10 ms·

It 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, t

by andai 9mo ago

It 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.

k8sToGo 9mo ago
If you want me to read your comment, please pay me $1 first... if I find your comment interesting I might refund.
- hermanb 9mo ago
  I had this idea / pet project once where I did exactly this for email. Emails would immediately bounce with payment link and explanation. If you paid you get credit on a ledger per email address. Only then the mail goes through. You can also integrate it in clients by adding payment/reward claim headers.
  - Fnoord 9mo ago
    Bill Gates already had this idea. All efforts to change email were already documented 25 years ago. The biggest changes are it is more centralized these days, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, JMAP innovation, oh... and one more thing! It is HUGE!! HTML email is the default...
    - TurdF3rguson 9mo ago
      Yeah I remember this from "The Road Ahead" which I chanced upon one time in the 90s. I thought it was a silly idea.
  - zx8080 9mo ago
    Scammers (and spammers) always got $1! That's why there's a lot of the scam ads on google, fb, apple. So the paywall email firewall will not work as desired.
    - Dylan16807 9mo ago
      Not many email attacks are worth an entire dollar. It would be very very effective at reducing spam. And too effective at reducing everything else.
      - zx8080 9mo ago
        Emails to CEOs they do worth.
        Dylan16807 9mo ago
        So only CEOs will get spam, and it's effective for 99.9% of people? I would not describe that as "will not work as desired".
        AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
        And it would even still work for the CEO, they would just have to charge more than $1. The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.
        SJC_Hacker 9mo ago
        > The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy. Its called cryptocurrency
        AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
        First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me?
- jt2190 9mo ago
  The market currently values your reading of HN comments at $0.
  - AlexCoventry 9mo ago
    I'm sure astroturfers value it more highly than that.
    - vasco 9mo ago
      The only way for you to be sure of that is if you're one.
      - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
        I'm sure there's literature out there on how much astroturfers are paid.
- eps 9mo ago
  Who's hit with the transaction fees though?
Bewelge 9mo ago
> 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.
- lelandbatey 9mo ago
  The idea is that sustained and recurring communication would have a cost that quickly drops to zero. But establishing a new line of communication would have a slight cost, but which would quickly drop to zero. A poorly thought out hypothetical, just to illustrate: Make a connection at a dinner party? Sure, technically it costs 10¢ make that initial text message/phone call, then the next 5 messages are 1¢ each, but thereafter all the messages are free. Existing relationships: free. New relationships, extremely cheap. Spamming at scale: more expensive. I have no idea if that's a good idea or not, but I think that's an ok representation of the idea.
  - Bewelge 9mo ago
    Haha yea, I almost didn't post my comment since the original submission is about contributors where a one time "introduction fee" would solve these problems. I was specifically thinking about general communication. Comparing the quality of communication in physical letters (from a time when that was the only affordable way to communicate) to messages we send each other nowadays.
ramon156 9mo ago
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).
- oldpersonintx 9mo ago
  [dead]
- kurtis_reed 9mo ago
  You get it refunded
  - Nevermark 9mo ago
    The default could should be to refund. That would make not-refunding culturally crass unless it was warranted. With manual options for: 0. (Default, refund) 1. (Default refund) + Auto-send discouragement response. (But allow it.) 2. (Default refund) + Block. 3. Do not refund 4. Do not refund + Auto-send discouragement response. 5. Do not refund + Block. 6. Do not refund + Block + Report SPAM (Boom!) And typically use $1 fee, to discourage spam. And $10 fee, for important, open, but high frequency addresses, as that covers the cost of reviewing high throughput email, so useful email did get identified and reviewed. (With the low quality communication subsidizing the high quality communication.) The latter would be very useful in enabling in-demand contact doors to remain completely open, without being overwhelmed. Think of a CEO or other well known person, who does want an open channel of feedback from anyone, ideally, but is going to have to have someone vet feedback for the most impactful comments, and summarize any important trend in the rest. $10 strongly disincentives low quality communication, and covers the cost of getting value out of communication (for everyone).
    - zx8080 9mo ago
      $10 will be a honeypot for scammers.
_puk 9mo ago
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.
nl 9mo ago
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.
- rifty 9mo ago
  It feels like the problem here comes from the reluctance to utilize a negative sum outcome for rejection. Instead of introducing accidental perverse incentives, if rejected your stake shouldn't go to the repo, 50% could be returned, and 50% deleted. If it times out or gets approved you get 100% back. If a repo rejects too often or is seen doing so unfairly reputation would balance participation.
  - nl 9mo ago
    No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible.
