I am not sure what to do about the burnout problem. The way he described it is very on point though. Since everyone working on the project is overloaded there is a great feeling of things only get done if you do them.
Most of my open source work was in the pre-GitHub days when we used mailing lists, not pull requests, to build community. I do think there was something better about that for the project itself as it encouraged a lot more discussion and community building. PR's and Issues become silos and are not great for general discussion. I think they also encourage drive-by contributions which honestly are intoxicating initially but once you see people are not coming back become defeating.
Open contributions project.
An open source project does not necessarily have to accept random contributions, issues or hatemail from the general public. [1] They just need to make the source available with a permissive licence, period.
I believe that Linux with its idiosyncrasies in its communication model (mailing list vs the ease of Github, strong dictator running the show) works as a great filter from entitled users, and that's an underrated feature in open source. See also sqlite.
---
1: Yet hell will freeze over before Github lets maintainers turn off the PR tab which would lessen this problem a bit.
I'm confident that GitHub has a good prediction on what will happen if they roll out features that lower the burden of maintaining a FLOSS repo. And am rather certain that several of these features also lower the engagement. And therefore will not be implemented. In other words: the needs and goals of GitHub/MSFT and those of Open Source maintainers don't align perfectly. Yet the power balance is way off, so open Source maintainers will experience pain to a level that they almost walk away in great numbers.
Engagement means people have you in their workflow, on their radar. I would love it if Github is something that I don't have to think of, that is invisible and out of my mind. I'd love it if it's something I never have to visit, open, see or interact with; as as little as possible. I'd love it if it were preconfigured to take work from me rather than impose yet another inbox, timeline, bookmarks, "likes" and so on.
And if you consider "advertisements" very liberal, that's exactly what Github is: a place for companies to attract eyeballs and engagement on their software.
Tailscale put it well: https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan
> increased word-of-mouth from free plans sells the more valuable corporate plans
GH annoys the shit of me by making me click more shit to get my job done, it “increases engagement”, and then… what exactly? My annoyance is supposed to lead to me… thinking about GitHub more? And thus I’ll pressure my org to use it?
This makes no sense. I hate engagement-based metrics as much as the next person but I’m not sure MS is as brain dead as to intentionally make the UX worse, to make engagement higher, and assuming that will somehow increase sales. There’s no link here.
I'm not saying MSFT is intentionally frustrating you to increase sales.
But that, where engagement drives sales, your frustrations are disregarded.
They are different links.
MSFT could easily build a toggle to disable PRs (default, enable PRs). They have these toggles for all other features already.
They don' build this, because, as many other commentors point out, the few people that would benefit from such a toggle, don't outweigh the amount of engagement, data, and usage it generates.
I merely take that a step further: there are quite certainly many features disregarded or not even conceived that would save a (small) group immense effort. Simply because MSFT has done the excel-thingies and knows that features that make people visit GitHub less often, are not positive to their sales.