Hacker News Reader

> You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest

I find it weird that none of your suggestions involved allowing the maintainers of the software project to decide if the contributions were worthy of a reward? I also find it odd that people who had contributed meaningfully to OSS would suggest a numerical bound on PRs as a measure of meaningful contributions.

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with. The "bad actors" are assholes, sure, but I think you also need to revise your concepts about meaningful OSS contributions.

Well I haven't worked for DigitalOcean in many many years. My reply was to calling hacktoberfest "shit". I do agree given the scale the initiative has reached, projects should reach out to DO, get on a list and be the "approved" project. As a point of interest on your "but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with" - how would you have designed it?

Fix the broken process:

Do NOT auto-include closed PRs.

Let maintainers choose to add a hacktoberfest label to contributions they think are worth rewarding, if they want to opt-in and they like that particular contribution.

Don't emphasise t-shirts, emphasise fun and the rewards of helping OSS.

These are not difficult challenges, they could fix the process right now if they wanted to. Yes their numbers would go down, but they'd be rewarding genuine contributions, as originally intended.

> You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of its existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did at DigitalOcean was "just marketing" - everything we did was because we all genuinely cared about developers, that's why the company grew. Certainly it's a real shame that a few bad actors are ruining the project, but I take real issue with all this vitriol. Maybe it's gone off the rails and needs to be revised or reconsidered, but creating shitoberfest twitter and putting things in blog posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive.

I find it troublesome that a room full of people and no one raised a concern about how the whole thing would be misused, and wasted time of hundreds of maintainers who now have to clean up their repo. Did "the room" consider this, at all, and what if they did, what was the conclusion?

Edit: I added neom's original comment, still have it on my browser.

Yeah, this really makes me wonder what the room gets up to during threat modelling session at Digital Ocean. But perhaps they don’t do that sort of thing.

Exactly what I thought. I don't really care that digital ocean had "good intentions". The scheme is obviously abuseable and seems to have indeed wasted the time of a number of actual developers.

Why do you think hundreds of maintainers have to clean up their repos? What is your acceptable ratio of misuse to value add?

To be honest, we are well beyond hundreds of maintainers that will need to clean up their repos. I've been crawling the "Improve Docs" spam issues since they started appearing.

As far as I'm aware, there are already 4500+ repos which have had a low quality, single-line-change, "Improve Docs" PR opened in the past two days.

Just to pull out a few repos out for example purposes:

* 7 spam - https://github.com/seductivegeese/softi.es

* 8 spam - https://github.com/easydepot/websiteSwallower/pulls

* 8 spam - https://github.com/tokio-rs/website

* 13 spam - https://github.com/phpmyadmin/website

* 15+ spam - https://github.com/pyvec/elsa

* 15+ spam - https://github.com/justicedemocrats/candidate-website

* 15+ spam - https://github.com/Salamek/blacklist

* 20+ spam - https://github.com/openmaptiles/www.openmaptiles.org

* 25+ spam - https://github.com/blitz-js/blitzjs.com

* 60+ spam - https://github.com/EdmontonPy/edmontonpy

Heck, take look at the PRs and commit history of https://github.com/azmat21/UyghurWebsiteCrawler. It's been two days into October, and this repo has gotten 55 PRs. It hasn't ever gotten a single PR before this as far as I can tell.

Not to be pedantic but I think there is some conflation here between PR/repo and maintainer? How do you define "low quality" hacktoberfest was originally also focused on people learning to code who could help clean up docs/fix typos etc.

I have seen some repos with 3 pages of spam PRs. It's drowning out legitimate PRs.

> I find it troublesome that a room full of people and no one raised a concern about how the whole thing would be misused

As someone completely unaffiliated with Hacktoberfest (only attendee over several years), my impression is that there really haven’t been much issues with it until this year.

I’m quite confident it was all done in good faith.

Unlike all those shit, SPAM PRs.

> I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions.

For sure, but the Hacktoberfest promotional website treats this as a second order effect, instead of the primary goal it really should be.

The primary motivation for participants is the free t-shirt, because that's the incentive that's being pushed. What is not promoted - and should be promoted - is the impact of contributing: making a change for the better, the social good, taking a step towards connecting with new people, learning opportunities, making a mark in the world with your name on, etc.

