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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

God, even as an open source maintainer, all of these insights SCREAM incredibly relevant.

In fact, what is worse is that you don't realize your focus is totally wrong because you're not losing revenue. You might be losing eyeballs or growth and adoption, but that's easier to gloss over considering it's a factor of advertising.

I constantly ask myself when looking at some of the de facto solutions in open source spaces what the hell the maintainers are doing, because what they are focused on is completely irrelevant.

The same could be said about large companies who have so much revenue that can continue to make mistakes until someone challenges them.

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With open source, the incentives from a maintainers view might look a lot different than what you would think. A friend of mine has a very popular JS framework out there, gets about 500k downloads a week off of NPM.

There are lots of user requests that he just outright ignores. He doesn't even care about his stats, or trying to "compete" with another more popular framework- to him its just more headaches. He built what he wanted, pushed it out for the world to use, and plenty of people did, enough that even 10x'ing that number is unlikely to really burnish the resume any further. He even tried to make it a full time job, but he found the Patreon model just way too much begging and inconsistent. Offering a support contract, a few people bit, but not enough that he could really hire people so he could offer 24/7/365 support that that implies.

So he refactors, adds features he wants, and tells everyone to go Fork themselves if they whine about their pet feature not getting implemented. Of course PRs are welcome, and its actually more of a community based project now, but he has retained BDFL status for the core of it.

Ultimately, I found that basically no one makes any money off Patreon or GitHub Sponsors. I mean statistically. Sure there are big names you and I know of out there, but the income of OnlyFans creators is orders of magnitude higher.

But of course, I doubt they'd ever share the distribution of income for users off those platforms. You'd realize there's no point.

Exactly right. This is the superstar phenomenon of single commercial actors on the Internet -- YouTubers, Open Source product owners, self-publishers, etc. Far less than 1% "make it big", then eventually v/blog about how to be successful just like them in five easy steps. Many great bloggers eventually write that awful post about "writing is the best skill to have". Barf. I do agree about OnlyFans. Due to social constraints, it does seem easier to make "middle class" money than YouTubing/OpenSourcing/Self-Publishing.

this is why fair competition is so important in markets (not "free"). it's literally what makes markets efficient, not omnicient capitalists, as they'd love for you to believe. the market works because mistakes become directly apparent in the catchall metric that is price (and its derivatives, revenue and profit).

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