Nadia Eghbal Highlighter Session on Working in Public (August 2020)

A Highlighter session with Nadia Eghbal about her book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.

Why it was kept

Kyle’s notes pull out the frame Eghbal uses for creator platforms. On GitHub you can see that a project with 400 contributors may have three people writing 75% of the commits, and few other platforms expose that structure. He also kept her contrast between ProductHunt, where anyone can read but posting is limited, and Clubhouse, where privacy constrains who can even listen. He also saved Kevin Systrom’s line that social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, and Daniel Davies’ summary of her taxonomy of communities (federations, clubs, stadiums, toys).

Kyle read the book; see Working in Public.

As Kyle captured it

• Had call with Nadia Eghbal on Highlighter about Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Open Source Community Online Communities
  • Excerpt: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O2CGnX936CqhJS6VEUw4GxLw6V_9OmNM/view [STALE] (the shared excerpt now returns 404, checked 2026-10-05)
  • “Social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, where we all understand that it works, but not how it works.” Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram
  • Nadia Eghbal previously worked for the Sloan Foundation and the Ford Foundation and did research
  • Simple structures to identify Platforms that are centered around Digital Creators?
    • On GitHub if you go to any open source project you can see how many contributors there are; some projects share that to market this project
    • But then you can click through and see the top 3 people have authored 75% of the commits even if they have 400 contributors
    • We don’t have that kind of measure for every other community and platform
    • On Twitter you can see people responding to something but you can’t easily create a thread about someone else
    • There might be a lot of chatter / conversation, but it often is centered around one person making the commentary (e.g. a Twitter thread usually revolves around one person)
    • Limiting the replies can be more creator centric because its still publicly visible but
  • https://twitter.com/Daniel_E_Davies/status/1289948204994158592?s=20
  • ProductHunt is an example of a community where anyone can view the post which helps them scale but then not everyone can post a product, so you limit the contributions to the site.
    • If you made it completely private it becomes constrained not only in conversations, but who can even listen to these conversations (e.g. Clubhouse) so you’re not balancing the need to make things public.