[HN Gopher] Making is show business now (2020) ___________________________________________________________________ Making is show business now (2020) Author : hgarg Score : 159 points Date : 2021-01-25 12:14 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (alexdanco.com) (TXT) w3m dump (alexdanco.com) | danschumann wrote: | I up voted based on the converse application to the headline, | wherein a programmer makes his program more fun by adding ah | fictional character to do his logging statements like a story. | sgillen wrote: | This is pretty discouraging honestly, from the perspective of | what the article calls a "fan". I like to make small | contributions to projects I use when I can, but I don't become a | core dev on any of them. | | Is it really not worth the maintainers time to merge a bug fix or | look at an issue I opened? Are they just doing it as "fan | service"? | | Genuinely, does this type of "participation" really waste more | time than it saves on the whole? | | That seems to be the implication of the article. I wonder if any | open source maintainers can chime in. | titanomachy wrote: | The article doesn't say large fan bases are useless, just that | managing them requires a different skill set (and possibly | personality type) than conventional team management or pure dev | work. | centimeter wrote: | This is one of my primary objections to the cultural shift of the | last 10 years towards trying to attract tons of random people, | especially special interest groups, into open source software | development. If they weren't naturally going to contribute anyway | in the previous environment, the expected value of their | contribution in the current environment is very low. Possibly | negative after considering the drain on the maintainer(s). | milesvp wrote: | I think the author is missing a key point in that software is | vastly more complex than it was in the 90's. The few times I've | tried to contribute to open source, I spent more time trying to | convince projects that my pull requests fixed the problem without | causing other issues. And this is largely because my fixes tend | to fix integration problems I had with the software. These | weren't small changes that could be unit tested, and setting up | test repro steps were non trivial. I don't blame maintainers for | being slow to accept these kinds of fixes, when the bugs are | likely to effect a small minority of users. 30 years ago you | could look at a patch and at least reason about it's efficacy, | now you have to have some idea about supporting ecosystems, and | not just libraries you're already using. | StillBored wrote: | So many of these projects are "mature" which means for many of | them there is a risk to accepting random pull requests. In the | past a growing project tended to take them without to much | worry under the assumption that if a patch broke something it | would get fixed. Now there is a fear of the effort required to | dig through the mountains of code to "support" someone who is | screaming about the code breaking. | jdxcode wrote: | I agree. In my experience maintaining, the work validating a PR | is substantially more than writing the initial code as well. | There is also a significant maintenance cost that falls on the | maintainer after the code has shipped. | | In other words, even if your contribution is perfect, it's | still probably putting more work on the maintainer than you did | yourself. | Jugurtha wrote: | > _If you go back to the 90s, when we first figured out how | communities built software, it took a lot of work to use the | internet. It wasn't fast or easy, but that made it special: it | meant that everyone on the internet cared about it, a lot. You | were really committed to being there. Online communities back | then were like a federation of villages; each one had its own | culture, its own customs, and its own values. The open source | community was like that too, and remained so for a long time._ | | > _In these kinds of environments, attracting more users really | did advance open source projects, because the costs were usually | worth it. When a new member joined a community, they were | probably serious about it. There weren't many "tourists" back | then, so there was a real environment of camaraderie. Existing | users were happy to onboard you and teach you things, because | their effort would likely pay off as a good investment._ | | > _Since community members joined slowly and stuck around, there | was a lot of trust and shared context in the group. Every | community had a different way of working, so there was a fair | amount of friction preventing users from jumping around or | "surfing" from project to project. Groups could preserve and | maintain their collective motivation to keep shipping; they | weren't getting paid, so that motivation was everything._ | | > _It sounds pretty idyllic, and for many users back then, it | was. As the internet grew more popular, the old timers reliably | complained every September as a new crop of college freshmen | gained access for the first time, not knowing