[prododev]

This is every successful product, small, medium, large. I've never ever worked on a big corporate or small personal project and not experienced this.

The secret is to have a healthy system for taking in those requests, queueing them by priority, and saying, "you are 117 in the queue, you can make it faster by contributing or by explaining why its higher priority".

You can't let feature requests get to you, the moment you do your users become your opponent. None of those requests are entitled, the author has clearly already reached a point where they are antagonistic towards requests.

[duxup]

I always tell this story about working with sales at a job where I worked in tech support. Sales would call me up and ask why I hadn't talked to their client about their very important ticket.

I would tell them:

"I have 5 P1 tickets, 8 P2 tickets, and dozens of P3 tickets. Your ticket is a P3 ticket."

They would ask that I change it to a P1. I would. Then they would call me an hour later asking me about the ticket and I would tell them:

"I have 6 P1 tickets."

That's when they'd understand ;)

[pmontra]

That's when they understand that they have to start fighting their peers and talking with the big boss to get their P1 ticket moved in front of the other P1 tickets.

[duxup]

Yup, but it gets them out of my hair, and they understand the support guy isn't in a position to wave a magic wand for them. If sales guy wins his fight with the folks in charge and I get time / resources to work on his thing, fine with me.

Otherwise he knows he's 6th in line.

[thombat]

At Symbian defects were classified from P1-P4, with the inevitable shit-fights about adding magic runes to the title so everyone knows that your P1 is more important than theirs.

The day came when, after prolonged hand wringing and with stern observations about great power and great responsibility, the priority could be set to P0. But like any bunch of junkies we came off this new high all too quickly and the P-1 classification arrived, the showstopper of showstoppers.

In hindsight what I most regret is that we stuck with an integer field; we were denied the expressive power of fractionally critical issues.

[anyfoo]

So? If they succeed (big if), then that ticket is your new priority. Maybe even for good reason, maybe not. But usually you don’t care that much which one you work on first, do you?

[karaterobot]

Good for them for at least understanding at that point. The typical response is to say "I get that, I really do—can you move this one to the front of the line for me?" and then maybe a vague threat like "I can talk to your manager if it would help".

[duxup]

I always invited them to talk to my manager if they wished. "If you can get my manager to tell me to do the thing, I'll happily do it."

I got along great with the sales guys. They could understand that kind of thing.

[hobs]

That is because they know they have the most influence and can get to #1 most of the time :)

[CRConrad]

> they have the most influence and can get to #1 most of the time

Not when all the other P1 tickets are from other sales guys.

But at least now they're all fighting with each other, via your manager, so they're out of your hair.

[sph]

In my experience, when it's other people deciding the priority of your tasks (usually your boss), the distribution is 150 P1 tickets, 3 P2 tickets and 1 P3.

This is when the underrated skill of saying NO pays off massive dividends. One long-term client once told me the thing he appreciated the most, compared to most other consultants, was that I wasn't afraid of pushing back on his requests and saying no (within reason). Probably the most valuable feedback I have ever received.

[deaddodo]

When I worked support, they didn't even have a priority system (it was C2B, so there weren't necessarily enterprise customers. That did come later, with LiveChat and all it's joys). Instead, we had a 24hr expected turnaround and harder tickets would naturally filter to the top. Tickets that had reached near that point had a higher weight, which went towards your metrics/"leaderboard status". To dissuade gaming of the system, ongoing replies were assigned to an agent (you wouldn't give a half-assed reply and then hope for someone else to clean it up) and were exempted from the bonuses (so were one standard ["fresh"] ticket each).

Obviously, there was some oversight from managers, but overall it worked pretty well.

[anonzzzies]

Yes, this is pretty normal; in paid products I even find it's less aggressive than in free things. But I have a hard and frozen shell around my vital organs to just politely and friendly point to the place in queue and where to donate to speed it up. For $10k I will build your cpu temp proc, if that's not an option then it's in pos #17463 of my task list.

[earnesti]

Yes. I was developing some open source stuff before venturing to for-profit closed Source Software, and I was surprised that the paying customers were on average much nicer than those who got their stuff for free!

Great idea about the priority queue.

[iamacyborg]

When you pay for something, you’ve already demonstrated that you value whatever it is (a product, a service, etc). Free stuff tends to attract people who don’t value the thing.

[jorvi]

Or the more darwinistic view: anything you pay access for, you can get gated off from.

Its quite difficult to ban someone from a public park, especially when they can just put on a new hat.

Its really easy to ban someone from a private park. Even if they do put on a new hat, when they get belligerent again you just revoke the renewal of their access pass.

[throwway120385]

There's also a level of professionalism depending on the product. When I'm responsible for an MSP team I'm very polite to them and always try to get them good, detailed, high-quality information when I'm telling them about problems with their work product, because I want them to do good work quickly and that's the best way to do that.

[ryandrake]

Yea, I'm not sure it's open-source vs other software. It's public vs. professional insiders.

