Do people not remember the "Hacktoberfest" fiasco? People were encouraged to make a PR on public repos in exchange for a free t-shirt, and _obviously_ this led to repos being overrun with spam PRs changing a single line comment.
with loads of people replying and thanking the author, excited for their t-shirt, not really knowing they're _creating unnecessary work_ for actual engineers with limited time.
Incentivized systems like this can work okay in small, self-selected communities, but as soon as it's open up to the entire world, the implied courtesy of said system vanishes, and immediately we're pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Do people not remember the "Hacktoberfest" fiasco? People were encouraged to make a PR on public repos in exchange for a free t-shirt, and _obviously_ this led to repos being overrun with spam PRs changing a single line comment.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktobe...
There were dozens of videos like this one,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xjmCsdgUhE
with loads of people replying and thanking the author, excited for their t-shirt, not really knowing they're _creating unnecessary work_ for actual engineers with limited time.
Incentivized systems like this can work okay in small, self-selected communities, but as soon as it's open up to the entire world, the implied courtesy of said system vanishes, and immediately we're pandering to the lowest common denominator.
This thread digs in a bit. https://twitter.com/Kautukkundan/status/1311717814768594944/