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Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

> They had a user-friendly system previously... Now users have to learn GitHub and author raw HTML! - I would point out that not all documentation writers are developers!

So you'll need to know HTML and how to create a Pull Request on GitHub to be able contribute to documentation about web development... I feel like if you're writing about web development topics, that doesn't seem like a high bar to pass.

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The friction is higher. Now you have to deal with github and accounts and permissions and so on. Before it was a simple web form.

Well, now balance that against the rest of the upsides they present, like the new UX not being to merely revert the changes that you spent the weekend writing.

Let's stop acting like just because we can think of one downside that we can ignore the rest of the trade-offs. Btw this is a trade-off they already mentioned in TFA rehashed by an HN comment for some reason.

Because HN commenters always feel like they know better and like to talk down on any changes even when they have no context for why the decision was made.

Or, you know, because it’s a legitimate concern that readers on HN value higher than the MDN maintainers.

Having used this site for a long, long time. No, almost never.

The friction is lower because I already have a GitHub account but I don’t have an MDN account.

Is higher friction a bad thing though? This is web standards documentation, not Wikipedia; once a document is finished, it'll be a lot more static. I can imagine they've had edit wars (another commenter mentioned it), abuse, etc, whereas with a GH workflow there's a better review process involved.

Its much more than that. Have you seen how many ways there are to write html? So you have to learn their flavor on top of providing the actual information. Thats a good chunk of time that can be used elsewhere. People don't contribute to projects that have bad levels of entry and artificially difficult participation requirements.

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