FWIW the open source scene (at least in the US) can often have very similar dynamics. I believe it was Ashley Williams who put it best by saying that in the Rust community (where I am), one's influence is determined by one's free time. I've noticed over time that in certain areas it can very much be those with the least experience on a subject (but the most free time) who wield the most influence.
> I've noticed over time that in certain areas it can very much be those with the least experience on a subject (but the most free time) who wield the most influence.
Unfortunately, I have found similar. A prime example I feel is Reddit mods, who all do it for free and spend countless hours moderating a community. In fact powermods, the most influential ones, were moderating a decent handful of communities. There wasn’t necessarily any reason for them to be in power specifically other than they had the time and desire for that power. No real need to interact with the community or even know what they were saying, as long as you could remove enough low quality content to retain your position.
I find that phenomenon in many self-organizing communities. it is often true that those with the most free time do get to research the problems and solutions more and have good answers, but even if they do, they dominate the conversation in an inherently unsustainable way. they either drive out newcomers or burn themselves out - sometimes both!
I think that is what HN is getting out of this article.
Lots of us have side biz, or are working on something important to us, and we often think our product is better than the leaders of the industry. Heck, from a data/math point of view, mine is the best, without a question. I just don't have the charisma or connections to make it the number 1.
I know my output(science) is going to last beyond my lifetime, even if I'm not nationally popular. I have academics and international leaders reading my work. Good enough for me.
You say it like it's a bad thing. I guess it's a bias to be aware of so the community can try to compensate, but there's really no other way. Power goes to those who are contributing. If I'm building an open-source compiler I'd love to give power to the world renowned experts on compilers, but unfortunately they are not participating.
If you're building something that has a big community and sees a lot of use, you've got a lot of different stakeholders with different needs. The folks contributing to the compiler, language, standard library, or build system directly are not your only stakeholders, nor are they your only contributors.
Successful languages don't become successful without a rich ecosystem behind them. The people responsible for those projects are probably more important to your continued success than anyone contributing to the language itself.
What processes you have makes a huge difference in terms of who you give power to. If you have formal processes that ensure that folks have time to weigh in on things, and you make it easy to follow what's going on (signal-to-noise ratio is important here!), you can get much more relevant feedback from a much larger and more important group of stakeholders than if you handle things in a noisy, fast-moving zulip.
