Comment by renewiltord
5 years ago
Oh, this is really unlucky. I like Hacktoberfest and always get my T-shirt. Perhaps opt-in would be a great idea.
I can see why this happens, though. I've noticed that a whole bunch of projects have `good-first-issue` being something like "Re-architect module loading system" while most commits are like "correct typo". Like, jeez, man.
The participants are probably just pattern-matching against the commits available.
EDIT: Decided to go look at the spam that OSM got (a project close to my heart) and what the hell, man, look at this diff
<removed>
* Tom Hughes [@tomhughes](https://github.com/tomhughes/)
* Andy Allan [@gravitystorm](https://github.com/gravitystorm/)
+
+
+ Made with Love
This is just awful! I really feel for the maintainers. This user is just adding nonsense to a bunch of places.'
EDIT again: Whoops, guys, I didn't mean to cause more spam to the project. Removed the diff link. Jesus Christ, I ended up becoming the villain I was complaining about by linking it.
Sometimes it feels like software development has devolved into a sea of posturing and marketing oneself. It's faintly depressing to see reminders of that trend which are as stark as this.
It's a fitting allegory, though. This contest has used free T-shirts to solicit open-source contributions in the same way that the industry has used high salaries to solicit creative and impactful contributions.
Now imagine that you're trying to fill a position, and these pull requests are analogous to candidate interviews. You might start to have some sympathy for people who believe that we need some sort of professional certification for the trade.
It's unfortunate considering the democratizing promise of low-cost computing, but how else can you effectively deal with this "market for lemons" caused by large swaths of people acting in blatant bad faith?
> Sometimes it feels like software development has devolved into a sea of posturing and marketing oneself.
I've been saying it for a long time, but the reason that this and other problems (like high developer burnout) seem like especially bad problems that the world of "software development" is facing is primarily because they're especially bad in the GitHub culture (and as a consequence of that culture), and the developers who are experiencing the worst of it are part of that community. Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.
Much like follower counts on other social media sites, GitHub's contribution graph and profile timeline should have never been public. They should have been neat features of your personal dashboard that you alone are able to see when you're signed in—providing some form of encouragement à la the Seinfeld hack and to help you manage your work—but not for others' eyes. The gamification of "social" leads to degenerative behavioral patterns.
> Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.
This sounds like "Without GitHub you will get less spam", which is probably true, but I think the reason is not "github is bad", it's: Less people will find your project.
Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off, but it's very different from "all will be better without Github"
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The effect of those things on github are minuscule comparing to that of medium and twitter. I never even looked at anyone else's github profile. Most of the time it's medium and twitter that take me to their projects and I only evaluate the project with the context of who they are on twitter or what they've written on medium.
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I’d argue getting a shirt for some PRs is better than the status quo, where you get nothing for a PR.
Which just goes to show how bad the status quo is.
> where you get nothing for a PR
You already got payment up front: software that the author(s) have made available to you for free.
You get payment by the author spending time to review your changes.
You also get payment afterward: free maintenance for your pet feature. (Not guaranteed of course but generally the case.)
“But we obtain the puzzling result that, when rewarded, volunteers work less. These findings are in line with a large literature in social psychology emphasizing that external rewards can undermine the intrinsic motivation for an activity.”
Be very careful assuming that a payment motivates open source developers. If you offered to help me do something for an hour for whatever internal motivation you might have, and afterwards I offer you $5 for your time, you would likely be demotivated.
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That's missing the point a bit.
Good PRs are valuable, but require lots of work. Spam is not valuable, but it also does not require basically any work.
Hacktoberfest equally rewards both good PRs and spam equally. With those incentives, what are people logically going to produce?
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I submitted very few PRs to open source projects. I usually submit bug reports.
In both cases I get that what I care about gets into the project. It's enough for me.
My pet theory is that 'marketing oneself' trend is a sign of oversaturation (and forthcoming commoditisation).
This happen a few years back in UI design when designers started to put more work into presentation of projects than projects themselves.
> When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming
This quote can be applied to organizations on the wane.
> devolved into a sea of posturing and marketing oneself
Don't think it's devolved at all this has been the norm from the 80's onwards (perhaps earlier).
