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Spamtoberfest.md (4670B)

    

  1. ---
  2. title: Spamtoberfest
  3. date: 2020-10-01
  4. outputs: [html, gemtext]
  5. ---
  7. As I've [written before][0], the best contributors to a FOSS project are
  8. intrinsically motivated to solve problems in your software. This sort of
  9. contribution is often fixing an important problem and places a smaller burden on
  10. maintainers to spend their time working with the contributor. I've previously
  11. contrasted this with the "I want to help out!" contributions, where a person
  12. just has a vague desire to help out. Those contributions are, generally, less
  13. valuable and place a greater burden on the maintainer. Now, DigitalOcean has
  14. lowered the bar even further with Hacktoberfest.
  16. *Disclaimer: I am the founder of a FOSS project hosting company similar to GitHub.*
  18. [0]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/10/How-to-contribute-to-FOSS.html
  20. As I write this, a Digital Ocean-sponsored and GitHub-enabled Distributed Denial
  21. of Service (DDoS) attack is ongoing, wasting the time of thousands of free
  22. software maintainers with an onslaught of meaningless spam. Bots are spamming
  23. [tens of thousands][1] of pull requests like this:
  25. [![Screenshot of a spam pull request on GitHub which adds garbage to the README.md file](https://l.sr.ht/71VU.png)](https://github.com/hundredrabbits/100r.co/pull/39/files)
  27. [1]: https://github.com/search?q=amazing+project+is:pr&type=Issues
  29. The official response from both Digital Ocean and GitHub appears to be passing
  30. the buck.  Digital Ocean addresses spam in their FAQ, putting the burden of
  31. dealing with it entirely on the maintainers:
  33. > Spammy pull requests can be given a label that contains the word "invalid" or
  34. > "spam" to discount them. Maintainers are faced with the majority of spam that
  35. > occurs during Hacktoberfest, and we dislike spam just as much as you. If
  36. > you're a maintainer, please label any spammy pull requests submitted to the
  37. > repositories you maintain as "invalid" or "spam", and close them. Pull
  38. > requests with this label won't count toward Hacktoberfest.
  40. via [Hacktoberfest FAQ](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details)
  42. Here's GitHub's response:
  44. > The content and activity you are reporting appears to be related to
  45. > Hacktoberfest. Please keep in mind that GitHub Staff is not enforcing
  46. > Hacktoberfest rules; we will, however, enforce our own Acceptable Use
  47. > Policies. According to the Hacktoberfest FAQ... [same quote as given above]
  49. via [@kyleknighted@twitter.com][2]
  51. [2]: https://twitter.com/kyleknighted/status/1311685461828612097
  53. So, according to these two companies, whose responsibility is it to deal with
  54. the spam that *they've* created? The maintainers, of course! All for a T-Shirt.
  56. Let's be honest. Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open
  57. source. It's a marketing stunt which sends a deluge of low-effort contributions
  58. to maintainers, leaving them to clean up the spam. I've never been impressed
  59. with Hacktoberfest contributions, even the ones which aren't obviously written
  60. by a bot:
  62. [![Screenshot of a pull request which needlessly comment a CSS file](https://l.sr.ht/F-sU.png)](https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/5975/files)
  64. Hacktoberfest is, and has always been, about one thing: marketing for Digital
  65. Ocean.
  67. <iframe
  68. src="https://oc.todon.fr/@val/104960502585461740/embed"
  69. class="mastodon-embed"
  70. style="max-width: 100%; border: 0; margin: 0 auto; display: block;"
  71. width="400"
  72. height="530"
  73. allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
  75. This is what we get with corporate-sponsored "social coding", brought to you by
  76. Digital Ocean and GitHub and McDonalds, home of the Big Mac&trade;. When you
  77. build the Facebook of coding, you get the Facebook of coding. We don't need to
  78. give away T-Shirts to incentivize drive-by drivel from randoms who will never
  79. get any closer to open source than a +1/-1 README.md change.
  81. What would *actually* benefit FOSS is to enable the strong mentorship necessary
  82. raise a new generation of **software engineers** under the tutelage of
  83. maintainers who can rely on a strong support system to do their work. Programs
  84. like Google Summer of Code do this better. Programs where a marketing department
  85. spends $5,000 on T-Shirts to flood maintainers with garbage and clothe people in
  86. ads are doing the opposite: *hurting* open source.
  88. [![Screenshot of a friend's notifications, 9 out of 11 of which are spam](https://l.sr.ht/KoFK.png)](https://l.sr.ht/KoFK.png)
  90. Check out [@shitoberfest on Twitter](https://twitter.com/shitoberfest) for more
  91. Hacktoberfest garbage.
  93. **Update 2020-10-03**: Digital Ocean
  94. [has updated their rules](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update),
  95. among other things asking maintainers to opt-in, to reduce spam.