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Comment by dmurray | Hacker News Reader

The cognitive dissonance here is that DO want to give the low-quality contributors a t-shirt.

These are Indian students with good hustle and poor technical skills who market themselves as technologists. They're going to be managers making purchasing decisions at tech companies in a few years time, and they lack the technical sophistication to choose between DO and competitors on axes other than "I've heard of them"/"they have a good reputation"/"they gave me a t-shirt once". These customers are both more valuable and a thousand times more numerous than the ones capable of earning even a $10 bug bounty.

I'm generalising here, but hopefully not racially stereotyping too much.

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So in your mind, hacktoberfest's marketing strategy isn't "let's sponsor a big public pro open source event so we get lots of good rep especially among open source enthusiasts and potential hires"... But instead it's some weird ass 5 year long-play betting that random indian students will, in the future, have purchasing power to choose Digital Ocean because they got a free shirt half a decade prior.

"Generalising" isn't the word I would use.

The people who are already making helpful contributions to open source don't need any additional incentives...?

No, but people new to programming might enjoy a month of supported learning and get a gentle introduction to open source along the way.

Let's not generalise in either direction. There are plenty of people who try to make meaningful contributions as part of Hacktoberfest.

People are constantly (and rightfully) on companies' asses talking about how they need to "give back to open source". Now you're telling me things are fine as-is. They're not.

If they want to give back to open source, they could use the money they're spending on seventy thousand t-shirts to sponsor projects or pay maintainers.

They do.

https://www.digitalocean.com/open-source/

Please stop telling people how to spend their money.

But it's still nice to get some recognition. And it would be a better play for DO. If they sent out 100000 t-shirts to those people who made the most accepted PRs over the last year, they'd hit a lot more longterm contributors and also get a better bang for their marketing buck.

Maybe their original plan was to build good will in the Open Source community. But it's a story of bad incentives: the bycatch turned out to be valuable and now they find it difficult to change their methods (as evidenced by their extremely anaemic response to tackling the problem).

Your argument is 100% correct but doesn't need to say "Indian".

Look at the vast majority of the profiles/usernames of those making spammy PRs and you'll find it isn't an incorrect generalisation.

That doesn't mean DO was targeting Indians specifically. That's more tied to the YouTube video that was making the rounds the other day.

No, of course not. I wasn't implying DO were targetting Indians (and didn't read parent as doing that either). My point was that Indians are the ones that are mainly responding.

Wouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to just give away a few shirts at a college event? Or heck, just gift them to everybody.

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