It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.
Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.
It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.
While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.
I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.
All of this still happens in a world where people aren’t typing the individual code lines by hand.
You just have to adjust and move on. Don’t let your code quality decrease, fight off those that submit vibe coded bullshit and push forward. You’ll find there’s people still behind the prompts.
Nobody cares anymore, because literally everyone on the planet can literally make their own mini stacks of things, as another commenter just said.
It's sad, but I don't see any way to put the bunny back in the box.
sitzkrieg•12m ago
lifeisloving•3m ago
They kind of did acknowledge this when they said the answer is smaller more trusted circles.
This has been what I look for recently. I prefer projects that are coordinating over discord or similar and have 50-100 total members but with decent activity.