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We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

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Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#531

Post by michaelcampbell »

causalscience wrote: post #44
nchmy wrote: post #11

I've been helping a bit with OWASP documentation lately and there's been a surge of Indian students eagerly opening nonsensical issues and PRs and all of the communication and code is clearly 100% LLMs. They'll even talk back and forth with each other. It's a huge headache for the maintainers. I suggested following what Ghostty does where everything starts as discussions - only maintainers create issues, and PRs can…

> Indian students Is this cultural? I ran a small business some years ago (later failed) and was paying for contract work to various people. At the I perceived the pattern that Indian contractors would never ever ask for clarifications, would never say they didn't know something, would never say they didn't understand something, etc. Instead they just ran with whatever they happened to have in their mind, until I cal…

> > Indian students

> Is this cultural?

Could be, but there are a number of very popular Youtube and other video based classes/bootcamps (taught and targeted from/to Indian students) that teach how to work with git and github that show how to create PR's and comments in repos, and then a lot of students do that, on public (and popular) repos.

There are a couple very famous examples of this.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#532

Post by owenversteeg »

emmaviolet wrote: post #404
ohyoutravel wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I contribute regularly to some major open source projects and it’s happening here too. So many issues that aren’t issues. Constant “fixing” of documentation that doesn’t need to be fixed. Bug reports that aren’t bugs, followed by a bad PR “fixing” the “bug.” Or YOLOing an LLM PR to change major behavior that users are relying on. And I click and the authors are always brand new, with only vibe coded or examples proje…

GitHub PM here. From what we've seen, you're right about the motivation; I've also seen plenty of job ads where "significant contribution to open source" is something that's called out explicitly as a valid substitute for professional experience in the area. While that's always well-intentioned and creates many benefits for the OSS community, the flip side is that it can also lead to the kind of problems you're seein…

I think a "PR quality score" would go a long way here. Doesn't even have to be displayed to the user, you can just flag it as a low-quality PR under a certain threshold and have it go to a separate view for the maintainer. Have a prominent 1-click button to close it as low quality/spam with a default message about useless PRs. To go along with this you'd probably want a "report" button on comments/PRs to flag them as (spam/AI generated/useless change/etc.)

You could estimate quality with: number of PRs accepted before (only counting repos >2 years old), age of account, size of diff, number of PRs reported as spam.

Thank you for looking into this. It's a huge problem for maintainers these days... something needs to be done.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#533

Post by nmz »

carlosjobim wrote: post #495
nmz wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating h…

Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.

One of the most used paid and proprietary software is windows, and its users do not matter at all to how it implements its features.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#534

Post by 1-more »

nmz wrote: post #490
mixedbit wrote: post #156

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to…

I've often dreamed of a system where normal users, give money as a promotion for a certain issue to be fixed or even created, if the user wants feature X then he should be able to give an incentive towards that feature to be added into the software that they use, developers do bounties instead, the user doesn't have to give much only a dollar, but if many users want feature X, then the money/donations pool creating h…

All we need to do is create Kalshi contracts! Users bet that a fix won't be created for Issue 123 by date XYZ, developers take the other side of the contract and then do the best kind of insider trading: changing the facts on the ground. We did it!

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#536

Post by nlawalker »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #496
nlawalker wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people maintain things literally all the time either purely for prestige, or because being a contributing member of a community, even a small one, makes them feel good, or because knowing that maintaining things leads others to also maintain things. True, but the expectation means that taking on maintenance involves taking on and leveraging a large amount of reputational debt in a very risky way. If you release some…

It is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars. The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equit…

My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital, they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own, and that one of the reasons for that is the risk that stems from stepping down being something that you can fail at in the first place, with the consequences of cementing a reputation of "being bad at being a person" regardless of anything that's happened to that point. You don't have the opportunity of accumulating reputation without having that risk at the end, unlike a career, where you have the opportunity of taking a job that pays a regular paycheck regardless of whether you leave at the drop of a hat and burn all your bridges by doing so.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#537

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

nlawalker wrote: post #536
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is incontrovertible that the entirety of the open source / free software world exists, in a very fundamental way, because people experience personal reward by doing work that they give away for zero dollars. The existence of risk does not eliminate the existence of reward. It's called "expected value", and it's non-zero, and it's for the person to manage for themself like everything else in life. Working for equit…

My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital , they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own , and that one of the reasons for that is the risk that stems from stepping down being something that you can fail at in the first place, with the consequences of cementing a reputation of "being bad at being a person" regardless of anything that's happened to that point. You don't h…

> My point is that the OP doesn't >lack awareness of other forms of capital, they're asserting that those aren't sufficient on their own

OP said "it should be paid" because "it is a job", and so the rejection of that claim is two-fold: 1) Uncertainty in the expected value of payment does not change the fact that it's payment, 2) Payment in units other than dollars is still payment. If I get paid in bitcoins, the bitcoin market could completely collapse before I cash out. It's not different than that.

OP's specific written framing, that because it's a job it needs to be paid, which is only additive commentary if OP believes that it isn't being paid, disagrees with your prediction about what OP really secretly bases their statement on.

We can look further back in OP's comment as well:

> The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user

This is only fractionally true, and it is only true in an unpaid way for a desire to consume free software. It is not true in an unpaid way for the desires to produce or maintain free software. Those are done because the producers and maintainers experience some kind of reward from doing so.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#538

Post by llbbdd »

nmz wrote: post #533
carlosjobim wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.

One of the most used paid and proprietary software is windows, and its users do not matter at all to how it implements its features.

Most users of Windows get it for somewhere between free and $150, the fact that there is still a home edition of Windows is practically a loss leader to keep the business side ingrained. Enterprise licensees are the ones with the money and Microsoft will dedicate full-time engineers to their features if they can afford it.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#539

Post by boca_honey »

snowmobile wrote: post #485
mixedbit wrote: post #156

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to…

> This is software support, it is a job, it should be paid. What's stopping any open source maintainer from charging for their work?

Irrelevance. The moment you paywall a project, it’s a death sentence. Unless you have a unique and highly sought-after product (top 1%), someone else will just make a free alternative.

Re: We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports

#540

Post by chowells »

nmz wrote: post #533
carlosjobim wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those normal users are better off instead purchasing software. Then they will be listened to by developers if they report a bug or suggest a feature. Because they represent an incredibly valuable user segment: paying customers.

One of the most used paid and proprietary software is windows, and its users do not matter at all to how it implements its features.

Users matter a ton to windows. Specifically, the users with a hundred thousand or more licenses. Their unhappiness threatens Windows' profits in a meaningful way. Why do you think all the new secure boot and TPM features were added to Windows 11? All that work wasn't free to implement. But big businesses really want that degree of secure fleet management, and they're the customers who matter.

So going back to the GP - pay for software where you're in the largest organized user class. That's how you get power. Paying alone doesn't suffice.

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