Skin in the Game

> Skin in the game

In the title but never elaborated on. (Kind of like CDO.[1])

Anyone who makes an effort has skin in the game. Unless your PR was made by ChatGPT or you are sending out spam PRs, you have skin in the game. (Of course there’s an asymmetry here since the maintainer has to deal with this spam. But isn’t it like email? Eventually with enough spam it will be tolerated to by-default ignore solicitations based on heuristics.)

Someone can spend a week on a PR and get immediately rejected because the maintainer liked neither the approach nor the feature. Okay but wait, you say, why didn’t you just ask about the design before you made the PR? Because some projects will politely say “send patches” if you first do a preliminary feeler-inquiry. They won’t even tell you what the chances of such a change being accepted and will just give you a generic “we will judge it on its merit and usefulness”.[2]

> In a sense this is a generic rant about missing the “good old times” (that probably never were), where people talked to each other eye to eye.

They’re simulating eye-to-eye/real life interactions. In real life I can be eight different people under my real name because physical interactions are localized. On the public Internet, under the same name, everything is in the same place.

And the Internet has gotten more hostile over the decades.

[1] https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/3/26/rust-cdo/

[2] I have a particular project in mind

Anonymity is a many-faceted issue. I have various personas on the Internet, but the truth is that any serious research can probably link them together.

Why do most people want anonymity (or pseudonymity)? Most of us are not in any sort of actual danger. If someone links my identities together, nothing horrible is going to happen. At worst, my employer will get some nasty email by someone I offended with an uncareful remark, which would have no consequences beyond a confused question.

Is it just a matter of comfort? Is it not wanting to have to be so careful what we say? Is it because we actually have different facets to our personalities, and want to give each of those facets expression?

Anyway: My open source projects are linked to my real identity. That's not an aspect of my identity I have any reason to hide. I don't see why anyone should. Heck, if you're young, your contributions may be important to your career: "Look what I did, you should hire me!"

A lot of things could be done, most projects don't do much that is extra work. In practice most projects do something that is within what is socially acceptable, what people do and what does not require extra effort. The fact that even large projects like the Linux kernel are much more relaxed about pseudonymous contributions today to me is at least an indication that this is where things are going.

I choose to post under my real name, it forces be to think harder and more often about saying some smartass thing (which still happens anyways because I grew up on 4chan or whatefer, slashdot I guess mostly but the internet used to have a rough sense of humor as the default), and to apologize earlier and more often if I get called out on it by someone who is right.

But I’m not sure it nets out in my favor anymore: it’s just a huge handicap to be totally honest and transparent in a world that will really hold past mistakes against you in a very arbitrary way with the only consistent theme being that “important” people rarely face any consequences (some might say these days, even real scrutiny).

My current solution-in-progress is a handle (b7r6) that’s a decent Unix name, has my initials in it so no secret if it matters, but kinda changes the tone to like, “I’m a real person but I kinda want to be treated like an opaque ID unless it’s damn important.”

It’s a sock on the doorknob, not a lock, but I can’t think of anything better just yet.

I've gradually migrated all my accounts to pseudonyms over the past few years, also citing arbitrary social punishment and unlimited downside of sharing my identity, combined with (more) limited upside.