alt Hacker NewsI recently did a talk in opposition of this sentiment
Yes, some projects like stack overflow may be losing contributors by a large degree, but it doesn't have to be this way
I run SponsorBlock and DeArrow which are two human powered crowdsourced browser extensions that are only growing in scale in opposition to the want to slopify everything
We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors and 19% being old, a nice balance.
Unfortunately the talk isn't available yet but you can see the slides here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nGArM7c3i9cVGGvkh6ER...
Replies
> We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors
That doesn’t sound like necessarily a positive thing; it sounds like it could well be unsustainable churn (impossible to tell from such limited numbers, I don’t know what the general growth figures are or proportional trends).
I have contributed in the past, but don’t any more because of how you went out of your way to make it tedious: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/2106. I suspect there are a lot more that have been driven away by the unnecessary and not even accurate mandatory preview step.
This is the most optimistic way to look at it. People who couldn't code before but had ideas can code now, can build things, can contribute to projects they had no business understanding before LLMs.
SponsorBlock was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the article title! Thank you for both of these extensions, they’re almost as important as uBlock for my experience of the web.
Excellent counterexample! I have been using SponsorBlock and DeArrow for years and anecdotally I'm hearing more and more using SB.
What I like about SponsorBlock is the statistics it presents. Every sponsor segment I've contributed has saved 682 people from seeing it. Per each submission I've contributed by spending maybe 1.5 minutes, I've saved 459 person-minutes. Wow. What an impact.