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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

Heh, reminds me of that free T-shirt contest thing... Submit crap PRs to random FOSS projects for a chance of winning a shirt, what could go wrong?

https://ongchinhwee.me/shitoberfest-ruin-hacktoberfest/

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Classic perverse incentive.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

"According to the story, the British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, and the cobra breeders set their snakes free, leading to an overall increase in the wild cobra population."

worked well for a bit. but then the program became popular and that’s when it hit the curb. terrible loss, imo. it was a brilliant idea to encourage open source work with a token reward. it relied heavily on good intentions, which quickly disappeared with the popularity.

I have one of these and it was really nice in the first 1-n years.

People gamified it and then it sucked, but the idea wasn't so bad. One would expect people would not stoop this low for a free T-Shirt.

There is no limit to how low someone will stoop to get even a tiny token for free. I remember a local community fun event from a couple of years ago, which was set up by the library to encourage kids to read. They would count up these reading tokens at the end of it and give some tiny $2 teddy bear to the winners, and of course a bunch of adults swooped in, gamed the system, and all the toys went to them. People are totally shameless assholes when even an insignificant free prize is on the line.

this is why we cant have nice things

It’s still ongoing. The difference is they now no longer offer t-shirts (at one point they planted trees instead, unsure if that still happens), and projects must opt-in.

They offered T-Shirts in 2025

Thank you for the correction. I thought they had stopped that but I see you’re right. Seems to be more restrictive, though.

https://hacktoberfest.com/participation/

> Swag - Get an exclusive Hacktoberfest T-Shirt, but its only for ‘Super Contributors’ who contribute 6 accepted PR/MRs to a worthy repository. (T&Cs Apply | Valid only for the first 10,000 contributors completing 6 PR/MR)

The funniest/saddest part is that you could just game it on your own repos, you never had to go out and spam any real projects. If you just made 5 PRs in a repo you owned with the appropriate hacktoberfest tags, that was enough to pass the mark and to get the free shirt and stickers.

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