logo

drewdevault.com

[mirror] blog and personal website of Drew DeVault git clone https://hacktivis.me/git/mirror/drewdevault.com.git

Spamtoberfest.md (4689B)


  1. ---
  2. title: Spamtoberfest
  3. date: 2020-10-01
  4. ---
  5. As I've [written before][0], the best contributors to a FOSS project are
  6. intrinsically motivated to solve problems in your software. This sort of
  7. contribution is often fixing an important problem and places a smaller burden on
  8. maintainers to spend their time working with the contributor. I've previously
  9. contrasted this with the "I want to help out!" contributions, where a person
  10. just has a vague desire to help out. Those contributions are, generally, less
  11. valuable and place a greater burden on the maintainer. Now, DigitalOcean has
  12. lowered the bar even further with Hacktoberfest.
  13. *Disclaimer: I am the founder of a FOSS project hosting company similar to GitHub.*
  14. [0]: https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/10/How-to-contribute-to-FOSS.html
  15. As I write this, a Digital Ocean-sponsored and GitHub-enabled Distributed Denial
  16. of Service (DDoS) attack is ongoing, wasting the time of thousands of free
  17. software maintainers with an onslaught of meaningless spam. Bots are spamming
  18. [tens of thousands][1] of pull requests like this:
  19. [![Screenshot of a spam pull request on GitHub which adds garbage to the README.md file](https://redacted.moe/f/fd88f606.png)](https://github.com/hundredrabbits/100r.co/pull/39/files)
  20. [1]: https://github.com/search?q=amazing+project+is:pr&type=Issues
  21. The official response from both Digital Ocean and GitHub appears to be passing
  22. the buck. Digital Ocean addresses spam in their FAQ, putting the burden of
  23. dealing with it entirely on the maintainers:
  24. > Spammy pull requests can be given a label that contains the word "invalid" or
  25. > "spam" to discount them. Maintainers are faced with the majority of spam that
  26. > occurs during Hacktoberfest, and we dislike spam just as much as you. If
  27. > you're a maintainer, please label any spammy pull requests submitted to the
  28. > repositories you maintain as "invalid" or "spam", and close them. Pull
  29. > requests with this label won't count toward Hacktoberfest.
  30. via [Hacktoberfest FAQ](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/details)
  31. Here's GitHub's response:
  32. > The content and activity you are reporting appears to be related to
  33. > Hacktoberfest. Please keep in mind that GitHub Staff is not enforcing
  34. > Hacktoberfest rules; we will, however, enforce our own Acceptable Use
  35. > Policies. According to the Hacktoberfest FAQ... [same quote as given above]
  36. via [@kyleknighted@twitter.com][2]
  37. [2]: https://twitter.com/kyleknighted/status/1311685461828612097
  38. So, according to these two companies, whose responsibility is it to deal with
  39. the spam that *they've* created? The maintainers, of course! All for a T-Shirt.
  40. Let's be honest. Hacktoberfest has never generated anything of value for open
  41. source. It's a marketing stunt which sends a deluge of low-effort contributions
  42. to maintainers, leaving them to clean up the spam. I've never been impressed
  43. with Hacktoberfest contributions, even the ones which aren't obviously written
  44. by a bot:
  45. [![Screenshot of a pull request which needlessly comment a CSS file](https://redacted.moe/f/970f2a31.png)](https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/5975/files)
  46. Hacktoberfest is, and has always been, about one thing: marketing for Digital
  47. Ocean.
  48. <iframe
  49. src="https://oc.todon.fr/@val/104960502585461740/embed"
  50. class="mastodon-embed"
  51. style="max-width: 100%; border: 0; margin: 0 auto; display: block;"
  52. width="400"
  53. height="530"
  54. allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
  55. This is what we get with corporate-sponsored "social coding", brought to you by
  56. Digital Ocean and GitHub and McDonalds, home of the Big Mac&trade;. When you
  57. build the Facebook of coding, you get the Facebook of coding. We don't need to
  58. give away T-Shirts to incentivize drive-by drivel from randoms who will never
  59. get any closer to open source than a +1/-1 README.md change.
  60. What would *actually* benefit FOSS is to enable the strong mentorship necessary
  61. raise a new generation of **software engineers** under the tutelage of
  62. maintainers who can rely on a strong support system to do their work. Programs
  63. like Google Summer of Code do this better. Programs where a marketing department
  64. spends $5,000 on T-Shirts to flood maintainers with garbage and clothe people in
  65. ads are doing the opposite: *hurting* open source.
  66. [![Screenshot of a friend's notifications, 9 out of 11 of which are spam](https://redacted.moe/f/a50f2dfc.png)](https://redacted.moe/f/a50f2dfc.png)
  67. Check out [@shitoberfest on Twitter](https://twitter.com/shitoberfest) for more
  68. Hacktoberfest garbage.
  69. **Update 2020-10-03**: Digital Ocean
  70. [has updated their rules](https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/hacktoberfest-update),
  71. among other things asking maintainers to opt-in, to reduce spam.