    - rifty 9mo ago
      Ahh, I see now the angle you were coming at it from, my wrong!
    - AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
      > No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible. Isn't this problem unrelated to cryptocurrency? There will be the US dollar, and the people involved will be incentivized to keep its value high, e.g. by pressuring or invading other countries to prevent them from switching to other currencies. Or they'll be incentivized to adopt policies that cause consumer and government debt to become unreasonably excessive to create a large enough pool of debts denominated in that currency that they can create an inordinate amount of it without crashing its value. Or on the other side of the coin, there will be countries with currencies they knowingly devalue, either because they can force the people in that country to accept them anyway or because devaluing their currency makes their exports more competitive and simultaneously allows them to spend the currency they printed. If anything cryptocurrency could hypothetically be better at reducing these perverse incentives, because if good rules are chosen at the outset and get ossified into the protocol then it's harder for bad actors to corrupt something that requires broad consensus to change.
bastawhiz 9mo ago
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.
- zahrevsky 9mo ago
  The system could be set up to automatically refund, if your PR wasn't checked for over $AVERAGE_TIME_TO_FIRST_REVIEW$ days. The variable is specific to the project, and even can be recalculated regularly and be parameterized with PR size.
  - bastawhiz 9mo ago
    I don't think you heard what I said: I don't want to pay money to contribute to someone else's project. If I fixed your bug, I'm not paying you money for you to ignore my PR for _any_ amount of time, I'm simply not going to contribute back.
hamasho 9mo ago
But one way to get better at communication is try and error. This solution makes trying much harder, and eventually leads less good communicators.
tonymet 9mo ago
in the 90s, before bayesian spam filtering, Microsoft proposed a proof of work for email along these lines. it would cost the server a few cents per message to sign and send emails, so spammers would not be able to afford spam, but regular senders could handle a small fee per day.
spruce_tips 9mo ago
I built a side project to solve this for myself that’s basically an inbox toll system. It funnels emails from unknown senders into a hidden mailbox and auto replies to the sender with a payment link. After the sender pays, the email gets released to recipient’s main inbox. Recipient can set custom toll amounts, whitelist, etc. Would be happy to share the code, just lmk!
- kurtis_reed 9mo ago
  Please do share!
  - spruce_tips 9mo ago
    https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth this was part of a little saas tool i was building (since retired it) so spent some time today having an LLM help me pull it into a headless service. far from perfect but sharing anyway. details in readme!
- Quizzical4230 9mo ago
  Yes please!
  - spruce_tips 9mo ago
    https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth this was part of a little saas tool i was building (since retired it) so spent some time today having an LLM help me pull it into a headless service. far from perfect but sharing anyway. details in readme!
- chasd00 9mo ago
  I’m interested in seeing this too. Heh an agent will gladly pay a dollar of their human’s money if they can declare success.
  - spruce_tips 9mo ago
unfunco 9mo ago
People with very little to no skill in software development are spending hundreds of dollars on tokens to fix things for clout, will an extra dollar barrier really slow things down noticeably?
- tehlike 9mo ago
  There are a lot of _free_ models on opencode.
geysersam 9mo ago
Or just don't refund it. Most people want to make contributions to open source, and everyone can afford $1. Exceptions can be made for very active contributors.
- lejalv 9mo ago
  In fact, we can use an automated schedule: first PR - if rejected, 5€ are drawn from the contributor’s account, then 4€, 3€, etc (plug in your favourite decreasing function, round to 0€ when sufficiently close). But, crucially, if accepted, the contributor gets to draw 5€ from the repository’s fund of failed PRs (if it is there), so that first bona fide contributors are incentiviced to contribute. Nobody gets to profit from failed PRs except successful new contributors. Virtuous cycle, does not appeal to the individual self-interest of repo maintainers. One thing I am unsure of is whether fly-by AI contributions are typically made with for-free AI or there's already a hidden cost to them. This expected cost of machine-driven contribution is a factor to take into account when coming up with the upside/downside of first PR. PS. this is a Gedankenexperiment, I am not sure what introducing monetary rewards / penalties would do to the social dynamics, but trying with small amounts may teach us something.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  >everyone can afford $1 Well that's awfully assumptuous. So now a young college kid needs to spend time and money to be able to help out a project? I also don't like that this model inentivizes a few big PR's over small, lean, readable ones. We're completely mixing up the incentives here anyway. We need better moderation and a cost to the account, not to each ccontribution. SomethingAwful had a great system for this 20 years ago; make it cost $10-30 to be an external contributor and report people who make slop/consistently bad PR's. They get reviewed and lose their contributor status, or even their entire account. Sure, you can whip up another account, but you can't whip the reputation back up. That's how you make sure seasoned accounts are trustworthy and keep accounts honest.
