Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

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applfanboysbgon

This is an evergreen internet comment right here. Condescendingly proclaiming "This problem could be easily solved by [significantly worse solution that had 1/10th the thought put into it as the actual solution by people with a stake in actually solving the problem rather than making quippy armchair comments]".

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I know it's against convention to comment on downvotes, but really? Really? This is controversial? The OP came up with an elegant solution that cleanly solved their problem without subjecting contributors to anything more than a captcha. Then somebody comes along and says "oh, it's so easy, just charge $10". You're going to set up payment infrastructure, incur administrative overhead with human support managing refunds, and deter 99% of actual humans from contributing, and then call that the easy solution that OP is so stupid for not thinking of first? Give me a fucking break. This site really is just Reddit-lite, anyone who thinks about engineering problems seriously would realise this does not stand up as anything beyond a pithy internet solution with three seconds of thought into what actually implementing it would entail.

Github already has the payment infrastructure.

Polar.sh is already doing things that are a lot more complex in this space.

If you are in a civilized country which allow direct payments (i.e, anything but North American nowadays) and you don't want to deal with Github or any external system, there is always good old "make a M-PESA/SEPA/Pix/UPI transfer to account XYZ")

> the thought put into it as the actual solution by people with a stake in actually solving the problem

Let me flip your argument: think of how much time and thought is poured into problems like this one by people who don't even try to implement a Pfand system beforehand.

> Github already has the payment infrastructure.

...which is not available to maintainers to use in this way.

> there is always good old "make a M-PESA/SEPA/Pix/UPI transfer to account XYZ"

And then lock out anyone who is not from the same country as the maintainer, on a platform that is known for its global reach.

Moreover, you're introducing significant anti-human friction. For privacy-conscious people, it's a complete non-starter; I'm not giving my payment information, not for a $1 transaction, and compromising my anonymity just to make a PR for the benefit of other people. That's a small subset. Then, you have the lazy people. The majority of the population will simply not bother with something if it has friction. Getting out their credit card is one of those things, and it's why products/services that offer free trials or a free tier tend to be overwhelmingly more successful -- people want to see a tangible benefit to themselves before they engage in high-friction processes (where "high-friction" is as little friction as requiring a payment, yes). "Free to play" video games with microtransactions engineer first-time purchases to be cheap ($1 or $5) and have 5x or 10x the value of the normal microtransactions, because that first hurdle of getting somebody to hand over their payment information is by far the biggest.

I'll take the captcha, thanks. And maintainers will too, because they'd rather have the solution that filters bots and keeps humans contributing rather than the one that filters out both humans and bots.

> significant anti-human friction

Yes, that friction is intentional. The lazy people don't want to do it? Great, there is very little chance their contributions are worthwhile. The privacy conscious people won't do it? Then let them work on their own repositories and complain loudly about the idiot maintainer who puts these insane barriers. Then the maintainer can go take a look at that forks done by the loud complainers and see if it is worth to whitelist them.

> it's why products/services that offer free trials or a free tier tend to be overwhelmingly more successful

Drug dealers also offer the first hit for free, why don't you use that as an example as well? ;)

To answer this properly in case the quip was too vague: there is no reason for "number of PRs opened by new contributors" to be a viable/interesting KPI for any FOSS project.

> I'll take the captcha, thanks.

First you need to show me all your cool FOSS projects.

How is it "laziness" to not want to pay $10 to submit a bug fix to your repository?

1) I just used the term lazy because that's what OP use.

2) You are not "paying" $10. The money would be returned to you. In case you haven't heard of Pfand systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation

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