Martin SeegerDec 8

Dear OSS community on Mastodon,

Every day I scroll through my feed and I see proud announcements like:

“First Alpha Relase of HyperTurboWidget available"

or

“Version 2.7.1 now with improved glorb handlers!”

or

“Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is out”

… and I sit there wondering if I should be excited, terrified, or calling a licensed electrician.

Don’t get me wrong, I love open source. I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. Are we talking about a web server? A file system? A middleware thingy that keeps the flux from overflowing into the space–time continuum?

So, dear OSS developers of the world: When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context.

  • Tell us what your software does.
  • Tell us why this release is cool.
  • Tell us what it requires to work.

Example:

We are proud to announce Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is now avalaible. While it creates a nice wormhole to 1955, it requires an underlying gigawatt stack 1.21 to work reliably.

Because nobody wants to cheer enthusiastically for “v2.7.1” while secretly Googling “what is a glorb and why does it need handling”.

Yours truly,

Someone who wants to celebrate your achievements

Show threadMax Resing

@masek - I see the advantage of an introduction of the software of each introduction. But isn't that hugely redundant? Often, one can click on the release notes, and ends on the homepage/git repository within 1 click. Which I think is the better trade off. People familiar with a project appreciate the concise update.

Personally, I favor a compact update too, instead of a repetitive, long version that explains the basics each time a version update is announced.

Dec 8 at 11:49amWeb
Show threadMartin SeegerDec 8
@resingm Have you read Github ReadMes lately? Those are even harder to decipher…
Show threadLeelooDec 9

@resingm @masek
The post should have three words telling what it does, to get people to look at the profile.

The profile should have enough of a resume to get people interested, so they will look at the store/homepage/github page. And the store description as well as the homepage should have the full description. The github page should either have a prominent link to the homepage, or the full description as well.

Often, neither of them do.

When news headlines do this, I call it skip bait. The headline is there to get me interested in reading the article, if it doesn't tell me enough to get me interested, I'm going to skip.