any of the social | conventions. AOL opened the floodgates in 1993, which Usenet | bitterly declared "Eternal September", and the internet veterans | have been complaining about it since._ | | > _We know what happened next with online content. The tapestry | of forums and newsgroups that made up the early internet | flourished for a while, but in the 2000s an invasive species | arrived: the platforms. The platforms made it so easy to create, | share, distribute and discover that everyone joined them, | smushing everything together into common, user-friendly formats | without the local context or nuance of the smaller groups._ | | It seems to be an: Oh, let me tell you about the good ole' days | when the internet sucked so badly that it amplified natural | selection and all the twenty people on it could hack on the Linux | kernel and the output was amazing. Now that any peasant can get | on the information highway and participate, everything is ruined. | awkward wrote: | The story doesn't have to be about how the old days with the | old barriers to entry was the way. What it's definitely about | is the flaws and problems in the current way, where platforms | collect from continuous posting and participants collect from | long tail effects. | agumonkey wrote: | I can't help but to feel just like the author of this article. | | I'm vastly in favor of taxing and hurdles as natural filters. | Mainstream spoils everything (~almost). You end up having | people not really into things, endless debates about side | features, about how to organize the projects (inclusiveness, | code of conducts, tooling), scandals and less about the passion | of doing the thing. | | I'm often amazed at the difference in pacing and communication | on Mailing Lists. It's slower but denser. | deckard1 wrote: | Drama has always surrounded popular projects. | | Anyone remember that Andrew Tanenbaum/Linus Torvalds | flamewar? That was in 1992. This debate reverberated | throughout the entire 1990s. | | People didn't need Twitter to throw shade and cast doubts. | Usenet was a perfectly fine medium for this. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb. | .. | | Remember Slashdot and the "Slashdot Effect"? Slashdot was | pretty much a forum for FOSS. It was already mainstream. And | this is 1998 or so. The GNOME team caused _massive_ drama | when they started their campaign against Qt (and, thus, KDE) | on Slashdot. | | And on that point, GNOME was a reactionary project. It was | not started as a community of people coming together to | create _good_ software. It simply wasn 't. I was there | (mostly observing from the Gtk+/GIMP side at the horror | show). Gnumeric was slapped together in like one day. It was | pure 100% trash code. All that CORBA, ORBit, etc. stuff was | tossed together. GNOME was a movement that feared KDE would | beat them to the "Linux on the desktop", and their initial | versions were designed to play catch-up with KDE's feature | set. I can't overstate how shit early GNOME code was. And | then they took to Slashdot to bash the less-than-free Qt | because GNOME certainly wasn't winning on merit alone. | | The free software community has been a shitshow for as long | as such a thing has existed. Go back to the homebrew movement | and see how people reacted to Bill Gates selling proprietary | software. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists | Jugurtha wrote: | It's called nostalgia, and we pretty much all have that | condition. | | There are some fields or scenes where I recall how it used to | be magical, but I know my mind is playing with me. | | Many people think that it's too much, too many apps, too many | people, too much complexity. Yes. That may be the case and | this may not suit everyone, especially those who lived | through a pretty magical period with the birth of the world | wide Web, or BBS, or open source movement, or the free | software movement. Yes, god damn, that has got to make | someone nostalgic. However, all that is now is not 'just' | ruining it. The Beatles are what they are because of all the | people who've never been to their concerts who wish they had | been, amplified by people who were there who thought Paul | sucked at guitar at the time. People mostly are indifferent | to shifts in the now, and only cling to the now when it | becomes the good old days or when someone makes a documentary | about it and we feel we belong special for belonging to | something that is not anymore. | | This says much more about us, our desire to belong, to be | special, than it says about what reality is or was. We can | apply this to forums people thought sucked until they | disappear and the memories kick in. | agumonkey wrote: | it's too much, not enough, and too many issues around | | I like more balanced meals in a way | | And it's a bit objective too. IRC, Mailing lists did a lot | with few. Now you have to have discord/slack/zulip to .. do | the same ? consider the average website bloat. | | It's not pure nostalgia (I can realize my biases a bit) | Jugurtha wrote: | I'm not being dismissive and I'm not reducing