently pimping out their project?

... and then every time I mention this, someone comes around, totally misses the point, and leaves an obnoxious comment that "You don't have to clone the repo! You can make minor fixes like that from the GitHub web UI!"

It's like nobody knows how to distinguish between busy work vs things that are actually necessary to the process and/or indicators of real, forward motion.

user:	tw20190412hbqcg
created:	April 12, 2019
karma:	5