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I saw this happening in sort of slow-mo, but didn't know who to tell or what to do, so here you go. Around 2017-18 I was pretty involved in the bootcamp/learning programming community, and I noticed my fellow teachers recommending students to "do not ask question on StackOverflow, if you have an issue it' better to ask in Github to the library author, people are more polite and you get better answers". As an Open Source dev myself, this left a slightly bad taste, but couldn't exactly disagree since SO culture IS brutal (specially in the tight timeframe). I did explain when I could that the best is actually to learn to ask the right question, and that often this is part of the debug experience for yourself, but I was but a little pebble against the stream. This had probably gone for a while, and it was then also when we saw a lot of talk about burnout in open source devs. At some point it seemed there was someone burning out every other week! Everyone can put 2 and 2 together to see what was happening; low-quality questions were not being asked in StackOverflow anymore and now they were dumped to random OSS devs who didn't sign for it and were forced to move from a collaborative environment that was Github back then to a more customer-facing environment it became. The "interesting" part is what happened as a consequence. Today if you do Open Source, become semi-famous and want to continue, it's pretty clear that you have to have a thick skin and do a combination of: just shut down ALL issues/support in popular repos[1], or get used to tell people NO quick and easily, or take regular breaks, or I guess be part of a big company being paid to deal with issues as part of your job. |