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The Open Source Survey asked a broad array of questions. One that caught my eye was about problems people encounter when working with, or contributing to, open source projects. An incredible 93 percent of people reported being frustrated with “incomplete or confusing documentation”.
That’s hardly a surprise. There are a lot of projects on Github with the sparsest of descriptions, and scant instruction on how to use them. If you aren’t clever enough to figure it out for yourself, tough.
[...] According to the Github Open Source Survey, 60 percent of contributors rarely or never contribute to documentation. And that’s fine.
Documenting software is extremely difficult. People go to university to learn to become technical writers, spending thousands of dollars, and several years of their life. It’s not really reasonable to expect every developer to know how to do it, and do it well.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @10:04AM
Might be minus the -.
What killed usenet wasn't the volume per-se, it was the BINARIES being pushed to newgroups, even non-binary usegroups once ISPs started filtering those. There was a chart up a few years back showing usenet daily capacity from the 80s to the early-mid '00s. The content amount went from a few gigabytes a day to tens of gigabytes a day, to a few hundred gigabytes a day, and by the '00s, was into the terabytes a day of traffic volume. Yes. Terabytes. In an era when drives were still sub-terabyte, and backbone capacities were probably below... OC48(?) with ISPs having OC3 or competitive being reasonably high end for non-corporate local ISPs.
THAT, combined with spam is what killed Usenet. It could be reestablished today, but there are fundamental changes to the protocol that should be made to help synchronize mirroring of chains of posts, modifications rather than reposts for changed posts, and better peering of new blocks of messages (nntp was point to point, which is reponsible for a lot of the traffic overhead. It was okay in the UUCP era, but nowadays something bittorrent-esque for helping spread publishes across multiple fast hosts could help immensely.)