One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#221

Post by mcv » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:05 AM UTC

belorn wrote: post #208

random_visitor wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did, his statements (translated to English) were: -"Don't send PR to popular repos, they'll mark it as spam" -"Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out of 20 is doable" -"Hacktoberfest has had seasons when they didn't get enough participants and had leftover merch. I request every single one of you to go grab one" The t…

Is "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week" The same translation of: "Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out 20 is doable" It is times like this that a third translation would be nice, preferable with a bit more context around the "4 out 20" quote.

It's also bad from Hacktoberfest that they reward unmerged PRs. It would be better if they only rewarded PRs that are actually accepted or at least do something meaningful.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#222

Post by belorn » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:06 AM UTC

random_visitor wrote: post #217

belorn wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week" The same translation of: "Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out 20 is doable" It is times like this that a third translation would be nice, preferable with a bit more context around the "4 out 20" quote.

"4 out of 20" was directly mentioned by him, stating that a it's unlikely that you open 20 PR to random repos and every one of them is marked spam in next 7 days. > I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs This is the translation of his long winded explanation rationalizing on how "Improved docs" PR which adds "Awesome project" to docs is actually an improvement, and the PR is just asking the owner to…

Is there any translated transcription of the video? It seems established that "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs" is not an translated quote but rather an interpretation of the underlying meaning. That is good and all but I would prefer seeing the original source myself, and since it is in a different language, an translation that is as close to the original as possible.

The translation I am most interested in is the 1 minute before and after the "4 out of 20".

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#223

Post by detaro » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #221

belorn wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week" The same translation of: "Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out 20 is doable" It is times like this that a third translation would be nice, preferable with a bit more context around the "4 out 20" quote.

It's also bad from Hacktoberfest that they reward unmerged PRs. It would be better if they only rewarded PRs that are actually accepted or at least do something meaningful.

I worry the spammy set would then turn into a competition on how to harass maintainers to "merge my PR really quickly please please please!", but maybe.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#224

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

andi999 wrote: post #202

saagarjha wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand Hindi well enough to skim the video, which I just did. The impression I got was that this person was an enthusiastic YouTuber with somewhat good intentions: “get free swag”, “learn how to open a pull request which you’ll need to know how to do”, “if your pull request is garbage it’ll get rejected and you won’t get credit”. The issue was that he picked some random repository and made a useless change…

I am curious, when you say there is very little guidance what do you mean? To me in some european states there is zero guidance in IT, or what exactly do you mean.

Well, I’m not saying that Indians are the only people without guidance in this area; it’s just that India in general has it relatively bad. This video was in Hindi-the amount of material actually telling you how to file a good pull request in that language (as opposed to English) is comparatively much lower. In the United States I mostly figured this out by looking at other pull requests, and schools are beginning to teach it as well, but for many in India this video is the best they know of.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#225

Post by pritambarhate » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India.

* "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming".

Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.

* Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.

Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway.

So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy

[2] https://unacademy.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#226

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:09 AM UTC

mcv wrote: post #216

saagarjha wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand Hindi well enough to skim the video, which I just did. The impression I got was that this person was an enthusiastic YouTuber with somewhat good intentions: “get free swag”, “learn how to open a pull request which you’ll need to know how to do”, “if your pull request is garbage it’ll get rejected and you won’t get credit”. The issue was that he picked some random repository and made a useless change…

As far as I can tell his video only did damage: it taught people to spam open source projects, created a lot of bad blood, probably made open source maintainers more suspicious of new contributors, and gave a large number of potential contributors a bad experience. It could have been so much better if he'd actually put in the effort to create a real, meaningful pull request. Show how to clone the project, run it, fix…

I entirely understand why this change was picked and will maintain it was a bad choice. However, I don’t think I can fault them for doing that when the alternative would take significantly more time and effort and detract from the point they were trying to make, which is the steps necessary to make a pull request and not the expected content of one. Given the results, however, I would very much appreciate it if the author of the first video made another one which filled in the gaps of their first one.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#227

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:11 AM UTC

slimsag wrote: post #154

dang wrote: post #153

Is this the same story as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24643894 ? what's the difference?

This would be a continuation of that story, where someone did investigation into the cause. The original story you linked did not have a cause mentioned/found at the time it was posted.

Ok, we'll leave the current thread up then. Thanks!

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#228

Post by mcv » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

amitheonlyone wrote: post #193

gspr wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. I think this gives the spammers too easy an out. They're adults who live in a society. They know full well that spamming is not OK, either offline or online. They also know that what they're doing is spamming, not accidentally overly fervent contributions. Don't cut them any slack. This is pure and simple vanda…

The thing is they may not. For all we know, they're hearing about pull requests the first time and just seeing the presenter showing how easy it is to do, by altering/adding a few words, and get a free t-shirt. I think the blame is all on the channel. The least he could've made a proper pull request by fixing an issue. That said, the blame should also go on DO since they could've made hacktoberfest opt-in. Instead th…

Plenty of blame for both. The channel is appealing to people to spam crap PRs to inactive projects for the sole purpose of winning some swag, and his followers go spam projects for the sole purpose of winning swag.

One guy encourages people to be assholes, and the people respond by acting like assholes. Both leader and followers are wrong in this case.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#229

Post by watwut » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #204

watwut wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pull request I have seen were changing "how to install" into "how to easily install" and such. They were not fixing typos or even making sentences better. They were just meaningless changes.

Not sure why the downvotes... the takeaway is it’s extremely easy for maintainers to tell a well intentioned docs change from the crap referenced in this article

Yes. It is easy to tell them apart. But some people are getting over 50 of these in a day, so even if it is easy to tell, it gets annoying and requires you to deal with spam.

That is the thing with spam in general - you can tell it from legitimate mail easily, but is it still annoying and requires you to deal with it.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#230

Post by saagarjha » Fri, Oct 02, 2020, 8:14 AM UTC

gspr wrote: post #187

random_visitor wrote: post #57

Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't. This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I requ…

> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. I think this gives the spammers too easy an out. They're adults who live in a society. They know full well that spamming is not OK, either offline or online. They also know that what they're doing is spamming, not accidentally overly fervent contributions. Don't cut them any slack. This is pure and simple vanda…

They live in a society that is not your society. I think it is entirely possible, and anecdotally even likely, that they do not realize what they are doing.