Tell someone their free thing was useful
People maintaining open resources get bug reports and complaints. They almost never hear that it worked.
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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.
Answer if you want. It changes which ideas are shown first.
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