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LCA: How to destroy your communityLCA: How to destroy your communityPosted Jan 18, 2010 15:50 UTC (Mon) by ikm (subscriber, #493)Parent article: LCA: How to destroy your community
> Free software communities are never satisfied; they are always trying to improve things
An experience with a project of mine sums it up a bit differently: while 0.1% of the community is trying to improve things a bit indeed, 99.9% of them just whine actively and state that someone else should (which implies me, of course). Their reasoning is that "this would only take a couple of hours", "this would make the project more competitive", "imagine how neat that would be" etc etc, which looks nothing more than an attempt to manipulate me. Sure, I can understand this -- it's just the easiest thing to do. But it just really makes me feel bad each time another newcomer starts this crap all over again, and no one actually wants to do anything harder than that.
The whole experience on that front is that releasing stuff as free software only burdens you. To that end, I think selling it is a better idea: people pay you for the trouble instead of just whining for "moar free stuff".
I guess it depends on a project, of course. And if you do this for fun, that sure doesn't matter -- how could it? I just don't share our fellow editor's sentiments about the unconditional communities' awesomenesses. It really depends.
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LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 18, 2010 20:59 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
those whiners you complain about are a combination of QA testers (finding bugs) and market research (suggesting new directions)
yes, you may only get 0.1% of people contributing, but if you have a good size community, that 0.1% can be more people than you have as employees. If you keep the community small, the number of contributers will also be small.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 18, 2010 21:09 UTC (Mon) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
Agreed. However, expanding the community that much would require a lot of publicity. That publicity could either be a result of money investment in an ad campaign, or due to an enormous general usefulness for everyone, so that the natural time to spread would be acceptable. The latter looks possible only for some of the projects, not for any. The former looks much more easy, but requires money.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 18, 2010 21:16 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I would argue that publicity itself doesn't help. the program needs to be useful to people, if it's useful word gets around. you do need some publicity, but it's not expensive campaigns.
the real cost of growing a community is dealing with the 'whiners' when the community is small, bringing the new contributers up to speed, working with them to change their patches into something that's acceptable for the project, taking the 'works but is not quite right' patches and assigning someone to clean them up, writing documentation, etc.
when the community is small, these things will distract your paid people, but they are needed to grow the community. it's a long-term investment, and it doesn't always pay off, but when it does it can pay off in a big way.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 18, 2010 21:32 UTC (Mon) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
I agree again, but would notice that even if program is useful to people indeed (even if highly and extremely useful!), it won't get popular instant by itself. This can take years. With the right publicity, though, it can gain a lot of users in no time. Publicity means a LOT -- look at all of our beloved spammers out there and ask why do they exist ;) Remember the story of Firefox. Look at how fast Google's Chrome is gaining weight (and yet crashes all the time on my machine when I try it!)
Of course, if the program is an outright crap, no amount of publicity would hold the user base :)
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 21, 2010 11:44 UTC (Thu) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link]
I'm not sure it's a good example. Publicity may be the reason why people
try out Google Chrome (or Chromium), but usability is why they keep using it. I may be extrapolating from one example here (myself), but despite all the numerous bugs I find Chromium more usable than Firefox.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 24, 2010 19:36 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Building a community anew is very hard but there are ways of speeding it up.
If you're part of a larger community, say the KDE community, you can and should call upon the help of others like the KDE promo team, the forum ppl, the translators and others.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 19, 2010 0:20 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
This has been my experience to a limited degree as well. I'll admit,
sometimes I've even been one of the freeloading whiners. I'm willing to bet most of us have, although we may not have thought of it as "whining" when we did it.
Far too many users expect that because you released a project, you are
As a user, I actually miss being able to buy boxed copies of Red Hat or the
That said, users need to learn how to work with developers, especially in
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 19, 2010 8:56 UTC (Tue) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link]
> I won't tell the developers that they have to fix my issue -- they don't, they don't owe me a damn thing
Well, my opinion is that you should accurately and neutrally report the issue. Within a project of mine, I like when people do just that. But attempts to demand something or manipulate developers while at it totally ruins it.
Being an active Qt developer, I filed about like 20 bug reports to the Qt tracker. The key to a successful fix was always to provide a meaningful description, a complete test case, and preferably, a patch or the hash of the offending commit. I invested my own time, but it always payed off. The crucial understanding here is that it was *my* problem, not really theirs.
Returning to end user software, lack of any real support sucks. No possibility to pay for it sucks too. Though I'm not sure much people is actually willing to pay. I kinda like the feel of commercial-quality software and approach. Unfortunately, for all but the largest, corporate-backed software, this means closing the sources down.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 22, 2010 3:24 UTC (Fri) by ccurtis (guest, #49713) [Link]
> [...] corrupted every 60 minutes or so on the Open Source r600 graphics drivers [...] because of a silly bug, was forced to purchase Win7 [...] reacting to Linux as a whole when running into frequent corruption on common graphics hardware. It _is_ hurting the project.
I'm confused. I can appreciate some of the sentiment, but why are you insisting on using the open source drivers instead of the closed binary ones like you'd get on Windows, or spending the money on hardware that explicitly does support Linux rather than giving it to Microsoft? (ATI/AMD's support is a "work in progress" AIUI.)
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 23, 2010 8:31 UTC (Sat) by sfink (subscriber, #6405) [Link]
I absolutely do consider filing detailed bug reports to be contributing. So much so that I have
it on my resume, under the section labeled "open source involvement". Nobody has ever commented on it (and yes, I have gotten job offers, so this isn't a completely irrelevant anecdote. Just mostly.)
But if that's not contributing, what is? It's often more useful than a patch, because most
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 19, 2010 10:03 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
Developers like to say that complainers that do send fixes are complete overhead. Do remember however that the same level of testing and QA is very expensive to attain in a non-FLOSS context (and QA is necessary for good software).
Though developers like to complain of testers even when they are paid by their company.
LCA: How to destroy your community Posted Jan 19, 2010 17:49 UTC (Tue) by aliguori (subscriber, #30636) [Link]
One of the costs of being open is that you are subject to trolling. I think it's important to realize that while trolls are very vocal, they do not represent the entire user community.
A user that asks for a specific feature, and is understanding and supportive when it's politely explained that the feature is difficult to implement or lower priority compared to other things is absolutely a positive contributor. A suggestion of a feature is a useful thing even with nothing else and even if you've heard it a dozen times before.
On the other hand, trolls tend to repeatedly complain about the lack of a feature even after being the reasoning is explained. Trolls like to begin sentences with "If you really want to defeat Microsoft...". They do stupid things like reopen bug reports 100 times after it's politely explained that the issue is not in fact a bug.
To survive in an open environment, you have to be able to filter trolls. There's nothing wrong with adding filtering rules to your mail clients to send any mail from an individual that behaves like this to /dev/null. It's the only way to maintain sanity IMHO.
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