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Comment by shermantanktop | Hacker News Reader

You as a first-time contributor need to know that the large group of first-time contributors has a lot of poorly behaved people in it, and that the burden is on you to establish that you are not one of them.

Trust is built through iterative exchange. This is Bayesian priors - default is average, and only moves on the introduction of new information.

Lots of examples of this. In 1950's westerns, if a stranger comes to a small town, the default treatment is a guarded form of hospitality with a health measure of suspicion. If you are dating someone new, you are by default understood as the average first date partner, and the average first date partner is not a great match.

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I'm not saying you're wrong - but I do detest that attitude myself

As you say, trust is a two way street, and first time contributors are being expected to trust that it's not personal when they are met with brusquerie.

I know it's hard when it's the 99th person and you've had to deal with 98 less than nice individuals, but defaulting to an abrupt or blunt manner does nobody any favours.

What’s the solution then? This is one of those emotional-labor questions.

Who is responsible for new contributors having a good experience? Especially thousands of eager, misinformed contributors?

It’s a DDOS that exhausts and burns out the maintainer even while the supply of newbie contributors is rarely meaningfully impacted by maintainer conduct.

The world has givers and takers, and we are all both at different times. The newbie thinks they are a giver, but mostly they are a taker.

I've also seen maintainers complain about "drive by contributors" where one complaint is that the submitter has provided a good patch/PR, but doesn't stick around to support it.

From the submitters point of view, why /would/ you stick around if your first (and only) interaction with the project is less than "ideal"

FTR I absolutely understand the "burnout" maintainers experience dealing with contributors that drain energy as well.

The demands here are effectively extensions of netiquette[0] and "how to ask good questions"[1]. Every code contributor should at least understand what is asked of them.

[Julia's post sadly does not include the blunt expression "demonstrate that you have done your homework", which is a fundamental tenet.]

0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/netiquette

1: https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/

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