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Comment by judofyr | Hacker News Reader

What is even going on here? https://github.com/jorgebucaran/colorette/issues/78. They're arguing about who should have attribution for adding a single "!s &&" to improve performance? What happened with the world where open-source was about creating cool projects together, not about who has the most stars on GitHub?

To be honest, this is the general feeling I get from the JavaScript community: Instead of working together to improve existing projects it's all about launching new alternative packages and get everyone to switch to your new fancy project. This causes a never ending churn where we jump between (incompatible) libraries with very little actual improvements.

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> not about who has the most stars on GitHub?

It's the Instagram-ification of the open source world. All of the feedback and social signaling mechanisms are there. Likes, stars, followers, and charts of "contributions". It's just an extension of LinkedIn for many people.

Let's not forget the DigitalOcean Hacktoberfest debacle a few years ago. I still stumble upon repos with pull requests that contain nothing more than a single character change to a README. Just for a stupid SWAG t-shirt.

Holy shit that guy looks insufferable. At this point having PostCSS as a dependency just looks like a liability

Yes you should remove that creepy dependency

Behind the pretty facade there's a hyper competitive environment inside the JS community, sometimes with very low stakes. What's the incentive to fix fundamental issues if the metrics for success are stars and forks?

The best way to avoid their insanity is to use JS as a target language, pick some of their good tools and move on with life, working with safer languages.

That's just bullying from Sitnik. Stealing the entire repository and then blaming the victim for stealing a few letters back.

I mentioned Colorette in docs and license even before this Twitter thread. Why is it a stealing?

GitHub should remove stars, it has become a petty metric.

What's the term for when people with little to lose in low-stakes conflicts just have at it?

I first encountered this in the basement A/V department at my high school.

Cascade of attention deficit[0]?

JS is a vast ecosystem with little barriers to entry, and

> Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.

I don't think there's anything malicious going on, except a lot of people doing JS.

[0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

> I don't think there's anything malicious going on

The dev who copied the code forked someone’s repo, went out of his way to remove attribution and git history, sent PRs to replace the original package in other libraries with his own version, and when called out on it got defensive instead of apologizing. I think malicious is a fair way to describe his behavior.

> sent PRs to replace the original package in other libraries

Would you mind sharing a link to such PR?

This is Nano Colors author.

Even before this Twitter thread we had talk with Colorette author and I added mention to the docs, his name to LICENSE and promised him to not replace Colorette by Nano Colors.

The Colorette mention was there 5 days ago.

>promised him to not replace Colorette by Nano Colors.

And was that before or after you opened several PRs to replace Colorette with Nano Colors?

In my PRs I replace chalk to nanocolors

I wasn't talking about the specific case, but about the general attitude of the JS ecosystem to replace a library very frequently.

While I think you have a valid point about the javascript community reinventing the wheel often, the problem in this thread is simply that some people are inconsiderate, rude, and hostile, and that is in every software community and ecosystem in some way or another.

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