Hacker News Reader

I think it's github and "social" coding. You used to be able to build something out of curiosity or for your own use and be happy with that.

Now it's on github, and if you don't get enough followers or forks or it's not in a popular language or framework or you haven't updated it recently enough it's seen as a "dead project" or a failure. A project can never be "done" because then it's dead. That's demotivating.

Social media damages everything it touches.

View on HN

Who says it's dead, people opening issues? Guess I've never made a popular enough repo to even get there.

The most social coding I've ever experienced was Bukkit, the old Minecraft server thing. I was noob in high school, made plugins for little things I wanted, people installed them, they gave good/critical feedback, I learned, it was great.

In many ways I'd argue that a popular project is worse, as you end up dealing with a bunch of social factors that take time away from actually making or improving things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com