phantomathkg 9mo ago
This means someone with tons of money can spam anyone repo, while the lower income people cannot raise as many PR or speak as much as the filthy rich.
- collingreen 9mo ago
  Which is true now as well, but at least the cost is more than zero
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  The incentives are way off too. Now you have a financial incentive as a maintainter to throw out normally well meaning PR's as "bad".
  - judahmeek 9mo ago
    ...which is balanced out by all the other incentives that have the maintainer currently contributing unpaid time & effort.
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      I don't think those are are valued as we think they should be. Hence this whole system to begin with.
KronisLV 9mo ago
> It should just be $1 to submit PR. This, but for an escrow so people can show their actual interest in GitHub Issues, instead of just demanding new features or fixes. So if it gets implemented, the devs get the bounty, if not then they're refunded. I sometimes think about how this could help fund open source at least a little bit. No comment on making PRs paid, not everyone would react well to that, and some people might be in countries and circumstances where any amount would be problematic.
- boltzmann-brain 9mo ago
  pay-to-commit has been discussed in the article linked here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811 escrow is a more complex system, and there are multiple possible implementations, but the nice thing is you can skip it and get the same results. let's assume for a second that the repo owner spends time on PR review, and that time needs to be reimbursed. let's also assume that the person pushing a PR expects some sort of bounty. then as long as the review price is less than bounty price, there's no need for escrow. the pushing party goes out on a limb paying the reviewer to merge their PR, but also expects (rightly or not) to be remunerated for solving the bounty. whether they really did solve it is in the remit of the bounty originator, who might or might not be part of the group controlling the repository. if there's escrow, then the bounty giver probably has to be part of that group. not having escrow allows for crowd funding by interests outside of the repo controlling party. escrow is only usefully different in a situation when there is no bounty, you want to push code, and then you want to say "ok, here's some money, and here's a PR, either accept the PR and give me money or don't accept it and take my money" as a means of skipping the line or getting a shot at pushing in the first place. however, at that point two things are apparent: 1. you expect the reviewer to do work required to implement your desired changes for free and 2. this might start getting abused, with PRs getting rejected (to gain money) but then modified / refactored versions of this code being pushed via commits or from another user who is the repo owner's puppet (refactoring code is becoming super cheap due to AI). so that degenerates escrow-to-push into a scam. there are more considerations like that in the article I linked to. I agree that an economy around FOSS pushing would be desirable. it also doesn't preclude free-as-in-money contributions - there are at least two mechanisms that would allow it: 1. you get sponsored by someone who sees your talent (either gives you money to push, or they have push access to that repo and can hand it out free) 2. you create a fork that becomes so good and valuable that upstream pulls from you for free ultimately becoming a respected developer with free push access to contended repositories should be something that you can monetize to some extent that's purely within your remit, and it would greatly reduce unserious bullshit coming from third parties (especially all those weird hardware developers) and make it easier to be a FOSS dev.
weli 9mo ago
$1 might not be a lot to you, but in some countries that's the daily wage. Even in rich countries one dollar for some might be the difference between eating or not eating that day. Paywalling without any regional pricing consideration it's just going to incentivize people from poor countries to not participate in your project. Maybe that's okay for you but it's something to consider.
- poulpy123 9mo ago
  I don't like this idea but the people unable to afford $1 don't have time to propose PR
  - lobsterthief 9mo ago
    That’s not true—it depends entirely on the country..
  - weli 9mo ago
    I'm glad that you are lucky enough to never have had to choose between filling your gas tank or eating. It's sadly the state many people live in.
    - poulpy123 9mo ago
      You're right, I'm fortunate enough to not have this experience. But not only both food and gas are much more than 1€, but also people in this situation are too focused on finding a way to make money to care about submitting merge requests
  - elxr 9mo ago
    Plenty of teens in poorer countries actively devoting a lot of time to practicing programming. $1 is a lot for a PR.
toddmorrow 9mo ago
there are many many examples where paying a nominal fee seems like it would get rid of the clowns. and it would. almost any place where the public can "post". but the challenge is to not inadvertently throw out the good ones. once notable policy SQL Server enterprise support used to have was you must be available 24/7 if you submit a critical issue. Microsoft was demanding as much of their time as our time. not sure how that could be rolled out to repos but it worked

