My viral GitHub experiment is dying. 955 stars, zero merges this week.

3 months ago I built OpenChaos - a repo where anyone submits PRs and the community votes on what gets merged. No gatekeeping, pure democracy.

Hit #1 on Hacker News, got 700+ stars in the first weeks, TU Delft researchers started studying it, someone tried to delete everything, we had a constitutional crisis. It was beautiful chaos.

Now it’s stalling.

We just had our first week where nothing merged because no PR hit the 10-vote threshold.

955 stars, 75 forks, but the active voters disappeared. The tourists left and the regulars aren’t enough to keep the engine running.

The core problem: the exciting drama of the early weeks (nihilist PRs, “rewrite it in Rust”, dickbutt) generated its own momentum. Now that things calmed down, there’s no reason for people to come back and vote every week.

Things I’ve tried: blog posts documenting each week’s chaos, Discord community, Twitter threads. They worked for spikes but not retention.

Things I’m considering:

∙	Creating a PR to lower the vote threshold (feels like giving up)

∙	Some kind of token/points system for voters (maybe web3?)

∙	Weekly “theme” challenges to give people a reason to submit and vote

∙	Just accepting the natural lifecycle and letting it be

Has anyone here dealt with keeping community engagement alive after the initial viral spike? Would love to hear what worked for you.

repo: https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos

live: https://openchaos.dev