The fuck off contact page

I thought this this was just going to be about over complicated forms that scare people away.

Back when I was doing client work for a small agency we would get requests for these contact forms that would have 30+ fields, often many of them required. The forms made strong assumptions about why you were contacting them, and if you did not fit that mold the form was particularly painful.

No one wants to take the time to fill this out, you are losing business.

I would always try to talk them into simplifying. All anyone really needed was Name + Email + Text Area but many were insistent and many of these nightmare forms got built. I genuinely wish I had stats on how many people landed on the forms vs actually filled it out.

The worst part was that the vast majority of these just converted into emails to the owner of the small company with no backing database, because we charged extra for that. You'd spend all that time filling out all those fields and they would get concatenated back into a single string (with new lines and field titles).

I'm reminded of this when I try to submit an issue on some of these GitHub repos with wildly overdone templates. I just want to let you know you have a broken link in your documentation but you're forcing me to fill in my OS and build version and last time I went to the dentist and sign a CLA... and I've just not bothered more than a few times. Enjoy your broken link.

The latter is a byproduct of how GitHub's upperhanding[1]/casting couch culture has overtaken the Web community and how a bunch of software gets built, generally. The Shirky era[2] is gone. You're not seen or to be treated as a neighbor showing up with a helpful tip that one of your pipes has burst. You're going to be seen as another person who wants something from them, or, at best, a starlet who can do something for the cigar champers and'll be willing to put up with a lot of crap because you're trying to build a résumé.

This in large part because of two design decisions that GitHub made early on: the contribution graph on profile pages and naming the bugtracker "GitHub Issues" (and promoting a culture where people with support requests are funneled into the same side door as collaborators trying to keep tabs on software defects—i.e. people who need a real bugtracker).

1. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pez_Dispenser>

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody_(book)>

I really tried to get it on my own, but please, what is the connection between the Seinfeld Episode "The Pez Dispenser" and the "Casting Couch Culture of GitHub"?