I know I don’t know the answer and I probably don’t even know all the questions you could ask yourself. Interested to hear what others are thinking.
Here are some things I’ve pondered, usually without a clear answer:
- Stop using “good first issue” - use a similar label but one that isn’t aggregated on sites like https://goodfirstissue.dev/
- Tool up! - Use AI agents to reply to PRs that look like they were substantially created by AI tools
- Create a
AGENTS.mdto improve the quality of AI based contributions. - State that your project requires significant open-source experience, refer to that when closing PRs from beginners
- patiently explain how to contribute to projects, that it requires more than what your AI tool can do
- take up woodworking and leave behind open-source
I think “ten years” ago the problem was that there were hardly any people who contributed to open-source projects. Especially if you don’t count contributions from maintainers of other projects. As a result it made sense to increase participation.
Today it feels like there are too many new contributors, or at least the ratio of beginner contributions to reviewers has significantly worsened.
How to (significantly) increase the number of reviewers is a problem to which I don’t know a solution. It seems like it requires patience and personal mentorship, just like ten years ago 
I’m not sure this is a bad thing.