[namuol]

Since when were bureaucratized quality standards part of Open Source?

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"GitHub optimized being lazy" -- translation: GitHub enabled more people to get involved with Open Source.

There are no-fewer quality-obsessed developers participating in the community as a result of GitHub. There are, however, a lot more people involved, and a lot more code being "churned". The suggestion that the community is suffering as a result is a dubious claim that you offer no real evidence for.

It sounds to me like you miss the "good old days" when the club was more exclusive.

[strumptrumpet]

> There are no-fewer quality-obsessed developers participating in the community as a result of GitHub.

There is natural attrition of participants in any project; what keeps (or kept) so-called "quality obsessed" developers in abundance were the social structures -- and social currency -- of the communities built around open source projects.

In exchange for stature, learning, and intangible satisfaction, contributors would learn project guidelines, interact with project members, learn to meet the required levels of quality, and over time be subsumed as committers and trusted members of the community. This approach sustained open source for roughly 20-25 years.

However, github's social network structure supplants the traditional communities, instead creating a wholly Github community in which the previous social construct (and social economy) can no longer truly thrive, and instead, the community and social focus is redirected and reinvested in Github itself.

The similarities to the reward mechanisms and value feedback mechanisms of social networks like Facebook are quite strong.

> It sounds to me like you miss the "good old days" when the club was more exclusive.

This seems to be a recurring theme; it sounds to me like justification for cognitive dissonance borne out of a situation where two choices exist:

1) Subscribe to the notion in which one would be a junior contributor in a broad pre-existing world of established engineers, or

2) Ignore the experienced engineers and create a community of self-evaluating peers, writing off the old model as "exclusive" rather than "experienced".

I expect the truth is found in-between those two poles, but reality has trended strongly towards number #2.

[namuol]

I never disagreed that the overall quality of the code has gone down; I meant to suggest that such an observation misses the point.

Open Source is now much more accessible, and I think that's a good thing.

It used to be that if you wanted to own a car, you needed to basically have the knowledge of a mechanic. Now any "idiot" can own and operate a car. Is that such a bad thing? Cars are for getting you from A to B, remember?

There is arguably more mediocre code out there in the public eye now, thanks to GitHub. Is this bad? I'm not sure. But don't tell me that GitHub has made it more difficult for you to make software of the same quality as the stuff from 20 years ago.

Furthermore, why do I need to "choose" one of the options you gave? I don't care if I'm "junior" or "senior".

TL;DR: I just want to get my work done like everybody else. It's a matter of practicality; not honor.