the whole | piece. I still look for an IRC channel and a mailing list | for something by default when I want to join something. | | The Python IRC channel and mailing lists are top notch, | with lengthy debates and great advice. The excerpt sounds | like what an old geezer, in the soul, would say. I | recognize it because I sometimes catch myself thinking | like that. | StillBored wrote: | In the 1990's, the only people using the software tended to be | people capable of debugging the problems. Now due to maturity, | code complexity, and the simple fact that there are a lot of | "users" means that its a lot bigger deal if a random patch breaks | something. | | Its the result of the success of the project more than anything. | Now the maintainers have to start acting like real developers and | do the difficult/unsexy parts of maintaining something rather | than just hacking at the fun bits. | | It really points out that much of what people considered the | strengths of the opensource model were illusions that evaporated | when the ratio of users/developers got very large. That doesn't | mean its not a valid model, only that its a mistake to think a | project can both be successful and popular while simultaneously | expecting everything to be done by volunteers. | mywittyname wrote: | Even with tools like github, which are supposed to make | collaboration easier, it is still incredibly difficult to | contribute meaningfully to an open source project. | | I actually had a job where I had the privilege of modifying an | open source tool as part of my day-to-day job. Even there, I | found it very difficult to give back to the project because the | maintainers of the project weren't terribly interest in having or | maintaining the enterprise-y, cloud-y features that I was | implementing. | | It seems like most OSS projects have a single key contributor / | BDFL who decides the direction of the project. Outside of | financial incentives, it's hard to get groups of people moving in | the same direction. | TheHideout wrote: | This reminds me of a book I enjoyed, Show Your Work. | https://austinkleon.com/show-your-work/ | __jf__ wrote: | "Find your fellow knuckleballer" | | He also did a SXSW talk about it: | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m8v3jf8RVBk | [deleted] | fudged71 wrote: | I thought this was going to be about the Maker Movement and how | huge some of these channels have gotten on YouTube | jrochkind1 wrote: | > Something important changed between the 90s and today. If you | look at most open source projects now, the distribution of who's | doing the work versus who's simply there is skewed dramatically: | it's common to see projects where 95% of the work is done by a | nucleus of people, perhaps even a single developer, with a long | tail of "contributors" | | Any evidence this has actually changed between the 90s and now? | | I have a strong suspicion that it's always been this way. | | There are exceptional projects where the work is more distributed | (is Linux an example?), but my suspicion is that they were | exceptional in the 90s and still are, and that all along most | projects have this "dramatic skew" as described. | | For software of now, you can look at github. For software of the | 90s, 2000s... I wonder if anyone has tried to research this? | | I definitely don't see any reason to assume it was different | without evidence. | z3rgl1ng wrote: | +1, [Citation Needed]. | z3rgl1ng wrote: | Christ, every reply to this thread is an anecdote. | | Please back up assertions with _some_ data point.. | bergie wrote: | Totally anecdotal, but I feel open source projects were much | more community oriented in the 90s and the 00s. But after that, | it seems they're either driven by a company, or an individual. | That would roughly conform to the article's timeline of GitHub | adoption. | jrochkind1 wrote: | By "community-oriented", do you mean that the distribution of | commits was such that more people were making more commits, | instead of "95% of the work is done by a nucleus of people"? | | I'm not sure if those are the same thing, I'm just talking | about the distribution of work. | gowld wrote: | Everything has more "individuals" now, since everyone can get | a soapbox/megaphone, from YouTube to GitHub to Twitter to all | the rest. | | And it's possible to monetize that work now, with ads and | micro-patrons, which is a huge drain on free and open source, | mitigated only (partially) by the increased ability for open | sourcerers to collaborate and that nowadays we're drowing in | software and don't really need much more new software. | | You don't need to join a team to get noticed (and on the ugly | side, even though having a team helps, it's better for the | Personal Brand to make that team invisible) | nerdponx wrote: | Counter-anecdote: most of the small open-source projects I | use only have a small number of active contributors because | there is a small number of people who actively try to | contribute. | | Projects that stop accepting PRs tend to be pronounced "dead" | after just a few months, but there isn't always someone | able/willing to fork it and keep the project going. | | Maybe there are more projects to contribute to than before, | so each project gets a smaller % of the "potential | contributor" pool. | coldtea wrote: | > _Any evidence this has actually changed between the 90s and | now?