As an Indian, I think here some points I think western world needs to know about India.
* "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming".
Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.
* Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.
Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway.
So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now.
"Gaming the system" is also a cultural thing in Greece. In fact, it's so expected that you are perceived to be either out of the loop or a fool for not going the extra mile. I broke friendships with people who claimed that "it's all subjective at the end of the day" whenever I was raising ethical/moral concerns.
Imagine not being able to provide a reasonable argument to justify your actions, beyond of "because I'm allowed to do it".
I'm Greek too (γειάα) but live in the UK. It's a cultural thing here, too. Just imagine everyone around you constantly trying to pinch every last penny off your purse, in any way they can think of.
Or, look at the way the Brexit campaign convinced half of the UK citizens to vote for Brexit with unsubstantiated claims like "350 million to the NHS" or "Millions of migrants from Turkey coming over" etc.
In general, I think both OP and you are making the same mistake: assuming that because we're citizens of once or currently very poor countries, we're doing something different than the more affluent countries, or are somehow backwards, more corrupt, etc.
Far as I can tell, rich countries are rich because they're better at this game of taking as much as they can from everyone they can anyway they can, than we are.
Just think of who is associated with "move fast and break stuff". Is it an Indian startup? A Greek startup?
I don't see it in the UK actually, and those are not good examples at all. When I go to visit the US, I get nickel-and-dimed a lot more. Compared to the US, there isn't much MLM or get-rich-quick here for example.
"Gaming the system" is really NOT a cultural thing here in the UK. Not in the same way as described by the OP. Your two examples are not in any way, shape or form examples of gaming the system.
Facebook is actually a good example of the opposite tactic. They leave a lot of money on the table because they don't need it and it could hurt their platform dominance.
Which part of the UK do you live in, I wonder. It it’s London (as I’d be willing to bet it is), I’m not sure you can generalise to the whole of the UK from that.
Post modernism embraces this though, and it is rampant in the West post Kant/Nietzsche. When you create your own truth and morals, you are going to disagree with people about stuff like this :)
Do these people really create their own morals though or just live without them? I'm pretty much a nihilist, but spend a lot of time thinking about ethics and my own values because I know we need them for society to function.
I'll see your destruction and I'll raise you externalization.
Yes, this behaviour is rampant throughout Western society, it's pretty much embraced by capitalism. It's still "who cares about $x, as long as I can get my $y". It doesn't really change the argument much if $x is open source and $y is a free t-shirt, or $x is the habitat of these creatures and $y is gallons of oil.
Don't really see how postmodernism fits in with this though.
Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?
Sure, the people who have the majority of the world's wealth may be unsavory, ruthless folks, but let's not toss the baby out with the bathwater.
Capitalism is the alternative to state-controlled commerce.
If you believe in (here we go with the cringe term) liberty, then you cannot on-premise agree with an economic system that isn't capitalism.
(Whether capitalism ever works out in-practice is another argument entirely. My theory is that given any long-enough amount of time, a small group of actors will amass hugely disproportional wealth, and then start gaming/breaking the system for everyone else, as seems to be human nature.)
It gets really tiring (especially in modern tech culture) to say "I'm a capitalist" and then have people dogpile on you, asking why you want to pillage the environment and steal all the wealth, etc etc.
And then you have to explain, "I want none of that. I just don't want anyone telling you how to live your life, and to have as many opportunities as you can create for yourself."
I say all of this as someone who grew up exceedingly poor, in trailer parks eating peanut butter and crackers, with no higher education.
There are shitty people everywhere. Because some humans are murderers, does not mean all humans are murderers. Become some people are twisted, unethical capitalists, does not mean all capitalists are twisted and unethical.
At some stage of hyper-capitalism, when you hit "oligarch" levels, you've stopped representing capitalistic ideals because you have created a less-free market than when you entered.
> Why do people equate capitalism with "Fuck everyone, get money"?
That is exactly the behavior that capitalism incentivizes. Two facets:
1.
I'm assuming we agree that capitalism is mostly about markets and free consumer choice. So you have a set of produces competing for purchases from consumers. Consumers have finite resources to acquire information about the producers they consume from.
This means that if it takes less resources for a producer to hide a negative externality than the externality provides, that producer will be more efficient on the market and defeat other producers who don't. Thus the market rewards negative externalities and deceit.
Meanwhile, the market incentivizes no systems to produce consumer organization or better consumer information. We do see that happen sometimes with things like the USDA, Consumer Reports, etc. but all of that happens outside of and in opposition to the capitalist system.
2.
Producers don't want to compete, they just have to if one producer feels they can secure a relative advantage by competing with another. But it is almost always more effective for both producers to instead collude and cooperate against consumers. Since producers generally massively outnumber consumers, and have a lot in common culturally and structurally, it is natural for them to form anti-competitive cabals or to simply merge into larger and fewer corporations.
