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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

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Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#231

Post by saagarjha »

d3nj4l wrote: post #162
xrisk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blame DigitalOcean for not making this opt-in. Blame a bad implementation. Blame anything. But are you seriously gonna blame people looking for free swag? How many of us haven’t done something for swag before?

I completely agree with you, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who shoulders the blame if OSS maintainers start to get wary of README/docs PRs from github users with Indian-sounding names.

It’s fairly trivial to tell a spammy PR from a legitimate one by just looking at the content of it. Even if a docs change by an Indian account who joined yesterday, if it fixes a real typo or something then it is legitimate is it not?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#232

Post by dathinab »

fergie wrote: post #25

I have a couple of vaguely popular repos on github (~100,000 downloads a month) Generally speaking, (T-shirt farming aside), if you find a genuine typo, or small way to improve documentation, then that PR will be very much appreciated. README-typos are quite visible, yet easy for maintainers to overlook. If you are new to GitHub, please do not be discouraged, and as with editing Wikipedia- be bold. (In the large sche…

I love it if people send me PR fixing typos or improving documentation.

The problem a lot of the hacktober fest PR don't do any of that.

E.g. on the rust repo some one added a bunch of PRs which add "### The best" to some readmes.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#233

Post by csdffsdfsdfsdfs »

I fail to see how that person can be blamed for making a video showing how to make pull requests.

It's the organizers of the Hacktoberfest who make people look for his tutorial.

What's next, blaming people who create "Learning To Program" videos on all the bad code that exists in the world?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#234

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#235

Post by ram_rar »

Its good old Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

This culture of submitting a PR to get into conference or get some swag has been there for a while. If I recall correctly, during the peak of openstack summits, it was a requirement to submit some BS PR to show that the engineers contributed to openstack repo.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#236

Post by paule89 »

I am really looking forward for every Hacktoberfest. I try to look for issues, which i can fix with my knowledge. My problem often times is, that i do embedded software and finding an issue here is often times hardware dependend. So now i am looking for other things i might be able to fix. Of course i also want to get my 4th hacktoberfest t-shirt. But i really hate it that people start to spam repositories. Try to fix a real problem, not just changing a name.

i gotta say all this shittoberfest hype now really killed my mood and i hope that in the end the 70000 t-shirts will still be enough. Also i did not have the time to start hacking on the 1st october directly.

it seems to also be a problem of scale. At first only a select few knew about hacktoberfest. now so many people want to participate, that they try to limit the possible reward. So yeah i hope it is still enough for me and not gone, because too many people gamed the system...

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#237

Post by ratww »

saagarjha wrote: post #120
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…

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…

Yep. Most spam PRs were on website repositories, which is exactly what he used as an example in the video.

I don't know Hindi, but since it's a "free swag" video I assume some people with limited or none technical knowledge also saw it. There's a big chance people are just following it without knowing the consequences of their actions.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#238

Post by forgotpwd16 »

chillee wrote: post #148
TheDong wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github allows you to search by dates (newer than, date ranges, etc), so for example, you can add the query "created:>=2020-09-30" (the date the youtube video was uploaded) to get a more accurate list. From this search, it looks like it's definitely on the order of hundreds: https://github.com/search?p=5&q=amazing+project+created%3A%3... I opened a few at random to spot-check, and they all seemed like garbage to me. L…

Sorting by relevance doesn't get you a representative sample - that bubbles PRs who say "amazing project" in the title to the top(which are indeed mostly spam). If you restrict it to "in:title", you see that there's only 44: https://github.com/search?q=in%3Atitle+amazing+project+creat... And if you sort by "newest" or "oldest", which provide a more representative sample, you can see that most of them are not spam: ht…

Why restrict in title though? From parent reply it is obvious that the phrase isn't in title yet it is undeniably spam.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#240

Post by unixhero »

bauerd wrote: post #220
unixhero wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is not spam. It's based on morons trying to make it in the software world without any basis that they should be there. They're doing this so that they can put "I have x amount of accepted pullrequests on github" and fool an employer to hire them. To become shit team members or outsourced to become shit offshore team members*. I have seen these kinds in many a project. Real world experience. Real talk.

The major incentive here is a free tshirt

Good point. I guess that's even worse. Hillarious really. Like something out of a Rick and Morty episode. You couldn't make this up.
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