Please don't ever post things like this. If you're this frustrated that the people who make free things for you aren't donating their time to you in the way you'd prefer, grab a drink with a friend and vent to them in private instead.
> Please don't ever post things like this.
What the hell, is this against any HN policy? Or you think no one should post their point of view here if it's against yours?
EDIT: I think it's important to note that burnout is a result of you having an issue within yourself (at least in the context of voluntary projects), it's not something others do to you... you can choose to ignore all pull requests, for example, or say in your README that you won't accept any (I've done that myself to projects I wanted to keep in a certain "permanent" state for reasons). If you choose to engage in discussions, that's your call.
I think this is an oversimplification. You can be perfectly happy with yourself, but if your environment creates a neverending treadmill of situations that drains your soul, you will get burnout if you cannot find any mechanism to cope with it, to avoid it or to deal with it.
And in open source we are each others environment. If you have 100 well researched issues written in a friendly tone you will certainly feel a different motivation to tackle that backlog than if it are 100 toxic spitting well-researched issues. The same goes for how we talk about each other in public. If you think a PR should have been merged, just talk to the maintainers in a non-public setting (Chat or whatever) and explain why you want it merged, what you would be willing to do for it and how they could see this happen. If they still don't like to do it, just fork it and do it yourself.
I agree with you it's more complicated than that, but you seem to be supporting my point by saying this :)
... you will get burnout if --> *you* cannot find a way to cope... --> *you* cannot deal with it.
It's like offense... it must be taken to work... I know, I know... sometimes you cannot avoid taking it and bringing it with you because you care about others thinking you should be offended, or that they feel offended on your behalf even (with seems to be a common feeling today), but I find it great that the English language uses the term "take offense", as it is so accurate: if you don't take it, it simply evaporates, no one can offend you and force you to take offense if you choose to not do it.
Same with burnout.
In this case, requirements about code quality and even refusal of code likely to introduce bugs is being called "gatekeeping" which is complete nonsense.
If you refuse a merge request for good reason, you don't deserve to get shit on by some salty contributor who doesn't want to bring their PR up to your standards. This article seems to indicate that any PR intended to be helpful must be merged, whatever the cost in maintenance, because otherwise you're gatekeeping.
If you refuse a PR for bad reasons ("I don't accept contributions from Chile because I had a bad holiday there once" and more racist/sexist variants thereof) then you definitely deserve criticism. What's happening here isn't really criticism, though, it's childish ranting about other people not putting in enough free work for the author and how that is somehow damaging to the volunteers, disguised behind polite words.
I think the world owes maintainers no protection from real, useful negative feedback, but a lot of negative feedback is just people being angry that they don't get their way. In a civil internet, that kind of behaviour has no place being called "criticism" and being assumed to just be par for the course of open source.
I've decided I never want to be an open source maintainer exactly because of the entitled people who write these articles, and I don't think I'm the only one being pushed away from open source for this reason.
I strongly agree with you. I know gatekeeping has negative connotations and has become a sort of generalized boo word in some circles. But I'm glad maintainers act as gate keepers. Some code is crap and some coders aren't very good. Or, at least, their abilities don't match their ambitions. Someone has to keep low-quality work out of open source projects, and it's not a job I would want.
Nevertheless, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The real problem with gate-keeping is when the gate-keepers aren't accountable. Criticism is one of the ways we can keep them accountable.
It's the same many areas. I want engineering schools and guilds to gate-keep so bridges don't fall down when I'm driving across them. I want news and book editors to gate-keep so I don't have to wade through acres of dross to find worthwhile content. And I want maintainers to gate-keep so open source software works when I need it.
Me too, it's kind of the whole point of being a maintainer :-)
Lack of contributors also causes maintainer burnout. The best way I know to have zero help is to treat a contributor poorly. Sometimes it cannot be helped, for example, when a contributor sends unusable code or a contribution forces a decision the maintainer isn't ready to make. Most scorned contributors will do exactly what Frederick did in this case, vent and then find a similar project to contribute to. In this case the similar project is Kitty, which is a fantastic piece of software.
> Please don't ever post things like this.
Asking people to shut up, not matter how politely you do it, rarely works. The problem will remain, and people will still complain about it.
Why do you think people should unconditionally accept code into their own codebase? Your wording also suggests that you think the maintainers are somehow leading you on to doing more work. Have you considered how much work doing proper review is?
The Rust community seems toxic, in the Wikipedian way of being unwelcoming and unfriendly without ever dropping into incivility.