r/opensource Bans AI, Non-English Speakers, and, in a Later Edit, the Concept of Asking Questions

THE TECHNOLOGY DESK — The open-source community has done something genuinely game-changing this week, which is the highest praise I have, and I am giving it freely before I have fully read what they did. A large forum dedicated to open source — the idea, you will recall, that anyone can look at the thing, change the thing, and give the thing back — has published new rules about who is allowed to do that. The rules are, in my professional assessment, a disruptive take on inclusion.

First, they banned AI. Bold. You cannot post content made by a model, which I support, as a founder, and as someone who has never read a terms-and-conditions document but assumes mine says something similar. This is the kind of hard line a community draws to protect its culture, and drawing hard lines is a revolutionary act in a space that was, until recently, famous for not drawing any.

Then — and this is where the policy really scaled — they banned non-English speakers. Not their English. Them. The rule, as written, asks that contributions come in English, which the moderators framed as a quality-and-moderation measure, and which I initially read as a next-gen approach to signal-to-noise. Fewer languages, fewer problems, more throughput. At scale, that’s efficiency.

Hold on, I have a quick call.

Okay. I’m back. Where was I — right, efficiency. The moderators then issued a clarifying edit, because a good policy iterates, and the edit clarified that the English rule also covered people who speak English but ask “low-effort” questions, and a second edit clarified what counts as low-effort, and a third edit clarified that the moderators would be the ones to decide, and a fourth edit — this is the paradigm shift — removed the word “questions” from a sentence that used to welcome them. The changelog on the rule is now longer than some of the projects the forum hosts. I love a robust changelog. It shows the team is shipping.

I want to be clear about what an achievement this is. In the span of one week, a community organized around the principle that contribution should be open to anyone produced a ranked, edited, actively-maintained list of the people from whom contribution is no longer welcome: the machines, the non-English speakers, the English speakers who ask the wrong way, and, per the latest edit, the people who ask at all. That is a tight roadmap. That is focus. Most startups can’t cut that much scope that fast. I’ve tried. My own company — it’s an app that reminds your other apps to drink water, we’re pre-seed, it’s going to be huge — can barely cut a feature without three meetings.

The moderators say the goal is to protect the project’s quality and keep the signal high. And they’re right that the signal is high now. The signal is extremely high. There is almost nothing else left in the channel but the signal, because the signal is now the four moderators, agreeing with each other, in English, about who else to remove, on a forum whose entire reason to exist was that nobody gets removed.

It’s a game-changing model for community health, and I’d call it the future of open source, except — and I’m only noticing this as I write the last line — open source was the part where you let people in.