by andai 9mo ago

k8sToGo 9mo ago

If you want me to read your comment, please pay me $1 first... if I find your comment interesting I might refund.

hermanb 9mo ago
I had this idea / pet project once where I did exactly this for email. Emails would immediately bounce with payment link and explanation. If you paid you get credit on a ledger per email address. Only then the mail goes through. You can also integrate it in clients by adding payment/reward claim headers.
- Fnoord 9mo ago
  Bill Gates already had this idea. All efforts to change email were already documented 25 years ago. The biggest changes are it is more centralized these days, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, JMAP innovation, oh... and one more thing! It is HUGE!! HTML email is the default...
  - TurdF3rguson 9mo ago
    Yeah I remember this from "The Road Ahead" which I chanced upon one time in the 90s. I thought it was a silly idea.
- zx8080 9mo ago
  Scammers (and spammers) always got $1! That's why there's a lot of the scam ads on google, fb, apple. So the paywall email firewall will not work as desired.
  - Dylan16807 9mo ago
    Not many email attacks are worth an entire dollar. It would be very very effective at reducing spam. And too effective at reducing everything else.
    - zx8080 9mo ago
      Emails to CEOs they do worth.
      - Dylan16807 9mo ago
        So only CEOs will get spam, and it's effective for 99.9% of people? I would not describe that as "will not work as desired".
        AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
        And it would even still work for the CEO, they would just have to charge more than $1. The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.
        SJC_Hacker 9mo ago
        > The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy. Its called cryptocurrency
        AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
        First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me?
jt2190 9mo ago
The market currently values your reading of HN comments at $0.
- AlexCoventry 9mo ago
  I'm sure astroturfers value it more highly than that.
  - vasco 9mo ago
    The only way for you to be sure of that is if you're one.
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      I'm sure there's literature out there on how much astroturfers are paid.
eps 9mo ago
Who's hit with the transaction fees though?

