And here’s the uncomfortable realization underneath all of it: we were relying on a friction we didn’t even know we needed. The playbook for building and sustaining open-source communities—accumulated over decades by a lot of people who took the question seriously—assumed newcomers would keep becoming visible on their own. Nobody wrote that assumption down, because nobody had to. Now that it’s failing, the playbook has to change.

This seems to be a common refrain across all of AI-impacted society: we didn’t know we were losing something vital by reducing friction.

Zoe Bee had a video on basically this topic, back in 2023: https://youtu.be/7-_rK0KkB6k