Having people personally go out of the way for a little bit of friction tells you how valuable, and perhaps, serious these people are. I'd rather have that group of people contributing to my projects than fly by night agents that just shit all over the floor and expect treats for doing so.
Contributions aren't just commits/prs. It's also opening issues. The harder it is to provide feedback, the more likely users are going to seek a different library or tool, and depending on the actual objective of releasing or publishing code, that is not ideal.
I do agree on the fly by night agents, especially since so much is actually just agents acting on behalf of folks who just spam whatever permissions are requested in Claude/Codex.
Don't think open submission feedback is worth much anymore, at least not the amount of effort it requires to curate it. Having friction still seems like a great way to get decent feedback nowadays rather than needing to manually curate 100s of issues where 98% of them are spam/garbage.
That's fine if the projects are in a single place (e.g. GitHub) as you only need to create one account.
If every project requires its own username/password just to report a bug, I may do that for the first 2 or 3, but not for every project. I'm also unlikely to create accounts on hosting platforms I don't intend on using outside of reporting the single bug.
That's fine, maybe they don't want casual users like you to be part of their community. There is a reason to prefer group coherence over availability. Availability doesn't actually help the group for most online communities, it's actively a hinderance.
It's also a useful signal in the age of LLMs. A bit of hoops to jump through before a PR can now be seen as a good thing.
Re:Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
by colesantiago on Monday August 17, 2026 @01:42PM
(#49334799)
You don't really need GitHub's 'community'
It is mostly all AI agents, bots and spam anyway, not to mention most projects are now vibecoded slop on there.
You're better off going to a different forge or hosting one yourself.
Codeberg has a no LLMs policy which is very attractive for many.
I hate to admit it, but GitHub has a massive community. I’ve personally seen a project leave it and then contributions dropped significantly.