GitHub discussions: Your thoughts?

I was waiting for this feature for awhile now, because then projects like gitalk (a comments component for static websites) could use discussions instead of issues to store comments.

It will be interesting to see if it does turn into a spam/noise problem, but I do see some value as a non-contributor.

Very often, you will see people coming up with some great ideas and discussions form with other people providing positive or negative feedback. Then the repo/feature owner shuts it down because it should be broken into twenty different user stories or because it is not a feature they think belongs in the product, or because the conversation was stale for 5 days.

Sometimes it is very healthy to have a place where communities can work things out together. Then, after that is done, maybe it goes into the roadmap.

I’m guessing there will be some owners that will not actively monitor discussions, others where people that are well versed in the solution that can help the community, and all other things in between.

I do notice a lot of tech support style “how do I do this” issues getting logged and a whole bunch of people help ala Stack Overflow. Very often, once the developer sees it is a, what I will call, user issue, the whole thing gets shut down and the poor user never gets the final answer.

I guess what I’m saying here is I like the community aspect and hope it has a positive result.

I believe that it's a step in the right direction if it gets accepted by the community.

Having a less "formal" (for lack of a better word) manner directly in the repo itself will, I believe, make it easier to get into communities and contribute.

It will be interesting to see whether it can, UX-wise, hold up with its "outside competitors" (Discourse, Discord, Slack, ...), as I believe that for discussion spaces, people always tend to go to the easiest, not the most direct, solution (because something as essential as communication "shouldn't feel clumsy").

If communities accept it, I'm really looking forward to this feature. I believe that it'll help with general discussions around projects that are inclusive also to those who are not core members of a community. It also enables a sort of community support system around projects, as, to me, opening an issue always feels like pinging the maintainer, making me more hesitant to ask questions. With Discussions, I can see myself simply asking a quick question much easier, even if I'm not an expert of a project.

All in all, I have enabled it for my repos where it is relevant and am looking forward to seeing how it works out (for now, at least, I'm optimistic)

I think it's needed because some time we need to discuss in friendly or informal way so people can discuss about the project here rather than looking for contact details of maintainer to ask something or to tell.

I'm kind of neutral. I'm excited about it and can see the benefits but there are also some downsides as well. Mainly for maintainers. Wrote a post awhile back sharing my thoughts.

My thoughts on GitHub Discussions

Dzhavat Ushev ・ Apr 4 ・ 5 min read

#github #opensource

There have been some open source projects which have had the Discussions enabled for some time now but I haven't participated in any of them yet. I haven't heard from the maintainers complaining either so time will show. I hope it's a step in the right direction.

Discussions where the main reason I created an organization.
I can confirm per repo discussions are a nice tool, I just got one started!
🍾