My company's bug tracker is mostly internally-filed bugs, but accepts bugs from the public. The difference in tone and attitude is night and day. The public-filed bugs can be wild, varying across: Rude, entitled, arrogant, demanding, incoherent, insulting, irrelevant, impatient... They are also the worst when it comes to actually including enough information to investigate. Frequently filed without logs, without reproduction steps, sometimes without even saying what the filer thinks is wrong. We get bugs with titles "It doesn't work" and with a text description that reads like a fever dream from someone very unwell.

We do have strong personalities among employees, but bug reports tend to be professionally and competently written, contain enough information to debug, and always, always leave out insults and personal attacks. The general public (at least many of the ones technical enough to file bug reports) does not seem to have the emotional regulation required to communicate professionally and respectfully.

[kelnos]

> Frequently filed without logs, without reproduction steps, sometimes without even saying what the filer thinks is wrong.

In projects where this is a problem, I've made an issue template that clearly requests all the stuff I think I'll need. There's a big note at the top of the template that says it's not optional and that if it isn't filled out fully, I'll close the issue without comment.

And then I do that, every time. Sometimes they fill it out and reopen, sometimes they don't. Either way, I don't end up wasting time trying to help people who don't respect my time.

[leidenfrost]

I tell my friends all the time: You want your product to be accessible? Sell cheap, but not too cheap.

Fair deals attract people with some money, but the almost-free only attract people who are forever broke, who live their life feeling entitled to everything being handed over to them.

[fargle]

> were on average much nicer than those who got their stuff for free!

this is always true with, at least a great many, people. it's related to choosey-beggar syndrome. it's a bug/glitch/feature in human psychology.

if you ever have the chance to be a property manager, never ever let someone move in a week early or pay a week later for free. never let your rent get drastically below market. when people aren't paying for something, it's incredibly common behavior to stop respecting it. it's like a switch flips and suddenly they are doing you the favor.

that's why in times past, offering or taking "charity" was considered impolite. but making a small excuse might be ok. say someone needs to stay an extra week after their lease was over, but was strapped for cash. instead of saying "sure you can stay one more week", say "well, you'd really be doing me a small favor staying in the place to watch for the extra week since it's empty anyway. how about i discount the rent by 50% for that week and amend the lease to take care of it."

[throw16180339]

My experience was that raising my consulting prices lead to better customers.

[lasereyes136]

I agree that this is needed. It doesn't stop the person requesting the feature from asking for a meeting to explain why and just whining that they need it the whole time and saying they shouldn't have pay anything to get it addressed right now.

Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly and I never had more than 1 meeting a quarter with really toxic people and they were at least paying for the product and maintenance so hearing them out was part of the job. It unfortunate to get to the point where you view customer requests as antagonistic, but I can see how it happens. Some people really feel entitled, and some have a job to do and limited resources or control to do it in.

[drivers99]

> Having in the person taking these meetings for a software vendor, it can get really toxic quickly [...] hearing them out was part of the job

Does it have to be a meeting? Although it's about sales calls, I'm reminded of https://keygen.sh/blog/no-calls/ (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725385 )

[lasereyes136]

No, it doesn't have to be a meeting. It can be any method communication.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Yep. I've been working on Ardour for 25 years now, and it took me 7-10 years to develop the right kind of skin for dealing with "user feedback". For me, the right kind of skin was basically to shed such stuff like water off a duck's back. Whether someone is saying "I've been using Logic for 10 years and this is so much easier and intuitive" or "You should be ashamed for asking anyone to pay for this steaming pile of shit" (both real quotes), I had to be able to shrug and carry on with whatever my development priorities were anyway.

That said, I sympathize very much with Marcan on this project: getting the basic infrastructure for Linux operational on new hardware inflames passions much more than a niche project like a DAW.

[diggan]

Thank you for Ardour btw, great piece of software although I still use Ableton from time to time, Ardour is taking over more and more parts for me :)

I've read your comments here (and elsewhere) for a long time, and I'm sure you'd have some great ideas or at least opinions about this, which is pretty relevant to what you just wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037537

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I think my experience actually making a living from a FLOSS project changes things enough that it is not that relevant to people doing it "for the love it" or as a side-project.

It's much easier to shrug off strong comments when the people who do support you are making it possible for you (and one other) to lead a pretty comfortable middle class life.

[paines]

God how I hate these arguments. You have this especially with Gimp. "But my beloved multibillion company worth product can do X sooo much better and easier. Also it has 16bit bla bla bla." You don't say?!?!?!? Any tips how to get a thicker skin, or it grows on you over the years ? Also, thanks for Ardour. I am a hobby cellist and record sometimes myself using Ardour and to cut down samples for an app I am working on. I tried doing that with my iPhone which worked like crap. Yup!

[timewizard]

Open source is about liberating computing not about liberating users.

If you're supporting end users you need to be collecting money from them.

The mechanics of this system are entirely upside down. The corporations have bought into open source to regain control of computing and passionate developers are mired in the swamp of dumb user requests.

Something went very wrong here.

[manquer]

> you can make it faster

Simplest ( works in enterprise too) is to say pay for it to be faster or even considered.