Comment by Sohcahtoa82 7 days ago
> you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.
That's entirely the wrong take, IMO.
Listening to users is easy, but the users often don't say anything when they speak. Those non-reports are basically spam that should be automatically thrown away.
I have a tiny bit of sympathy for this, I have received a bug report that said “Your software doesn’t work”.
I’d always reply though, usually with something equally terse.
No this is a valid request.
If a user wants to use a piece of software to do A and several different pieces of code do that - why should they choose yours.
What is your selling point.
Especially if they have been using the other product why should they switch to yours?
If I'm writing FOSS and someone asked me that, I'd just reply with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not making money from it, so trying to convince some random individual to use it is a waste of my time. Sure, I'll describe the features in the README and possibly include comparisons to other software, but I won't go out of my way to convince a specific rando just because they asked.
When a mozilla application crashed it'll ask you to leave a comment to try and help resolve the issue when it prompts to send crash info, and you used to be able to see all those comments on https://crash-stats.mozilla.org (it seems to be behind login or restricted access now). There was a lot of vitriol and unhelpful comments that any developer would need to wade through to get to anything to give them a lead