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Comment on Ask HN: How do you deal with social media pressure on your GitHub project?parent

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I think parent referred more to contentious issues (e.g. sexism, systemd hate) rather than uncontrollable growth of a project. That said, excellent post, thank you!

The opposite of course are projects with too few contributors that accept any patch out of desperation, be it reasonable or not. (ZFS on Linux comes to mind, it's a super nice community and Brian Behlendorf does a great job as project lead but sometimes features and patches creep in of which I'm wondering why nobody dared saying "no".)

The Linux kernel community solved growth by delegating responsibility to subsystem maintainers. Such a hierarchical model is not supported by GitHub. Also, the kernel community's process of submitting and discussing patches on mailing lists, while somewhat arcane, raises the barrier of entry and keeps at least a portion of the Twitter mob out.

Yeah we'd had contentious issues on the various feature lines (systemd-analogous), absolutely no issues (that I was made aware of) on the -ism lines. The points about various feature items totally hit home though :)

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