_ | | Experience with the relevant communities (Gnome, KDE, and | others, etc) in the 90s and 00s. | | One reason for the change since then is that nowadays most | things are more feature complete so low hanging fruits are not | there (higher cost to entry for newcomers and fewer things to | do if you're not "up there" as a developer), plus you need to | "compete" or "collaborate" with a number of paid developers | from companies like RedHat who handle most of the project and | steer its direction wherever the company likes. | | Plus FOSS just isn't as glamorous as it used to be: | | The year of "Linux of the Desktop" (which as a vision meant | mass adoption of Linux to win over Windows in desktops and | laptops, not the "but Linux is fine for desktop use today, I've | used it for years" or "but billions of Android phones use Linux | behind the scenes" we settle'd for) never came. | | "Big" companies stopped caring about Linux except as an server | thing (e.g. we had Easel, Corel, and others competing for | desktop Linux, even IBM and others had an interest, whereas VA | Linux was one of the biggest IPO stories). | | There are much less stories about the sexiness of FOSS or some | FOSS future, and hackers changing everything working together, | etc, in mainstream (not industry) media, etc. | gowld wrote: | Linux on the "fleet" desktop almost happened (some companies | and schools do it), but then webapps got big and ChromeOS | swept in. Now the only reason to make a non-ChromeOS "webtop" | fleet is if your organization is explicitly Google-free for | competitive/legal/political reasons. | nitrogen wrote: | _For software of the 90s, 2000s_ | | Check Sourceforge, Freshmeat.net archives, IRC, old anonymous | FTP mirrors, etc. | Spivak wrote: | Users of software care about their own workflows, their pet- | features, and the bugs they hit. Some are willing to put up the | work to patch in those features or fix those bugs and upstream | them. Fewer still are people who are invested enough to | dedicate themselves to a project as a part-time job. | | I don't think this dynamic has changed since the dawn of open | source. | stonogo wrote: | It used to be you could email a patch to someone and that patch | would get reviewed and committed. | | Since then there has sprung up a fetish for bureaucratic | process, and tooling has arisen to foster that, such that the | barrier to entry is significantly higher now than it was in the | 90s. All you needed was a text editor and an email account. Now | you need accounts on whatever code forge is involved, and you | didn't write enough unit tests, and you failed to properly | format your pull request, and what do you mean you're not an | expert in whatever version control we've adopted? This pull | request sat in an open state because you didn't tag it | appropriately. The CI system was updated and your code wasn't | covered in the automated integration test, please resubmit | after making minor punctuation changes in a metadata file. | | Over time, this stuff filters out contributors and leaves a | core of people who are comfortable with the structure of the | engineering process for that specific project. It's not a bad | thing that engineering standards are higher, but it's no longer | a world of people 'scratching an itch' -- there's yak shaving | to be done, and the number of people willing to shave that yak | has always been smaller than the number of people who are not. | | I don't think the author is right about things having been | harder in the old days led to a higher proportion of the | internet being qualified to contribute. I think it's much | harder now to patch software upstream than it ever has been. | throwaway2245 wrote: | You could re-frame 'bureaucratic process' as 'expectation | setting'. | | It also benefits the contributor to know what is expected of | them. If you know that your contribution will be properly | considered when it meets the outlined expectation, then it is | easier to put in the effort to contribute. | microtherion wrote: | > It used to be you could email a patch to someone and that | patch would get reviewed and committed. | | May I ask what communities you were involved in, and when? | | Even formatting patches so they could be reliably applied was | a nontrivial matter. It was not uncommon for them to be | applied manually (and sometimes faultily). Sometimes you | would mail patches to maintainers directly, other times you | would share them on mailing lists, where they would undergo a | bit of "social review" (works for me!) and would or would not | be applied. | | Some people just mailed entire modified files and expected | maintainers to figure out the changes on their own. | | As for "committed", many maintainers may not even have used | source code control (notably Linus didn't use any), and I | can't recall a single project with publicly accessible | repositories in the 1990s as opposed to tarball releases. | | > All you needed was a text editor and an email account. Now | you need accounts on whatever code forge is involved [...] | | Getting an account on any of these code forges in 2020 is | almost certainly much easier than getting an e-mail account | at all in the early 1990s for many people. | | I don't agree with the author that contributing was easier in | the 1990s. Generally, it involved a bit of a social process, | trivial drive by fixes were not any more popular than today, | there were coding standards to be observed (and not always | written ones), in larger projects, you could expect to | navigate some flame wars, and sometimes your contributions | were rejected anyway because RMS decided to cancel your OS. | tom_ wrote: | Very much mirrors my experience. Github provides a very | useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches | and off-the-cuff issues. No more mailing lists or bug | trackers to sign up for and manage! | | And it's also even got an integrated version control | system, that 99.9% of projects then use, and it's one that | makes it easy to version control a fork of your own as you | work on any patches you might be making. | | Progress! | nerdponx wrote: | In my experience, bureaucracy is mostly uncorrelated with the | willingness of a project to accept a PR from a new | contributor. | | Homebrew has very strict contribution requirements but has a | huge number of contributors and is generally easy to | contribute to. Meanwhile there are lots of little projects | that go dead for lack of interest by the sole maintainer in | reviewing and merging patches. | | Also this: | | _Since then there has sprung up a fetish for bureaucratic | process, and tooling has arisen to foster that, such that the | barrier to entry is significantly higher now than it was in | the 90s. All you needed was a text editor and an email | account. Now you need accounts on whatever code forge is | involved, and you didn 't write enough unit tests, and you | failed to properly format your pull request, and what do you | mean you're not an expert in whatever version control we've | adopted? This pull request sat in an open state because you | didn't tag it appropriately. The CI system was updated and | your code wasn't covered in the automated integration test, | please resubmit after making minor punctuation changes in a | metadata file._ | | Doesn't really make sense to me. How many projects have you | actually had this problem with? | | _I don 't think the author is right about things having been | harder in the old days led to a higher proportion of the | internet being qualified to contribute. I think it's much | harder now to patch software upstream than it ever has been._ | | For some people, using Git and Github is a barrier to entry. | For others, submitting a patch to a mailing list is a barrier | to entry. | ekiwi wrote: | > It used to be you could email a patch to someone and that | patch would get reviewed and committed. | | Yes, but 1990 is also when this study came out: | https://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/par-distr- | sys/technical_papers/fuzz.... | | They find that a lot of UNIX tools could be easily crashed by | generating random inputs. The quality of our most popular | open source software has dramatically improved over the last | 30 years. | jdbernard wrote: | Another component, I think, is the difference between being | able to work on whatever you want vs. having to follow a | roadmap dictated by project leadership. Other commenters have | touched on this (pointing out the decline of community | orientation, rise of corporate oversight, or the fading | glamour, for example), but no one has identified it directly. | | The article points out that we collectively re-examined Brook's | rule, going from "adding more engineers to a project makes it | ship later" to "if you need to get more work done, go attract | more contributors." I think the evidence shows it's more | nuanced. | | If you have a large amount of potential tasks and a large pool | of potential contributors, and little strong preference for | which tasks get done (OSS in the 90's maybe) then highly self- | motivated people can pick up work they find interesting or | which are useful for them. You can then avoid the exponential | explosion of communication/coordination overhead by empowering | those individual contributors to make their own decisions about | how that work should be done. This is how OSS can scale to | hundreds of contributors. | | Once you introduce some sort of top-down planning that dictates | which tasks are important, the blessed approaches, strict | coding patterns etc. then you demotivate a large number of | contributors who don't share the top-down priorities and you | have to pay the exponential overhead cost of distributed | coordination to enforce the top-down priorities. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-26 23:00 UTC)