DigitalOcean’s “Hacktoberfest” Backfires
Cloud company Digital Ocean has started its seventh annual “Hacktoberfest” <https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktoberfest_pull_request_spam/>, promising free T-shirts to those who submit “quality” pull requests to online open-source repositories. Seems this year, the “quality” proviso is being roundly ignored. Many project maintainers are being deluged with trivial and pointless patches, many of whose submittors readily admit they are only doing it for the T-shirt. Choice quote: Imagine an arsonist declaring, "Only you can prevent forest fires," and you can get a sense of the frustration among open source maintainers. Actually, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened in previous years. But then again, maybe it has: "Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open source ... It’s a marketing stunt which sends a deluge of low-effort contributions to maintainers, leaving them to clean up the spam." There’s also a link to a rather pungently-named Twitter account which is collecting examples of these useless patch submissions.
On 10/2/20 12:48 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
Cloud company Digital Ocean has started its seventh annual “Hacktoberfest” ... Seems this year, the “quality” proviso is being roundly ignored. ...
The Naomi project has been participating in Hacktoberfest for the last couple of years. We try to generate some really simple issues (basically paint by numbers) for people who just want to complete pulls and get a t-shirt, and also mark some of our bigger, more time consuming non-core issues as Hacktoberfest for participants who want more of a challenge. I think the goal is to generate interest and get people familiar with Github and using Git to do pull requests, more than actually generating quality pull requests during the month of October. Hopefully, the participant will find a project they are interested in and make a simple one or two line pull request that is actually helpful and then continue to contribute in a less rushed way after Hacktoberfest is over. All of the pull requests I have received from Hacktoberfest participants appear to have been valid attempts (we haven't gotten any so far this year). I have received pull requests that were not able to be merged due to being based on the wrong branch (we changed our default branch from stable to dev for this reason) and pull requests that I have requested changes for that have never been completed. It got a few new people interested in the project and reading the source code and some really good suggestions. I don't understand the whole "get a t-shirt or plant a tree" choice this year. The FAQ around trees is pretty sparse. It looks like Digital Ocean is trying to lower their carbon footprint by planting trees in a few tree farms around the world, mostly in southeast Asia, and you can have a tree planted there rather than getting a tee-shirt. Unfortunately what this means to me is that if you show up at an event wearing a Hacktoberfest 2020 tee shirt, you don't get "nice job helping with open source" but rather "oh, you're one of those people who don't care about the planet". They also make a point of mentioning just how much carbon is generated by shipping t-shirts all over, so basically it feels like if you select the tree, then you are subsidizing someone else's t-shirt. Also, they are limiting the promotion to the first 70,000 participants to cross the finish line instead of everyone who makes 4 pull requests. To me, it makes the whole thing a lot less fun and more like a competition than a collaboration. I don't plan to modify my behavior this year to complete four pulls because I no longer care about completing the challenge, but I do hope to get some valid pull requests from participants. For what it's worth, I have t-shirts from 2018 and 2019, and they are both high-quality t-shirts that fit well and feel good.
participants (2)
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Aaron -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro