Comment by bartread
5 years ago
I'm appalled by this behaviour but also bemused. What's the motivation for spamming repositories just to get a t-shirt? I mean, are the t-shirts really that good?
5 years ago
I'm appalled by this behaviour but also bemused. What's the motivation for spamming repositories just to get a t-shirt? I mean, are the t-shirts really that good?
Judging by the names in the screenshots and linked github profiles it sounds like a lot of spammers are Indian students.
Thousands of students are all trying to get a low effort contribution in to have an extra line of "experience" on their resume and a T-Shirt from a western Silicon Valley company as signaling? Judging by the poor quality of the contributions, and the fact it's on GitHub, maybe folks studying IT?
That type of academic spam isn't new sadly [0].
[0] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/41687/what-is-b...
I am an Indian, and I've studied at an Indian university for my undergraduate degree, and I've witnessed spam like this everywhere. Not hacktoberfest, but I've been a part of it myself for some of the other things. Wish I had behaved better.
In most of these cases, it usually starts with someone really talented doing it with all the good intentions, and everyone else wanting to get in on that 'swag' and appear just as 'talented' and 'unique' amongst their peers. The freebies are mostly for 'show off'.
A few hours ago this link showed extremely low effort LeetCode/Programming Challenge problems and solutions aggregation repos created by us Indians (disproportionally more than any other country at the time I checked) with very silly open issues created & marked as 'hacktoberfest2020' (looks like some of them are gone now)[1].
But, from what I heard from my uni recently, things are improving and this year folks are trying their best to form groups to focus on meaningful contribution over spam.
Even after all that, unfortunately for us though, we'll still have bad actors, probably at the same percentage as any other country, but amplified due to our population and hyper-fixation with an unreal perception about most things we do.
[1] https://github.com/search?p=1&q=label%3Ahacktoberfest+state%....
Why do Indian IT students seem disproportionately represented when it comes to things like this? It seems like there is a strong culture of "getting ahead at all costs". This is seen in shitty YouTube tutorials, blog posts, open source submissions, all the way down the very bottom of the barrel with call centre scammers. Care to explain for us?
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> Thousands of students are all trying to get a low effort contribution in to have an extra line of "experience" on their resume and a T-Shirt from a western Silicon Valley company as signaling? Judging by the poor quality of the contributions, and the fact it's on GitHub, maybe folks studying IT?
Well, not exactly. There are a lot of people in India who are very passionate about open source and who actively try to get others to participate. So they organise events teach others how fork a repo and submit PR's. Batch-mates are either forced or join after seeing the enthusiasm. Unfortunately, these are not moderated and things go downhill soon where a PR is sent for the sake of it.
I've had multiple examples of "spam" from Indian and Chinese students who scraped an email from GitHub repos, wanting endorsement or to fill questionnaires or somesuch.
It's probably less effort to get this t-shirt than it is to get achievement badges or hats or whatever for many video games, and this nets you an actual physical achievement badge.
What you're saying makes perfect sense - no complaint or disagreement from me - but I'm still struggling to wrap my mind around this because when all's said and done we're still talking about a vendor t-shirt, and how cool can that really be?
If it does motivate people and they like them, then fine: I guess it's just different strokes for different folks.
> different strokes for different folks.
It pretty much boils down to this. Not only are vendor t-shirts actually a physical item but they are also often uniquely designed; many vendors only provide certain designs for certain events. So they really become a badge of honor and can gain in emotional value: "been there, got the t-shirt..."
People actually pay extra money for t-shirts that have specific brand names on them and entire businesses are built around that. It shouldn’t be surprising to you that there are people that want particular shirts.
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It's kind of like that episode of Pinky and the Brain where they finally are able to take over the Earth by convincing everyone who moves to a paper mache copy of the Earth a free t-shirt. People love free t-shirts.
Ever visit a booth at a conference or trade-show where they give out t-shirts? Pandemonium!
I've worked a bunch of them back in the day and they are indeed a feeding frenzy. Can be a lot of fun though.
The shirt is a form of signaling and once you wear it in the right circles you’re in as one of the cool kids.
You might wait, what, a 10 person line to get a free t-shirt? Making 5 “corrected typo” commits is probably equivalent to that effort and looks like 5 is enough to get past a spam tag.
I really wouldn't. I'm not a minimalist by any means but I've been decluttering for a while and am certainly long past the point where I'll tolerate having possessions that I don't want. Maybe this is a privileged point of view but, as with swag in general, most vendor t-shirts are honestly just tat.
> Maybe this is a privileged point of view
It is. T-shirts are wear items and getting a free one that looks decent is one less that you’ll have to buy.
You would be surprised by the stuff people do for free swag. I don’t get it either, but I’ve seen first hand how hard people go for that sort of stuff.
It’s a shame it has led to people spamming repos, however.
There are a ton of automated trivial pr spammers out there that aren’t even in it for a t-shirt. Maybe it’s vanity or just wanting to see the world burn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe some people feel that these t-shirts signals street cred?
Definitely. I've always wanted a cool Hacktober Fest t-shirt like the ones my co-workers have. But I certainly wouldn't spam open source projects just to get one.
You never did anything stupid and superfluous as a youth?
Participation trophies come in many forms.
In my experience the average American goes into a leave nothing behind mode whenever baited with Free.
Just look at the kind of mayhem Black Friday precipitates, and that's not even free - just a promise of exceptional discounts.
The comedian Doug Stanhope has an amusing bit about free healthcare and how wastefully it would be consumed by Americans conditioned to maximally abuse anything offered free of charge.
Edit: I don't mean to suggest Americans have a monopoly on this sort of behavior, it's just the country/culture I'm by far most familiar with.
The spammers appear to be overwhelmingly Indian, based on the usernames in the screenshots. Which is somehow unsurprising to me (there are 1.5 billion of them, after all).
Non-Americans on the other hand hate free stuff.