The bottleneck shifts to distribution
"There is a fixed amount of scarce attention to go around, and too many people want it. The metagame becomes: secure attention by any means necessary."
This definitely gave me pause. In a world where writing code is something vastly more people can do, when even GitHub is struggling to keep up with the ballooning number of codebases out there, it’s going to be increasingly impossible to get recognition for your work.
“This is what it takes for your free and open source project to be recognized in 2026: you must secure the endorsement of legendary actress Milla Jovovich. You know, like a celebrity vodka.”
I kicked against this — who says Milla Jovovich wasn’t a first class contributor? The fundamentals of WiFi were created by Hedy Lamarr — but it’s true that the commits are mostly assigned to Sigman, the CEO of Bitcoin Libre. She is credited as architect, he as engineer, together with a contributor called Lu.
Regardless, it’s obvious that attaching her name to the project has drawn it more attention, and that this is a product that could result in a real financial outcome for both her and Sigman. I’m left feeling really glad that I released my first big open source software 22 years ago, when LLMs were an impossibility and big names didn’t attach themselves to open source. I was able to build a community with the funding equivalent of a can of Coke and a packet of crisps; if I’d been competing against Hollywood celebrities, I would have had no chance at all.
But I don’t quite agree with the thesis. Whether you’re famous or not, the way to get a following for your code is to solve a real problem better than anyone else. It’s true that distribution platforms can be kingmakers, but starting small by building real relationships with people you’re trying to help in ways that don’t scale is still a good way to get off the ground. That means building something genuinely differentiated rather than something that’s a few degrees off from what everyone else is doing. For small players with no networks and no names, that’s always been the best way to start, and I think it likely still is.
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