Open Source Maintainers Have to Read the Comments

For me, it was open source developers that helped me make sense of the future. They've long experienced the frog-boiling that came with prior social norms of “everybody participates” butting up against the reality of “participation doesn't scale.” And they have to figure it out in a way that other creators don't. An Instagram creator who doesn't look at their DMs might miss a few good ones. But if an open source developer doesn’t read their bug reports, other people's lives are materially impacted, visible in the form of site outages and security breaches flitting through the news headlines.

There is a non trivial burden to chasing creative obsession in the open source space. The reliance on the technology open source maintainers build becomes an obligation for the maintainer. Creating trillions of dollars of value for free can be taxing 202212180035, but boredom of a project? Deadly ☠️

Luxuries became decencies, and decencies necessities. (Location 195)
-- Status Anxiety