Capitalism produces monopolies, which history shows any time you have a "free" market without very strong trust-busting from the government.
These two points exacerbate each other. The fewer producers there are, the more they become the sole experts in their field and the better able they are to hide their negative externalities.
"Economies of scale" work in harmful directions too. Bigger companies are more efficient at scaling up the damage their negative externalities cause.
Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part. When you treat it as the whole, you get... well, climate change and a dying Earth.
OR you can say "PART of Capitalism may form a part of a functioning, efficient system, but it is always only a part."
It's nice that capitalism has some really efficient features. But it also has some really horrible ones.
If we're talking about functioning efficient systems, you really have to show that the bad parts of capitalism do not form an obstacle against having a functioning, efficient system.
So far in history we have only seen that the good parts of capitalism can work really well.
Well, you can't very well spark a fire that burns down a whole city and then turn around and say you can't blame the sparks because they're not really dangerous, it's only a conflagration that's really dangerous. Capitalism is the system that enables the kind of people you call twisted and unethical to do their twisted and unethical things and "amass hugely disproportional wealth". And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong? Did Adam Smith say that capital should be equally distributed, or something similar?
> And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves.
Just wanted to mention that this is such a US cultural idea. It's really not nearly as strong elsewhere (maybe some exceptions, I don't know everywhere in the world).
> And also the system that everyone else accepts because they hope that, one day, they'll have the "hugely disproportional wealth" and be able to do twisted unethical things, themselves. Or, am I wrong?
I feel like most (capitalist) people don't actively spend their existence in a driven pursuit of excessive wealth with the intention/moral imperative to fuck everyone else over to get there or stay at "the top".
Or at least I like to hope.
Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.
I do not agree with the behaviors of these hyper-capitalist, exploitative people.
But it would make me a massive hypocrite with double-standards to say "Well, actually now I think you have enough, you don't get to have any more money."
If you spend your life getting to this position (legally), it's not my right or place to take it from you.
And this philosophy of "Okay fine, but I don't necessarily condone/agree" is the difference between freedom and oppression.
I VERY FIRMLY believe nobody has the right to push their ideals on others.
This kind of thinking is how you get things like gay marriage being illegal, preventing women from having abortions, and all numbers of unsavory things.
Genuinely believing in liberty, individualism, and personal freedoms means standing by those ideals even when you don't agree with the way these freedoms are exercised by others.
> Also, here's the thing about "liberty": If you're not a hypocrite, you don't attempt to control other people or decide what decisions they're allowed to make (barring things that would directly harm others) whether you agree with them or not.
And this here is I believe the crux of the issue. As you say absolute liberty requires absolute capitalism. And absolute capitalism by design incentives a number of negative societal behaviors. And companies forced to compete with those that perform those negative behaviors have to chose to either adopt them as well or go out of business - pushing them to adopt those behaviors.
So the conclusion is absolute liberty causes negative behavior. The idealistic view is absolute liberty is the primary virtue of society. Or in my opinion the more accurate view, is that liberty like many other essential virtues must be balanced with other factors in society.
My interpretation of you perspective is that absolute liberty is essential, anything less is hypocrisy - and the way you manage those views is by downplaying the negative impacts of what capitalism incentivises.
And note, I'm not saying capitalism is wrong (I absolutely believe is the best approach for economic efficiency) simply that it, just like liberty cannot be absolute. It must be balanced with negative impacts on society.
Because people equate capitalism with America, and "fuck everyone, get money" is literally required by law there. In 1919 Henry Ford was sued by minority share holders because he wanted to increase wages. "The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries." Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
If you want to claim that America reached "hyper-capitalism" and stopped representing capitalistic ideals 100 years ago, then sure what you are saying makes sense . But I think most people equates capitalism with america.
Please explain how the wikipedia page says the opposite of what I wrote.
Here I will spell it out verbatim from the article:
- By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the wages of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased.
- The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars.
- The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments.
- The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.
The court ruled in favor of the minority share holders.
I think most of the replies to this are missing the point. Capitalism is the best we have come up with so far. There's less of a praise for capitalism but more of a fear from change. When systems like that shift to others, it can be very hard to predict which system it will shift to and if it'll be better. It's the fear that, yes if we do switch from capitalism to some other system, can we trust this new system will be better? Because it also has the potential to be ten times worse. People like to say capitalism is evil and it's causing all of these problems but what would a reasonable alternative be and what would be a reasonable way to obtain that alternative without making live much worse for everyone?
huh well i came into that very dubious, but that was actually quite interesting and i listened to every word. i will hand it to religion that they have had a fairly consistent answer to the post-modernism / relativism / post-truth-iness and its attendant ugliness in present times-- the same answer as before any of those things even existed, in fact. xD
If you like this you should watch James Lindsay over at New Discourses. He just co-authored a book on this whole topic with Helen Pluckrose from Aero magazine.