Look at how fractured open source is today and the sort of egos that come with it everywhere you look. While the points made in this article are valid, it's great that someone is incentivising people to interact with various projects rather than do their own thing rather than climb blindly up the same treacherous mountains others have done long ago.
Hey, also why not rewrite it in rust :)
Being a contrarian is easy, fixing these well acknowledged problems is hard.
I think they should completely reverse their approach: instead of instigating people to create senseless PRs, DigitalOcean should use the GitHub API to find contributors who made meaningful first contributions to existing projects over the last year, and send them T-shirts... in October?
I think a major part of this is about pushing devs who haven't contributed before to contribute such as new cs students.
That may be the intention, but what's happening is basically vandalism: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=is%3Apr+%22improve+docs%2...
~1000 single line/word pull requests in the last 3 hours, almost all worthless rubbish. The scale of the problem is pretty severe.
To pick a single example: https://github.com/Geng-WD/websiteTest
A little personal Java project, unchanged in 3 years, where a new "contributor" has submitted a pull request where they add a comment with their own name in one commit, and then remove it and replace it with "Awesome coding website" in a second commit. 19 hours earlier another new "contributor" submitted a pull request to add a completely irrelevant mock gym web page (and they've done the same thing to a bunch of other randomly chosen repos).
If these people had to demonstrate valuable contributions over a longer span of time, I don't think any of this nonsense would be happening. There's no reason new CS students can't be respectful and put a little effort into doing something worthwhile, and they'll learn a lot more than from this mindless spamming.
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That would mean DigitalOcean has to do work. It's probably easier for them if the open source maintainers have to do the work.
but this would take time and imagination and is so much harder.
You may have missed it, but the article screenshots a similar example where the spammer added "### Great Work" to the front of the README.
I’ve heard of people spamming readme commits to get their github graph green... I guess if an employer is tricked by something like this they are kinda asking for what they get.
That’s a failure of imagination and evidence of having never read the Git manual pages, because the GitHub contribution graph respects commit time (which you absolutely can override), and it’s a trivial hour-long project to write messages on it. I had greenscale pixel rendering of images on the contribution graph working in about an hour, most of which was figuring out the heuristics for quantity in each cell (hint: it’s not as complex as you think).
I can’t understate the simplicity of doing it, and I’d be nervous about someone taking the other approach as indicative of their technical depth. Then again, they’re already spamming READMEs so it’s not as if it was a strong signal to start with.
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Any employer that looks at an applicants activity graph in any serious way only deserves the kind of people they will get.
Every employer worth working for will at least look at some actual code you've written, both in your own projects and in contributions to others.
And even then an in-person interview should be able to offset any github activity or lack thereof.
I once thought about making a script that automated git actions which would show you as active, but not actually do anything. Turns out theres too much real work to do to make it!
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Wth is that? Bots? Trolls? Scammers wanting to start a t-shirt business?
People resell them on ebay.
Oh you're right! I was reading on my phone and bucketed that picture as a link to the other blog posts like the carousel at the bottom and mentally skipped it. My mistake!
Sorry about that carousel. I want to get rid of Disqus entirely (when I started the blog in 2012 they were not so icky). But, then I think about related yak-shaving, like moving off of Jekyll...
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So when you're throwing a party and suddenly have guests trashing the neighbor's front yard, do you stop the party or let the party go on for another month because it was so good last year "and we'll change something next year, in the mean time can you build a fence"?
I'll not advocate calling DigitalOcean on the phone, but tagging the CEO on the complaints on twitter might be more effective than tagging the community manager who professes he is not listened to.
Why would you stop the party, rather than eject those guests?
They have been asked to, but say they can't?
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This is strange, I wonder why they are targeting this repo? I have labeled some issues 'hacktoberfest' and have gotten very well meaning contributions. Here is an example https://github.com/earthly/earthly/issues/334
How did linking to the diff cause spam?
Within seconds of doing so, people started adding reactions to it and then someone 'suggested changes' that were essentially a commit revert. It's the community saying the changes were undesired, but those things nevertheless do notify maintainers. I only realized then that I was creating one of those situations where people pile on a few hundred comments onto a PR that are thin me-toos onto one side or the other.