I don't know what I hate more, the +1's or the excessive use of meme pictures in github issue threads

I really think that GitHub needs better tools to deal with this, this is very frustrating - the only options right now are deleting a ton of comments or locking it preventing all discussion. Prompting people with a modal informing them what comments are inappropriate would go a long way.

In the past you would create a few mailing lists; I think sourceforge automatically did that for you too.

They should have locked the thread or use a wiki page for this. A wiki page is less likely to be edited to add this kind of comment or at least it would be easier to clean up with a bot.

Team internally we introduce `+1 by XYZ` labels exactly for this reason

It's surprising that Github doesnt provide "approval" as a native feature

I appreciate that the voting keeps the conversation from devolving into a competition for laughs. But, sometimes it seems that HN has no sense of humor whatsoever.

Looks like people don't get it. Or maybe they have a different view on what's funny. In any case, commenting about downvotes just attracts more downvotes.

Just to clarify: Downvotes are made by other users who have hit a certain karma treshold. No moderators involved.

Comment voting ala hackernews / reddit would be useful but in this case so would some attached polls. The +1, -1 was from "back in the day" when it was a useful way for the active contributors to actually vote on something (or straw-poll it) in a mailing list etc.

It's annoying in some cases now because 1) it's anyone, not just the active contributors or even users, 2) people don't use it as a vote but as a general expression of support, 3) -1 isn't really used anymore so you can't scan them and see what the sentiment is, and 4) in this case, it's not even clear what they are lending support to- the merge, or that it is time to discuss a merge seriously.

So yeah, in this case it's noise but in some contexts +1/-1 is a quick and simple way to govern code and it has historical roots. Just ranting as I think they and some in this thread are a little too quick to judge. +1/-1 from the right people could be considered very relevant information to a discussion (esp. within a focused community).

I'm using https://www.zenhub.io/, it adds a voting mechanism on github.

I don't get why people don't just subscribe to the issue instead of +1. Google's issue trackers have the same issue: they support starring but people insist on doing "me too" posts.

> I don't get why people don't just subscribe to the issue instead of +1

Because subscribing does not show interest/support: the repository owner does not see how many people have subscribed to the issue. Furthermore, supporting the resolution of an issue does not mean you want to be spammed with updates to said issue.

> Google's issue trackers have the same issue: they support starring but people insist on doing "me too" posts.

Google's issue tracker has the same issue to a lower extent: while everybody can see the number of stars on an issue (which is good), starring an issue requires following it and being spammed by it (which is bad).

Then again, people are by and large idiots, even on e.g. youtrack (which has non-subscripting voting) +1 comments abound: http://blog.jetbrains.com/youtrack/2013/01/making-1-mean-wha...

Only way I see to mitigate that is assuming the tracker has orthogonal subscription and voting ruthless moderation and removal of worthless "+1" comments.

> Furthermore, supporting the resolution of an issue does not mean you want to be spammed with updates to said issue.

Commenting on the issue automatically subscribes you to it. You have to manually unsubscribe if you don’t want to be spammed.

Of course, but the point is you can have commented ("voted") and not subscribed (/unsubscribed) from the issue. Although commenting subcribes by default (which does make sense) they are orthogonal.

Subscribing to this issues will spam your inbox. 42 updates just in the last 2h.

Apparently it's possible to work around a lot of this as shown in here https://github.com/jashkenas/underscore/issues/2184 although that excludes meaningful contributions from non-contributors.

It originally did have a voting mechanism.

From random people, it's not usefull for sure. But, I think doing +1 or thumb up when you are contributing somehow to the actual project is actually valuable to gauge support.

It's actually awful. Often times everyone pretty much agrees a change is needed. It needs a bit of work which needs to be discussed.

The +1s are so irritating because you have to read through a huge conversation and you also keep getting email notifications because you want to keep in touch with a thread. It actually makes it harder to do what the github topic is about with the +1s.

I think everyone agrees gauging support is valuable. The issue is that the mechanism should be an up/down voting feature like HN has, not a post in a thread meant for conversations.