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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

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Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#61

Post by [deleted] »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #42
neom wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did a…

> You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest I find it weird that none of your suggestions involved allowing the maintainers of the software project to decide if the contributions were worthy of a reward? I also find it…

[deleted]

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#62

Post by susam »

I received two pull requests for two projects on GitHub last night. I am the author of one and the maintainer of the other.

At first, the pull requests did not make sense at all. One of them made minor changes to a README, e.g., changing "this book" to "the book". It was not fixing a typo or incorrect grammar. It was merely choosing a word different from the one I had chosen. In fact, I preferred "this book", so the pull request (PR) was inconsistent with my preference. There was no explanation whatsoever regarding why this change was warranted. Then I looked at the PR author's profile and found that the same person had submitted several such trivial PRs to other projects too, all of them changing "this" to "the" at some places in README files.

It all began to make sense when I looked at the calendar. It was Oct 01. This looked like PR spam due to Hacktoberfest. For now, I just labelled the PRs as "invalid" (as suggested by https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/), closed the PRs, and moved on.

Like all good things created with good intentions on the Internet, spam is hurting this event and bringing bad reputation to it. The possibility of large scale, endless spam should be worked into the design of any new Internet-based event or solution.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#63

Post by SPBS »

https://mobile.twitter.com/avestura/status/13117539940716666...

This guy is just straight up begging for a PR merge so that he can get his free T shirt -- I'd wager a good portion of these PR submitters have no idea what they're getting into, they just think they can get a free shirt if they do this according to what the youtube video said.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#64

Post by sbmthakur »

gruez wrote: post #5
jdminhbg wrote: post #3

What I don’t get is... why do this for a t-shirt? Am I missing something?

T-shirts are worth significantly more (relatively) in poorer parts of the world. It might be worth 0.5hr of average wage in the us but be worth 5hr of average wage in India.

How's the quality of the t-shirt that one gets after completing the challenge?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#65

Post by higerordermap »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #45

[edit: Possibly I'm being too hasty in recommending swearing off Open Source contributions. Go forth and contribute, I suppose :) Leaving my original comment below for completeness.] For other South Asian/Indian people like me, a pessimistic but practical counterpoint to this -- if you happen to be Indian and have a username that marks you as such, just lie low for a bit and don't contribute anything; especially duri…

> the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it.

The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this.

I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#67

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

neom wrote: post #37
Google234 wrote: post #12

The shitoberfest Twitter account is hilarious. https://mobile.twitter.com/shitoberfest

You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did a…

I can easily see how the original concept is a great idea (honestly, anything that can get more folks into contributing to FOSS is probably worth considering!), but the thing is, after the first few years of people suggesting that this was going to be a problem and that it should be opt-in by the affected maintainers, I think it's fair to say that DO gets the blame. If you do something with good intentions and something bad happens as a result, it's not necessarily on you (and indeed, I would hesitate to assign blame in all but the most extreme "what did you think was going to happen!?" cases). But if you do something with good intentions after being repeatedly told by multiple independent parties on multiple occasions that it's going to cause a problem, then you get to be responsible when that problem actually arises from the actions that you knowingly took while ignoring warnings.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#69

Post by tastroder »

cvrjk wrote: post #49
chillee wrote: post #40

I agree that the spam is problematic, but I feel the need to call out his "data collection". As evidence that CodeWithHarry is the cause, he says > A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues. and > A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues. ??? Improve docs has been a common beginner level PR since the beginning of time. Do you really think that 319k spam issues have been filed in the last day…

A lot of those accounts also seem to be created just a few hours before October 1st. Can GitHub time gate new accounts before that can make public PRs?

I feel like that would be counterproductive given that GitHub is a tool, not a social network you need to gather account age or fake internet points on to use. Don't really see anything wrong with somebody signing up and immediately creating a PR.

I realize GitHub is one of the most popular choices out there but the activity stream is already social mediaesque enough for my taste. There's other ways to tackle this, DO could make their marketing stunt opt-in and GH could respond to the people wanting to add friction to their repo's workflows in a way that provides value, without crippling the general user experience.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#70

Post by tom-_- »

Spam PRs are frustrating but this rant just reads as petty and vindictive.

The author claims that he doesn't "want to cancel or shame him personally", which just rings of false humility considering he named the article "How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020" and then chose to expose his Youtube name repeatedly, something even other frustrated tweeters chose NOT to do.

Here's what CodeWithHarry did:

He created an example video of submitting a PR to an open source project that repeatedly reminded its viewers to make worthwhile contributions.

He then posted a lengthy response to again inform his viewers to NOT submit spammy PRs.

He's acting responsibly and in good faith.

Does this deserve lynching by the twitter mob?

Edit: Yes, the video appears to be mostly about showing kids how to get free swag with open source contributions without too much concern for whether these PRs are worthwhile. But the author of this post is absolutely trying to shame/cancel him personally.

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