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October 24 - October 27, 2021
However, in speaking to maintainers privately, I learned that these initiatives frequently cause them to seize with anxiety, because such initiatives often attract low-quality contributions.
I started to see the problem is not that there’s a dearth of people who want to contribute to an open source project, but rather that there are too many contributors—or they’re the wrong kind of contributors. Open source code is public, but it doesn’t have to be participatory: maintainers can buckle under excess demand for their attention.
This distribution—where one or a few developers do most of the work, followed by a long tail of casual contributors, and many more passive users—is now the norm, not the exception, in open source.
No metrics are perfect, however. Data can give us insights, but we still need to write the story.
Economist David Friedman tells a joke that goes like this: Two economists walked past a Porsche showroom. One of them pointed at a shiny car in the window and said, “I want that.” “Obviously not,” the other replied.
Even documentation is arguably a form of automation, anticipating answers to common questions and making them publicly available.