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?
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...
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%....
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?
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.
Identifying a privilege gap is not racist. India is definitely not in the same place as 1950s America which was the post-WWII boom. Sometimes called the Golden Age of america.
Then again, we do have some cultural issues to overcome, and yes, a lot of the cultural issues are a result of a traumatic period spent under the boot of the colonizers.
That being said, blame is not useful, the people responsible are dead, and hopefully we can mature as a culture. I see lots to be hopeful about, but lots to be fearful about too. The transition of power from colonials to our republic was botched, and now we're stuck with a broken political machine, and the powerful are trying to break it further.
Comparing the raw GDP of the US in the 1950s to India now is glossing over a lot of points. For example, GDP per capita does not capture the (in)equality of wealth distribution in a country. Or how that GDP ranks on a scale: The US in the 1950s was in a high, probably even the top position (I didn’t check exactly which) - India with the same GDP now is definitely not. That makes a huge difference in perception.
It’s easy to dismiss the status value of a brand name piece of clothing or any token that elevates your status if you’re already high up on the ladder.
None of that excuses the behavior in the sense that it makes it “ok”. But it contributes to the explanation of why such behavior clusters in specific communities.
For me, that I’m ahead, it’s easy to look down and say that this is unethical behavior, but it’s important to keep in mind that I’m applying my ethics from a privileged vantage point - and likely you’re doing so as well.
In the 1950s the US's GDP per capita was the highest. Is that the case for India today?
> Would we excuse this behavior in the 1950s West
I mean the 1950s West was no bastion of ethical behavior. Wasn't that when the cigarette industry in the US started its decades-long campaign of misinformation, obfuscation, and false advertising to cover up the harmfulness of their products? And this was flagrantly unethical behavior by some very privileged people. This is without even getting into how women or minorities were treated.
> relative poverty is no excuse for unethical behavior.
One man's "unethical behavior" is another man's "playing by the letter of the rules, not the spirit". Spamming PRs for a free T-shirt is no way comparable to call center scams.
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
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.
If it does motivate people and they like them, then fine: I guess it's just 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..."
It is. T-shirts are wear items and getting a free one that looks decent is one less that you’ll have to buy.
It’s a shame it has led to people spamming repos, however.
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.