Comment by 908B64B197
5 years ago
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?
you're surprised motivated people, who lack privilege and dont know any better, resort to what they know and have been taught to do? who live on much less than you do and therefore can live off much lower value economic activity?
is it fair to place the blame squarely on them or is it better to recognize that the global system we are complicit in has created this tremendous waste of human potential?
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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.