Bewelge 9mo ago

> 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.

lelandbatey 9mo ago
The idea is that sustained and recurring communication would have a cost that quickly drops to zero. But establishing a new line of communication would have a slight cost, but which would quickly drop to zero. A poorly thought out hypothetical, just to illustrate: Make a connection at a dinner party? Sure, technically it costs 10¢ make that initial text message/phone call, then the next 5 messages are 1¢ each, but thereafter all the messages are free. Existing relationships: free. New relationships, extremely cheap. Spamming at scale: more expensive. I have no idea if that's a good idea or not, but I think that's an ok representation of the idea.
- Bewelge 9mo ago
  Haha yea, I almost didn't post my comment since the original submission is about contributors where a one time "introduction fee" would solve these problems. I was specifically thinking about general communication. Comparing the quality of communication in physical letters (from a time when that was the only affordable way to communicate) to messages we send each other nowadays.

ramon156 9mo ago

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).

oldpersonintx 9mo ago
[dead]
kurtis_reed 9mo ago
You get it refunded
- Nevermark 9mo ago
  The default could should be to refund. That would make not-refunding culturally crass unless it was warranted. With manual options for: 0. (Default, refund) 1. (Default refund) + Auto-send discouragement response. (But allow it.) 2. (Default refund) + Block. 3. Do not refund 4. Do not refund + Auto-send discouragement response. 5. Do not refund + Block. 6. Do not refund + Block + Report SPAM (Boom!) And typically use $1 fee, to discourage spam. And $10 fee, for important, open, but high frequency addresses, as that covers the cost of reviewing high throughput email, so useful email did get identified and reviewed. (With the low quality communication subsidizing the high quality communication.) The latter would be very useful in enabling in-demand contact doors to remain completely open, without being overwhelmed. Think of a CEO or other well known person, who does want an open channel of feedback from anyone, ideally, but is going to have to have someone vet feedback for the most impactful comments, and summarize any important trend in the rest. $10 strongly disincentives low quality communication, and covers the cost of getting value out of communication (for everyone).
  - zx8080 9mo ago
    $10 will be a honeypot for scammers.

_puk 9mo ago

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.

nl 9mo ago

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.

rifty 9mo ago
It feels like the problem here comes from the reluctance to utilize a negative sum outcome for rejection. Instead of introducing accidental perverse incentives, if rejected your stake shouldn't go to the repo, 50% could be returned, and 50% deleted. If it times out or gets approved you get 100% back. If a repo rejects too often or is seen doing so unfairly reputation would balance participation.
- nl 9mo ago
  No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible.
  - rifty 9mo ago
    Ahh, I see now the angle you were coming at it from, my wrong!
  - AnthonyMouse 9mo ago
    > No, the perverse incentive is that there will be RepoCoin, and the people involved will be incentivized to make the price of that as high as possible. Isn't this problem unrelated to cryptocurrency? There will be the US dollar, and the people involved will be incentivized to keep its value high, e.g. by pressuring or invading other countries to prevent them from switching to other currencies. Or they'll be incentivized to adopt policies that cause consumer and government debt to become unreasonably excessive to create a large enough pool of debts denominated in that currency that they can create an inordinate amount of it without crashing its value. Or on the other side of the coin, there will be countries with currencies they knowingly devalue, either because they can force the people in that country to accept them anyway or because devaluing their currency makes their exports more competitive and simultaneously allows them to spend the currency they printed. If anything cryptocurrency could hypothetically be better at reducing these perverse incentives, because if good rules are chosen at the outset and get ossified into the protocol then it's harder for bad actors to corrupt something that requires broad consensus to change.

bastawhiz 9mo ago

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.

zahrevsky 9mo ago
The system could be set up to automatically refund, if your PR wasn't checked for over $AVERAGE_TIME_TO_FIRST_REVIEW$ days. The variable is specific to the project, and even can be recalculated regularly and be parameterized with PR size.
- bastawhiz 9mo ago
  I don't think you heard what I said: I don't want to pay money to contribute to someone else's project. If I fixed your bug, I'm not paying you money for you to ignore my PR for _any_ amount of time, I'm simply not going to contribute back.

