Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

okay now they're just taunting me

On Twitter, the bias seems to be slightly different! An *even stronger* bias towards the third option, but the first option is no longer the least popular.

Can't help but feel like there's some positional bias in the polls...

What it used to be:
- many early adopters were anarchists/communists/etc.
- a huge public commons of highly reusable, high-quality, collaboratively developed libraries on npm, built for the benefit of the public, not for profit
- high degree of interoperability between different people's work, no need for pointless busywork to redo the same work over and over again
- successful(!) 'community specs' designed through community consensus (Promises/A+, CommonJS, etc.), gaining near-universal adoption
- fundamentally different structures from other language ecosystems, both technical and social, to make this work

What went wrong:
- large influx of users from other ecosystems due to hype in startup circles, unfamiliar with the established practices and reasons why
- early adopters failed to effectively convey and explain the ideological basis
- corporate adoption and subsequent capture; increasing "business value", leading to corporate steering of many essential pieces of the ecosystem (language spec, Node.js, etc.)
- npm became npm inc., a for-profit corporation, eventually being acquired by Github due to its large userbase, placing control over the public commons and its namespace in private hands
- ideological basis was forgotten, early adopters eventually left for greener pastures, now an almost purely parasitic environment of people leeching off the commons without guarding its integrity or health
- community-consensus specs started being replaced by "official", by-decree-from-up-high language specs (CommonJS -> ESM, Promises/A+ -> ES Promises)
- widespread adoption of these "official" specs, even though they were in many ways worse, due to their "official" label and many people assuming that what a central authority says must be correct or better
- rapid increase in shiny, well-marketed new tooling that is not interoperable with the existing ecosystem at all, and frequently works less well
- more and more commercial/proprietary 'sidecar' services (eg. Snyk) that you are expected to use, sometimes replacing open initiatives
- now an ecosystem and public commons that is rotting in every aspect with no real hope for recovery

... we should probably learn from this?

(I promise this is not a shitpost)

another poll

"Overseas airlines are having to cancel hundreds of flights as they grapple with coronavirus-related staffing shortages weeks after they ditched rules requiring passengers and staff to mask up in the air."

Gee if only somebody had predicted that

poll