Comment by cvrjk
5 years ago
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?
Your comment seems to exude a kind of inadvertent tone suggesting "they fault is not with them, but in their lack of civilization". In other words, it's likely racist.
By GDP per capita, India is where the US was at in the 1950s. Would we excuse this behavior in the 1950s West just because "they lack privilege, don't know any better, resort to what they know and have been taught to do..."? Of course not, because relative poverty is no excuse for unethical behavior.
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Lack of ethics or interest in the subject, luring to the ways of gaming the system - I'd say this reputation is well deserved, as someone who studies here.
> the global system we are complicit in has created this tremendous waste of human potential?
Thanks for writing -- I like that way of thinking about spammers etc -- that they could have been doing something meaningful instead, if the world and society made more sense