You were probably thinking about geeks leaving heartwarming comments under a forgotten repository while reading this.

But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent.

  > Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet.

  > It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea

  > You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthy

The "traces" I love most is people who post complicated enough issues on github repos that show the depth of their use case.

Where there's some detail that's causing them problems, and they would not hit it unless they were actually making use of the project in a productive way. It's sort of the ultimate proof of the work I did being useful for somebody and a genuine motivator to resolve that issue for them too.