Ask HN: How to warn developers not to use certain libraries?

2 points by ponyous ↗ HN
There are several libraries that I know that are complete garbage and claim otherwise in README - from performance "lies", being completely broken to APIs that change completely every X months. My experience was horrible and I would like to save some time for others if I can, because rewrite hurts way too much.

I was considering opening the issues on these repos but some of them auto close them after a week of inactivity (that's part of the issue, you come to the repo see 20 open issues and 1000 closed you think it's good, but 80% of them were closed because maintainer did not reply). Couple of years ago I was so frustrated by one of the libs I wanted to open a PR and just change the README completely to represent the real state of it... I couldn't be bothered at the end, because I know it wouldn't be accepted - it doesn't sell so well.

We need something like libexp.com where people describe their experience with certain libraries. Is there something like that?

Examples:

- Silly performance comparisons - comparing trivial rendering and claiming your lib is 1000% faster than everything else

- Being completely broken: if statement didn't work in one of the libs I used (not joking)

- Being completely broken: shows features as working, but it's so shallowly tested that if you don't exactly use their examples it is not gonna work

- APIs that change way too often because developers don't know what they want and then completely abandoning last versions which work fine but are not idiomatic to their thinking

All of these had 1000+ stars on GitHub. I'm sad for thousands of developer hours wasted on them.

2 comments

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Have a Github Rating App. Here is your next +$1b idea Microsoft is buying. Unless people fake recommendations too lol.
I guess it would be useful. Not sure if $1B+ range. I don't care if people fake it as long as there are some real experiences that do not get hidden.