[burningChrome]

Years ago, I built what I thought was a pretty basic static site generator using HapiJS. I was using it for personal projects and after some convincing by friends, put it up on Github. My friends went on Reddit and posted it and then told me about it afterwards.

It initially got some decent traction and then all of a sudden, all the pull requests came, all the feature requests and then all the bug reports.

I kept telling people this was a side project, if they want to fork it go ahead, but this is not something I'm going to spend a ton of time on. Then all the hate started about how I put something out into the OSS community with no desire to support it. I was bad person, my code was shit and I should stop being a developer.

That was my first and last OSS project.

I applaud and respect the people who are committed to getting OSS out there, but for me, it was a horrible experience.

[calenti]

Bitching is free and easier than making pull requests. And I bet it was 1 or 2 choads plus a variable pack of minions, not everyone. And Megacorp X can file all the bug reports they want, their lack of investment is not my urgency.

[necovek]

In general, there is a difference of ethos and culture between Free Software and Open Source movements. GitHub is the latter: strewn with expectations from low-effort requests.

With free software, many projects have their own code hosting with separate accounts, sometimes even separate bug trackers with another set of accounts (think Bugzilla + GitLab). Any submission is by definition bigger effort, and thus the culture is significantly different.

As an example, just try submitting a patch to GNU libc (if it hasn't switched to GitHub in the intervening years, though I'd be surprised as it's a GNU project, but it's also largely supported by Red Hat), and see where you get to. Or join the GNOME community and submit a fix. Or FreeDesktop. Or KDE. Or...

[cjblomqvist]

Far from all OSS projects are like this. Eg. https://www.viblo.se/talks/

[hypfer]

Been there, done that, built walls.

If you allow me to go on a meandering tangent/exploration:

___

I mean if you think about it, this outcome is more or less inevitable, given the environment we've created.

The foundational building block being that people will always optimize for their own benefit and personal gain. They fundamentally have to, because no one else will. So that gives us a natural source of conflict, because not everyone is a builder (or at least not everyone believes that they would), meaning that they need to get someone else to do what they want to get done.

You as a builder of course operate no different to that. You also want to optimize for your own personal gain. Where it is different though is that you do not rely that much on external resources to do that, given that you can create by your own.

So these are our building blocks.

To have a functioning societal system, we do want and need to allow people that don't to receive a decent-ish slice of the output of those that create for various reasons.

Something something shared humanity, but also the fact that a society built out of autonomous builders quickly collapses. Plus multi-dimensionality, meaning that person A might be a builder in discipline X, but needs others to sustain themself in discipline Y. Society and all. Shared workload.

The mechanism that regulates the flow of resources between these agents is friction.

For example, social shaming for not sharing the fair part of what you're earning is friction. That is a constant eroding force and cost that is supposed to shift your internal mental calculus to make contributing to society the most sensible outcome.

Equally so, the act of being protective of your time, demanding respect, boundaries and fair compensation is friction that is supposed to shift someone else's mental calculus to make fair treatment of you the most sensible outcome.

____

Okay, many words, but what the fuck am I on about?

Here's where this self-regulating system implodes:

In the last two decades or so, we have absolutely supercharged the mechanism of shaming and public pressure (rel: Twitter).

Simultaneously though, we've also _vastly_ nerfed any forms of friction a builder might employ. (rel: GitHub as the default, being "nice and professional" as the default, etc.)

And that is what simply is not working. But we're not talking about that properly, because any platforms we currently have for talking about stuff are absolutely and utterly dominated by those that do not create; meaning that they get to dictate the rules.

In a very unsustainable way of course (see also collapse of democracy in general) but that is still the reality we find us in.

___

And that is _I think_ also where we can find solutions to these problems. Don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing to return to linus and tell people that they should be retroactively aborted for having made a mistake. There were many very important advancements we made culturally to push out toxicity.

We will need to reintroduce friction though.

Likewise, we will need re-engineer our communication spaces to shift the balance of power back to a sustainable equilibrium. Which doesn't mean "cold uncaring meritocracy" (also, what even is merit?) but it will mean not handing out ever-larger megaphones based on who is already screaming the loudest.

___

Anyway, TL;DR:

It's the system, stupid. It is like this, because it can't be any else given the currently governing rules.

Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

[leekrasnow]

fantastic insight, thanks for sharing these thoughts!