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One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

joel.net

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Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#91

Post by _RPL5_ »

When I first heard about Hacktoberfest a few days ago, I thought it was neat. I am relatively new to programming, and as a newbie I got excited that there was an event like this. It prompted me to read about how pull requests work, and to research several open source projects that I could contribute to. I haven't made any contributions yet, but it's on my to-do list for October.

I suppose you can already count me as one of the beneficiaries of this program, simply because it got me to learn new things. I think Hacktoberfest is a good idea, speed bumps like this one notwithstanding.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#92

Post by random_visitor »

bdhess wrote: post #80
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 don’t know why the protagonist being Indian is something that would be strongly remembered. I’d guess anyone whose audience has more time than money could’ve hatched a scheme like this, regardless of nationality.

I mentioned this because I've seen people bash Indians for ruining sites like Quora and Medium with lot of bad quality content. Spam job offers, freelancing sites with bloated profiles, sending unsolicited messages and resume to people in LinkedIn and AngelList. Much of this comes from us having 1/6 of world's population, but that doesn't excuse a big group from their misdeeds. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people about etiquette in written communication and how to behave in semi-formal to casual internet settings

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#93

Post by tyrust »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #83
hombre_fatal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No reason to lie low, just continue making good, earnest PRs which look nothing like this Hacktoberfest spam. It's not the username in these examples that's the problem.

> It's not the username in these examples that's the problem. It totally is. Make a profile with a Western-sounding, preferably female name, and submit a similar typo-fix PR. I can guarantee you that it will be accepted, or at the very least, not featured on a Twitter account called "Shitoberfest". Minor typo fixes and such have been an established way to make a first bite-sized contribution to OSS projects. What cha…

These aren't typo-fix PRs. Thousands of them simply added "an amazing project" to the title of the readme, as was suggested in the video.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#94

Post by d3nj4l »

xrisk wrote: post #88
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…

> When everyone involved is a beginner, you get unintended outcomes. This is on DigitalOcean for coming up with a half-baked scheme, not those folks themselves. Edit: it’s amusing to see Indians taking swipes on fellow Indians. It’s a systemic problem, and the fact that you’ve somehow “risen above it” is not a reason to virtue signal.

> It’s a systemic problem, and the fact that you’ve somehow “risen above it” is not a reason to virtue signal.

(As an Indian) As much as I agree with you, I feel like this is different. I'm worried spam on this scale will damage the reputation of Indian OSS contributors.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#95

Post by jp0d »

I've reported his video as a spam. He is promoting his fraudulent methods to teach people how to get a free t-shirt at the cost of the wonderful open source software community. I wrote the following in the details of the spam report. To be honest, I don't think he is a bad person. He probably didn't think that his video would cause this. But as a decent human being, the least he could do is take down that video.

``` This video is promoting and teaching people how to get a free t-shit by showing them how to do spam pull request. These requests have flooded real world open source projects on Github. This is ruining the community's efforts. ```

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#96

Post by faithfulcat »

lipstone wrote: post #22

If everything that CodeWithHarry says is true, then I don't see how it's his fault. Also, this doesn't seem like a big deal. Just ignore the spammy emails for a while and close the pull requests.

Hindi is my native language. CodeWithHarry, in fact, is actually subliminally asking the users to create very low quality PRs. Or at least very heavily implying it.

In one part of the video he mentions that last year DO was not able to distribute all the t-shirts as they didn't have enough PRs. He goes on to mention that "this year, we don't want any T-shirts to remain".

If I get time, I'll point out more lines from the video where he is promoting PR for the sake of PR.

I do agree that it may not be totally his fault in the whole larger context of things.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#97

Post by xrisk »

d3nj4l wrote: post #94
xrisk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When everyone involved is a beginner, you get unintended outcomes. This is on DigitalOcean for coming up with a half-baked scheme, not those folks themselves. Edit: it’s amusing to see Indians taking swipes on fellow Indians. It’s a systemic problem, and the fact that you’ve somehow “risen above it” is not a reason to virtue signal.

> It’s a systemic problem, and the fact that you’ve somehow “risen above it” is not a reason to virtue signal. (As an Indian) As much as I agree with you, I feel like this is different. I'm worried spam on this scale will damage the reputation of Indian OSS contributors.

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?

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#98

Post by saagarjha »

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…

No. Just look at my username; you don’t get more Indian-sounding than that. The way forward is to submit high-quality pull requests, not spam them to get a free T-shirt, and certainly not to give up and let people ruin it for you. I personally guarantee you that it’ll work out.

Re: One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020

#99

Post by susam »

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…

> Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us (Indians) in the first place ...

Do you have any evidence to support this? I am an Indian and my own experience has been totally opposite. The open source community welcomed me, guided me, and appreciated my work when I began contributing to open source. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-559 for an example. This was my first significant open source contribution to an Apache project. I was young, naive, and had very little prior software development experience. The change I submitted added new features but it also removed a lot of code that I incorrectly assumed to be not serving any purpose. The Apache committers helped me to refine the change, make it better, and even appreciated it with a "Wow" with this comment: "Sorry for the late review... I have finally reviewed your patch and I have to say: Wow!"

I think this was very welcoming. It filled me with confidence to tackle more complex problems both at work as well as in open source. Thanks to that good experience, I still contribute to open source whenever I can and I write and maintain a few open source projects of my own.

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