[nicklecompte]

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.

[Brian_K_White]

Craven is definitely one of the words I'm groping for to express just what is wrong with this.

I really don't understand the "seems fair" comments.

I (stupidly I see now) treat the stars as feature just for me, like a bookmark in my own browser. There for my use, not anyone else's.

Obviously that was silly since they are public and anything that is public is someone somewhere's currency, and anything that is currency will expose the lowest of the low human behavior.

And this IS automated. The automation is in the form of a policy rather than a scripting language, but it's still a mechanistic rule where a star is produced by application of an if-this-then-that, and by a transaction, purchased exactly like with money. By at least those TWO different means this is not an honest reflection of a users regard or admiration or expression of value.

Github surely would see that as devaluing stars and harming a feature of their site. Surely github does not want stars to become like amazon reviews.

[zokier]

Are you arguing that people should not be authoritarian on their own personal projects? To me this signals having healthy relationship with the project and knowing how to set boundaries (small as they may be) to avoid maintainer burnout.

[nicklecompte]

My point is that if you're an organization looking to use a tool like dae, the maintainers' behavior here is a huge red flag. Of course open-source projects can do basically whatever they want. But dae is really not a "personal project," its clearly designed for use by the broader community and the maintainer clearly wants lots of people to use it. If I am considering using any open-source software, I would want to understand the devs' decision-making behind denying good feature requests:

1) The best possible reason is work-life balance, "hey I'm not getting paid for this," etc etc. I am not demanding that dae's maintainers accept the change simply because it's a good idea.

2) An unpleasant but probably acceptable reason is obstinance, stubbornness, etc. Maybe you're wrong, the feature is a bad idea. But even if you're right, sometimes you have to accept the aesthetic/ideological quirks of the devs.

3) The worst possible reason for denying a feature request is pettiness or narcissism, which is exactly what dae is doing. Perhaps the user had legitimate reasons for not starring the repo (GitHub "learns from" your stars and will suggest related repos in discovery, which can be annoying). But the idea of labelling CI tests as a "wontfix" until you get a stupid GitHub star is just horrendous open-source management.

[tomalbrc]

understood