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Comment by treesknees | Hacker News Reader

I’d love to know what your genuine motivation is. Is it a desire to genuinely improve projects? Because I’ve always had the impression that people who do this just want to boost their PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.

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Not everyone is a developer. Finding and fixing typos benefits everyone and allows nontechnical people to participate in the projects to improve the software they use, even if they can't contribute code.

Genuinely, I am trying to improve things. Making documentation more readable has a real cascading positive effect. Of course, most of these PRs are tiny — just a word or two — but that means it takes me almost no time to submit them, so the ROI is still positive.

One of the most enraging things to me is when a text search of documentation fails because the word I'm searching for has been misspelled in a key place. That's one of the things I'm trying to solve for.

I'm also just a stickler for good style. It bums me out when people misuse heading levels. Heading level is not a font size markup!

Of course doing this does generate activity on my GH, but I think all of us have probably moved on from caring much about the optics of little green squares.

Also like someone else said, it's just fun. I like typing and making Git do a thing and using my nice keyboard.

> I'm also just a stickler for good style. It bums me out when people misuse heading levels. Heading level is not a font size markup!

I want to start a company with you and mandate all documents use appropriate styles.

One of the things I've done that has helped with my writing consistency is to use whatever version of "project" or "library" your LLM of choice has and pre-load it with a technical writing guide (I used the Red Hat Technical Style Guide[1]) and push my docs through that to identify improvements. It has been a great way to keep my own writing consistent and remove randomness from just having my own writing improvement prompt.

1 https://stylepedia.net/style/

There's been a couple of projects with typos, that I wanted to fix but didn't for exactly the reason above!

Didn't want to be seen as just padding my github.

This makes me a bit sad. Over the years I've posted PRs to several, but not many, repos with a one-off fix, issue or improvement. It's a great opportunity to say hello and thanks to the maintainers.

I opened a 1 letter typo fix for NextJS not that long ago and had the same thought run through my mind beforehand. I (obviously) decided to just do it anyway and let people think what they want, who cares.

I know my intention was simply fixing a typo I stumbled on while reading the docs..and the effort level is so low to open a PR to fix it

I used to do this when I had more free time and I did it because I just enjoy doing it. When I write it down like this I realise it sounds kind of obvious, but here we are

I once submitted a typo fix, among other things, to XFree86 way back when. Talk about love of the game, good grief.

> PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.

This used to mean something, but I don't think it does anymore.

I still see a disturbing amount of people claim it does matter a whole lot to them on LinkedIn. Hell, Sam Altman himself made a big deal about someone he knows "committing 100k lines of code per day with AI," as if that code was anything other than complete garbage.

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