Recently, I've noticed a certain idea a lot I didn't see before: that if you make something a lot of people like, you have a responsibility to them. In the real world, this happens if someone has planted a tree in their garden and people like how it looks, then when they want to cut it down, "the community" would like an opinion.
Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.
I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.
peyton 4 hours ago [-]
OSS has gone off the rails recently. There’s a project under the Apache Software Foundation—I forget which—that is essentially a byproduct of the operations of a Chinese beverage company. That’s more like what I remember.
We’re talking about code that users can modify themselves to solve their own problems. That’s it. I don’t need to hear about the struggle.
intothemild 17 minutes ago [-]
> We're talking about code that users can modify themselves to solve their own problems. That's it. I don't need to hear about the struggle.
That's exactly the kind of attitude that this discusses.
You create something that solves your problems, you put it up on GitHub, free, and open... Suddenly it turns out others have the same problems you did, your software solves them.
It starts ok. People are nice. But as it gains traction, a certain kind of toxic person becomes more and more common. The "YOU FIX IT NOW! I DONT KNOW" Kind of person.
You wake in the morning, look at your email, and it's a stream of being screamed at. That takes a toll.
All because you had an idea one time to build something that solved your problem you thought "hey I might just open source this".
> That's it. I don't need to hear about the struggle.
agunapal 5 hours ago [-]
I think it comes down to "Is the juice worth the squeeze"
As someone who worked for a large organization maintaining an OSS project, one issue I faced was how do you show impact? We used to have many organizations really love and use our project , but they would hardly give anything back to the project, including writing blogs where they could have shared some success stories.
IMO github stars/pip downloads etc are not good metrics and these are even worser metrics in today's agentic AI world. Its so easy to fake these nowdays.
RobRivera 4 hours ago [-]
Github stars are such a terrible metric, completely gameable. The facy it is taken seriously appalls me.
Joel_Mckay 4 hours ago [-]
People can't go into OSS projects expecting anyone will care as much as they do. In general, only a few applications become popular enough to remain in active self-sustaining maintenance a decade later.
The real question, is if a project is "worth it" for your own fun. =3
avaer 7 hours ago [-]
This triggers me hard.
> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.
It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:
- People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time
- Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention
- People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to
- My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others
- Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore
- I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests
- Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers
This is just scratching the surface of the things I've had to deal with in my open source work. I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
RossBencina 6 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry to hear about your experiences. I find it hard enough to deal with pushy people who have mismatched expectations (and yes, I'm not proud of it but at times I have been an entitled user.) I don't think what you're describing is limited to open source software though. Any time you make yourself available to the general population you're going to attract the full spectrum of human behavior. I guess the trick is to not make your project a honeypot for the debilitating stuff.
> I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
Could you elaborate on what has worked for you?
I imagine people who work in customer service have strategies too.
malicka 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, a lot of this behavior is very common in online communities generally. Addicts or mentally ill folk with no outlet offline take it online to some authority member in the community, or really anyone who will spare them a second… the things this leads to can be absolutely insane. Sad all-around.
justinclift 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder if the distribution of Weirdly Entitled users is higher in some groups vs others?
ie JS/Node seems to attract more newbie users, so I wonder if that correlates with higher incidents of this
That's with the thought that maybe it's newbie users mostly being that source.
rglover 7 hours ago [-]
Well this just made me feel a whole lot better (similar experience, though not as hardcore). Good lord.
corvad 7 hours ago [-]
XZ Utils was a big example of this, the poor maintainer had to put up with toxic users and it led to supply chain compromise after a while.
msukkarieh 6 hours ago [-]
As one of the cofounders of an open source tool (Sourcebot) we have seen the "AI slop PR" issue explained here first hand. The amount of of PRs we get now from people who clearly have never even deployed or used our tool is staggering. We're working on a solution for this that leverages our tool, and plan to make it available for free for OSS projects. If you have any ideas, please reach out to me: michael at sourcebot(dot)dev
eddyaipt 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
mohamedabdallah 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 07:45:19 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.
I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.
We’re talking about code that users can modify themselves to solve their own problems. That’s it. I don’t need to hear about the struggle.
That's exactly the kind of attitude that this discusses.
You create something that solves your problems, you put it up on GitHub, free, and open... Suddenly it turns out others have the same problems you did, your software solves them.
It starts ok. People are nice. But as it gains traction, a certain kind of toxic person becomes more and more common. The "YOU FIX IT NOW! I DONT KNOW" Kind of person.
You wake in the morning, look at your email, and it's a stream of being screamed at. That takes a toll.
All because you had an idea one time to build something that solved your problem you thought "hey I might just open source this".
> That's it. I don't need to hear about the struggle.
As someone who worked for a large organization maintaining an OSS project, one issue I faced was how do you show impact? We used to have many organizations really love and use our project , but they would hardly give anything back to the project, including writing blogs where they could have shared some success stories. IMO github stars/pip downloads etc are not good metrics and these are even worser metrics in today's agentic AI world. Its so easy to fake these nowdays.
The real question, is if a project is "worth it" for your own fun. =3
> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.
It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:
This is just scratching the surface of the things I've had to deal with in my open source work. I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.
> I've learned to draw much stricter boundaries.
Could you elaborate on what has worked for you?
I imagine people who work in customer service have strategies too.
ie JS/Node seems to attract more newbie users, so I wonder if that correlates with higher incidents of this
That's with the thought that maybe it's newbie users mostly being that source.