alt Hacker NewsIt should just be $1 to submit PR.
If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;)
I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase.
But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.
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I'll simply never file PRs, then. I'd say 4 out of every 5 PRs I file never get a response. Some on very large projects, and I like to think my PRs are more useful than docs fixes or pointless refactors. I'm simply not going to spend money to have to float around in the void endlessly because a maintainer lost interest in the project and won't ever look at my PR, I'll simply keep my changes on a downstream fork.
Moreover, I'm not interested in having my money get handed over to folks who aren't incentivized to refund my money. In fact, they're paying processing costs on the charge, so they are disincentivized to refund me! There could be an escrow service that handles this, but now there's another party involved: I just want to fix a damn bug, not deal with this shit.
If you want me to read your comment, please pay me $1 first... if I find your comment interesting I might refund.
> But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.
But a non-zero cost of communication can obviously also have negative effects. It's interesting to think about where the sweet spot would be. But it's probably very context specific. I'm okay with close people engaging in "low quality" communication with me. I'd love, on the other hand, if politicians would stop communicating via Twitter.
It's externalisation of cost.
We've seen it everywhere, in communication, in globalised manufacturing, now in code generation.
It takes nothing to throw something out there now; we're at a scale that there's no longer even a cost to personal reputation - everyone does it.
Sorry, but this seems like a privileged solution.
Let's say you're a one-of-a-kind kid that already is making useful contributions, but $1 is a lot of money for you, then suddenly your work becomes useless?
It feels weird to pay for providing work anyway. Even if its LLM gunk, you're paying to work (let alone pay for your LLM).
This thought pattern leads to crypto.
In that world there's a process called "staking" where you lock some tokens with a default lock expiry action and a method to unlock based on the signature from both participants.
It would work like this: Repo has a public key. Submitted uses a smart contract to sign the commit with along with the submission of a crypto. If the repo merges it then the smart contract returns the token to the submitter. Otherwise it goes to the repo.
It's technically quite elegant, and the infrastructure is all there (with some UX issues).
But don't do this!!!!
I did some work in crypto. It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts, and because crypto brings money so close to engineering it corrupts good product design.