Tell someone their free thing was useful
People maintaining open resources get bug reports and complaints. They almost never hear that it worked.
The BeingKind editorsPublished How this is written
Why it lands
Anyone maintaining something free — a library, a guide, a dataset — experiences their audience entirely through problems, because satisfied users are silent by definition. The result is a distorted picture in which the work seems to generate only complaints, which is how maintainers talk themselves out of continuing. A message saying it worked is rare enough to be kept.
How
Say what you used it for specifically: “I used your script to process a year of records for a small charity, and it saved about a week.” No feature request in the same message — that converts thanks into a ticket.
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