hamasho 9mo ago

But one way to get better at communication is try and error. This solution makes trying much harder, and eventually leads less good communicators.

tonymet 9mo ago

in the 90s, before bayesian spam filtering, Microsoft proposed a proof of work for email along these lines. it would cost the server a few cents per message to sign and send emails, so spammers would not be able to afford spam, but regular senders could handle a small fee per day.

spruce_tips 9mo ago

I built a side project to solve this for myself that’s basically an inbox toll system. It funnels emails from unknown senders into a hidden mailbox and auto replies to the sender with a payment link. After the sender pays, the email gets released to recipient’s main inbox. Recipient can set custom toll amounts, whitelist, etc. Would be happy to share the code, just lmk!

kurtis_reed 9mo ago
Please do share!
- spruce_tips 9mo ago
  https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth this was part of a little saas tool i was building (since retired it) so spent some time today having an LLM help me pull it into a headless service. far from perfect but sharing anyway. details in readme!
Quizzical4230 9mo ago
Yes please!
- spruce_tips 9mo ago
  https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth this was part of a little saas tool i was building (since retired it) so spent some time today having an LLM help me pull it into a headless service. far from perfect but sharing anyway. details in readme!
chasd00 9mo ago
I’m interested in seeing this too. Heh an agent will gladly pay a dollar of their human’s money if they can declare success.
- spruce_tips 9mo ago

unfunco 9mo ago

People with very little to no skill in software development are spending hundreds of dollars on tokens to fix things for clout, will an extra dollar barrier really slow things down noticeably?

tehlike 9mo ago
There are a lot of _free_ models on opencode.

geysersam 9mo ago

Or just don't refund it. Most people want to make contributions to open source, and everyone can afford $1. Exceptions can be made for very active contributors.

lejalv 9mo ago
In fact, we can use an automated schedule: first PR - if rejected, 5€ are drawn from the contributor’s account, then 4€, 3€, etc (plug in your favourite decreasing function, round to 0€ when sufficiently close). But, crucially, if accepted, the contributor gets to draw 5€ from the repository’s fund of failed PRs (if it is there), so that first bona fide contributors are incentiviced to contribute. Nobody gets to profit from failed PRs except successful new contributors. Virtuous cycle, does not appeal to the individual self-interest of repo maintainers. One thing I am unsure of is whether fly-by AI contributions are typically made with for-free AI or there's already a hidden cost to them. This expected cost of machine-driven contribution is a factor to take into account when coming up with the upside/downside of first PR. PS. this is a Gedankenexperiment, I am not sure what introducing monetary rewards / penalties would do to the social dynamics, but trying with small amounts may teach us something.
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
>everyone can afford $1 Well that's awfully assumptuous. So now a young college kid needs to spend time and money to be able to help out a project? I also don't like that this model inentivizes a few big PR's over small, lean, readable ones. We're completely mixing up the incentives here anyway. We need better moderation and a cost to the account, not to each ccontribution. SomethingAwful had a great system for this 20 years ago; make it cost $10-30 to be an external contributor and report people who make slop/consistently bad PR's. They get reviewed and lose their contributor status, or even their entire account. Sure, you can whip up another account, but you can't whip the reputation back up. That's how you make sure seasoned accounts are trustworthy and keep accounts honest.

phantomathkg 9mo ago

This means someone with tons of money can spam anyone repo, while the lower income people cannot raise as many PR or speak as much as the filthy rich.

collingreen 9mo ago
Which is true now as well, but at least the cost is more than zero
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
The incentives are way off too. Now you have a financial incentive as a maintainter to throw out normally well meaning PR's as "bad".
- judahmeek 9mo ago
  ...which is balanced out by all the other incentives that have the maintainer currently contributing unpaid time & effort.
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    I don't think those are are valued as we think they should be. Hence this whole system to begin with.