The problem OSS faces is not just finding enough contributors. It's finding contributors who are intrinsically motivated to actively engage with a project.

And so, the current campaign inadvertently targets loads of people who don't really care for the code or the projects themselves: they just want the exclusive t-shirt as a trapping and not much more.

I'm sure the campaign still attracts contributors who genuinely want to submit a good PR (I sure am going to do an effort). But frankly, if the campaign ends up devolving into a frenzy for t-shirts, it's hard not to feel demoralized: that's not the spirit of the campaign, and that's quite likely not what DO originally intended, right?

Yes, you're absolutely correct.

>is certainly not constructive

Digital Ocean is not a student under our guidance that we owe a supportive feedback style. They don't even behave like a peer where things can be discussed eye to eye. They interact like a business: as if they're correct and infallible until sufficiently proven wrong that their face is covered in egg.

>posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive

That's entirely constructive advice... for the end consumer. It is smart to remember the results of a business' prior actions when you consider future dealings with them. Even if they're all well-intentioned and lovely people that wielded their one-to-many relationship poorly.

>I take real issue with all the vitriol.

The mirth of a "shitoberfest" twitter account and consumer advice in a blogpost aren't all that vitriolic, what they are is simply not friendly to DO.

I can easily see how the original concept is a great idea (honestly, anything that can get more folks into contributing to FOSS is probably worth considering!), but the thing is, after the first few years of people suggesting that this was going to be a problem and that it should be opt-in by the affected maintainers, I think it's fair to say that DO gets the blame. If you do something with good intentions and something bad happens as a result, it's not necessarily on you (and indeed, I would hesitate to assign blame in all but the most extreme "what did you think was going to happen!?" cases). But if you do something with good intentions after being repeatedly told by multiple independent parties on multiple occasions that it's going to cause a problem, then you get to be responsible when that problem actually arises from the actions that you knowingly took while ignoring warnings.

(parent post tried to abolish blame and called out the grandparent post as the issue, hence why the lack of continuation)

I don't, you messed up!

The fact that you're actually incentivising contributors to make PRs of any quality and without standards, whilst forcing the burden on to maintainers (without reward) and you do very little (no tutorials about how to make quality PRs, no standards information on what comprises of a good PR, no quality guidance what so ever!).

This seems like a marketing stunt that has backfired and you're saying that you don't deserve some backlash?

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/hacktoberfe...

This isn't highlighted high enough, and the lack of what makes a good PR that shows new contributors the best way forward isn't shown enough.

Yet I standby my statement, you're not blameless here.

Would you be willing to share what you'd recommend? I don't work at DigitalOcean but I know a few of the folks working on hacktoberfesst and I'm happy to forward our suggestions. je at h4x dot club.

Only count pull requests that are merged. Make this fact obvious on the hacktoberfest website so contributors know spamming PRs will not help them.

I know the standard answer to this is that it would exclude some repos (ex: node) that merge PRs manually via git. However:

1. You already are excluding every open source project not on GitHub, so this is a really weak point.

2. I am extremely confident trading off not including a very small subset of repos for removing the incentive to spam bad PRs is a worthwhile trade.

> as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS

Don't let your sunken cost and in-group bias distract you from seeing the unfortunate externalities of decisions here. You're separating intent from effect when that is the exact problem. DO created a program which incentivized spam that puts long-term strain on a community which it derives revenue from long-term, just for short term benefit.

If you or anyone else who designed that program doesn't understand that and take action until a /satirical twitter account/ has to pop up, that's really bad. I don't think you should try and make excuses for it. You should try to understand why the incentive broke and caused unintended side effects first before you go criticizing others.

I think this may be a small example of the path to hell being paved with good intentions, or of unintended consequences.

Talking about how you get paid to pat yourself on the back isn't going to win the sympathy of people you mistreated. Now is the time for apologies and amends not tone-deaf whining about being held accountable by people who are actually giving freely of their time and IP.

Here's some constructive criticism: DO should send $20 to the donation box of every repo owner who got a spam PR.

And since you don't even work for DO but seem to like them: stop creating more bad PR for them by making embarassing comments in their name.