ThomassRichards Authors Adam Wathan
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This is my favorite HN thread in a long time, so (positively) surprised at the support in the comments:
https://t.co/nx8ZfDB5Bc
Maintaining open-source is brutal, and feeling obligated to acknowledge, review, and respond to every attempt to contribute is a huge burden to carry.
When I saw this tweet from @dhh the other day I couldn't help but s/email/open source contribution/, but it makes me feel horribly guilty to suggest that anyone should feel anything but grateful for unsolicited free work from
But the reality is even though folks are generally trying to help by contributing, those contributions still cost the maintainer more than they cost the contributor, in terms of time to review, stress worrying about making time to review, and long term maintenance.
And unlike email where as long as you can convince yourself it's totally fair to not respond to unsolicited email it's okay, on GitHub there's a public counter signaling to the rest of the world that you are a poor steward of your project if you can't keep the number low.
And also unlike email, the only way to ignore something while also dismissing it from your "inbox" is to take an explicit action (closing the issue/PR) that sends a notification to the person, highlighting how rude you are if you don't craft a thoughtful reason for closing.
https://t.co/nx8ZfDB5Bc
Maintaining open-source is brutal, and feeling obligated to acknowledge, review, and respond to every attempt to contribute is a huge burden to carry.
When I saw this tweet from @dhh the other day I couldn't help but s/email/open source contribution/, but it makes me feel horribly guilty to suggest that anyone should feel anything but grateful for unsolicited free work from
You are not obligated to spend even a moment of your precious time on this planet dealing with emails you did not ask for, do not want, and aren't interested in responding to. The unsolicited email is an assault on our natural proclivity to reciprocity.
— DHH (@dhh) January 25, 2021
But the reality is even though folks are generally trying to help by contributing, those contributions still cost the maintainer more than they cost the contributor, in terms of time to review, stress worrying about making time to review, and long term maintenance.
And unlike email where as long as you can convince yourself it's totally fair to not respond to unsolicited email it's okay, on GitHub there's a public counter signaling to the rest of the world that you are a poor steward of your project if you can't keep the number low.
And also unlike email, the only way to ignore something while also dismissing it from your "inbox" is to take an explicit action (closing the issue/PR) that sends a notification to the person, highlighting how rude you are if you don't craft a thoughtful reason for closing.