KronisLV 9mo ago

> It should just be $1 to submit PR. This, but for an escrow so people can show their actual interest in GitHub Issues, instead of just demanding new features or fixes. So if it gets implemented, the devs get the bounty, if not then they're refunded. I sometimes think about how this could help fund open source at least a little bit. No comment on making PRs paid, not everyone would react well to that, and some people might be in countries and circumstances where any amount would be problematic.

boltzmann-brain 9mo ago
pay-to-commit has been discussed in the article linked here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938811 escrow is a more complex system, and there are multiple possible implementations, but the nice thing is you can skip it and get the same results. let's assume for a second that the repo owner spends time on PR review, and that time needs to be reimbursed. let's also assume that the person pushing a PR expects some sort of bounty. then as long as the review price is less than bounty price, there's no need for escrow. the pushing party goes out on a limb paying the reviewer to merge their PR, but also expects (rightly or not) to be remunerated for solving the bounty. whether they really did solve it is in the remit of the bounty originator, who might or might not be part of the group controlling the repository. if there's escrow, then the bounty giver probably has to be part of that group. not having escrow allows for crowd funding by interests outside of the repo controlling party. escrow is only usefully different in a situation when there is no bounty, you want to push code, and then you want to say "ok, here's some money, and here's a PR, either accept the PR and give me money or don't accept it and take my money" as a means of skipping the line or getting a shot at pushing in the first place. however, at that point two things are apparent: 1. you expect the reviewer to do work required to implement your desired changes for free and 2. this might start getting abused, with PRs getting rejected (to gain money) but then modified / refactored versions of this code being pushed via commits or from another user who is the repo owner's puppet (refactoring code is becoming super cheap due to AI). so that degenerates escrow-to-push into a scam. there are more considerations like that in the article I linked to. I agree that an economy around FOSS pushing would be desirable. it also doesn't preclude free-as-in-money contributions - there are at least two mechanisms that would allow it: 1. you get sponsored by someone who sees your talent (either gives you money to push, or they have push access to that repo and can hand it out free) 2. you create a fork that becomes so good and valuable that upstream pulls from you for free ultimately becoming a respected developer with free push access to contended repositories should be something that you can monetize to some extent that's purely within your remit, and it would greatly reduce unserious bullshit coming from third parties (especially all those weird hardware developers) and make it easier to be a FOSS dev.

weli 9mo ago

$1 might not be a lot to you, but in some countries that's the daily wage. Even in rich countries one dollar for some might be the difference between eating or not eating that day. Paywalling without any regional pricing consideration it's just going to incentivize people from poor countries to not participate in your project. Maybe that's okay for you but it's something to consider.

poulpy123 9mo ago
I don't like this idea but the people unable to afford $1 don't have time to propose PR
- lobsterthief 9mo ago
  That’s not true—it depends entirely on the country..
- weli 9mo ago
  I'm glad that you are lucky enough to never have had to choose between filling your gas tank or eating. It's sadly the state many people live in.
  - poulpy123 9mo ago
    You're right, I'm fortunate enough to not have this experience. But not only both food and gas are much more than 1€, but also people in this situation are too focused on finding a way to make money to care about submitting merge requests
- elxr 9mo ago
  Plenty of teens in poorer countries actively devoting a lot of time to practicing programming. $1 is a lot for a PR.

toddmorrow 9mo ago

there are many many examples where paying a nominal fee seems like it would get rid of the clowns. and it would. almost any place where the public can "post". but the challenge is to not inadvertently throw out the good ones. once notable policy SQL Server enterprise support used to have was you must be available 24/7 if you submit a critical issue. Microsoft was demanding as much of their time as our time. not sure how that could be rolled out to repos but it worked