[travisgriggs]

Is this kind of burnout perhaps in part due to the level of mechanization provided by the defacto platform for open source projects now: GitHub?

It seems like it’s more frequent, but maybe that’s just me.

It’s great that GitHub exists and lowers the barrier for anyone to develop and share open source efforts. But you also become a slave to its various very well automated processes. As a creative altruistic agent, that can actually take a lot of the fun out of it. And make one feel trapped by the process machine.

It seems in old days, when things were less standardized, maintainers had more creative control over not only the code, but the process/community around it.

I’m not advocating for a demise of GitHub. Just kind of wondering if this is the price we pay.

[TAForObvReasons]

Cultural norms around Slack / Discord (compared to the IRC of old) are also to blame. With email, people understand that there is a reply and that process takes time. Discord and Slack encourage people to keep the apps running, continually sapping time and energy.

The best thing a project can do to address burnout is to eliminate any sort of messaging option. Keep all discussions to the issue tracker and email.

[outsomnia]

Yes, many issues are simply users deciding that it is quicker to abuse maintainer time to get and answer than find out themselves, github does facilitate that.

What causes the most teeth grinding is when it is questions about their proprietary code. I don't care if their garbage never works! It's not going to help me or anyone else either way.