Aye, it's common knowledge in Greece that he came across his huge fortune by being a nice guy and never stepping over any lines, of law or ethics. True fact.
Generally he was thought to be trustworthy if you cut a deal -- no matter how corrupt and shady the deal was -- but absolutely willing to bribe, coerce, threaten, and completely willing ignore regulations and rules.
I was backpacking Europe years ago and I met this Brazilian girl. We were discussing places that required a visa and she said she never bothered with them. I asked how that was possible.
She said that if anyone ever questioned her she just acted confused and found a way to sneak off. I was flabbergasted. She simply (and proudly) explained: "It's the Brazilian way of life!"
Yeah, personally I think this has a lot to do with post-colonialism.
I'm Irish, and there's a lot of this in our society. It was much more accepted in my parents generation, and appears to be reducing a little bit as we become a richer society.
I heard from an Irish colleague (I'm a Brazilian expat in Dublin) that this attitude, in particular towards taxes, changed after the independence from the UK.
So yes and no. My parents are pretty old (they had kids late) and they really don't like telling revenue (the taxman) anything, and would be inclined to overlook tax avoidance and whatnot. My wife's parents are of a similar age, and also similar on this.
Now, all of them were born a generation after independence, so it's definitely not just that.
However, when the government has historically not given a crap about you (as the British government did not), it leads to a disconnect from the society and institutions that increases the probability that you'll be OK with tax dodging and not have as much trust in the overall society (because historically, it didn't care about you).
So, I'd say that it's slowly changing because we're not a colony anymore, but it definitely didn't just disappear in a puff of smoke in 1921.
I'm sorry, what? Like I enjoy a bit of Irish-Catholic bashing as much as the next Irish person (probably more than most, given that I enjoy complaining about the Council of Nicea) but I don't really see how the pre-independence Catholic Church was unethical.
To be fair, though I'm not a fan of the authoritarianism, without the Catholic Church neither of my grand-parents or their parents would have had an education, and indeed the church was the centre of irish social life and community for a very long time.
Like, post-independence, the Church did a lot of dodgy things, but I really don't think you can blame the one organisation which actually provided some services for Irish catholics for our issues with authority.
And it's worth pointing out that much of the remaining corruption in Irish life is at the political level, rather than the bureaucratic level. As an example, you might bribe politicians to get planning permission for a large shopping centre, but you don't have to bribe the passport office for a renewal.
Can you give me some examples of Ireland being horrifically bent?
That could describe any country. Certainly Greece, India and Brazil wouldn't make it to the top of my list of countries I'd expect to see described that way.
According to a reliable source - hat logos - there is a country that might someday rejoin that elite group. ("MAGA" political hats: "Make America Great Again". There is so much to read into that in the political climate.
One more very Indian thing perhaps also is we like to gladly flog ourselves and jump at the chance of discrediting our people. We will start with "As an Indian" but end with "They" instead of "We"
I'm frankly kind of sick of the constant denigration and apologies being written slavishly to foreigners on behalf of all Indians by Indians. As an Indian, I accept there's a lot of cultural problems and crap in the country but to the degree that people will prostrate before the Western elite reminds me of our colonial days. Like, literally everything in that paragraph could be written about literally any part of the world cause humans are just that shitty. In this particular case, the person making the video made it in Hindi so it very specifically created a spike from Indian users
I wish my fellow Indians would stop this constant self flagellation and appeasement and have some goddamn pride
yeah, man. I tried to convince my Japanese wife not to pay off her predatory student loans when she moved to the US, and it was like I was talking about burning down a building or something.
> I wish my fellow Indians would stop this constant self flagellation and appeasement and have some goddamn pride
I don’t see it as an Indian thing (or a Greece thing as someone else replied). It’s a failing of all of global humanity that anything you can get away with is “ok” to 10-49% of the world’s population (have no concrete source, but I “feel” it’s below 50%, but still a significant number). The US President got up on stage just this week and essentially answered the question “why did you pay so little taxes in 2016-2017?” with the response “because I could! Don’t like the tax laws? BLAME JOE!”, taking zero responsibility for his own actions.
It's something you'll see in pretty much every disfavored group: people will attempt to push themselves up by pushing the others down. They'll say "I'm not like other X", reinforcing the idea that X actually does whatever bad things you imagine they do, and deserves to be looked down on.
They usually don't even recognize that that's what they're implying. They merely want to set themselves up as worthwhile and ask not to be pre-judged. But collectively, you get "crab mentality" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality).
The social motivations for saying sth should not be conflated with the truth of that thing. In my experience, usually people shitting on their own group tell the truth.
On another note, I find Western, affluent self-flagellation much more pervasive and deceptive.
I disagree. As an Indian, our pride is one of the biggest problems. Not achieving much but taking a lot of credit for it. We even take pride in Indians that leave for abroad and do exceptionally well - CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Adobe, MasterCard are not Indians in terms of their citizenship. They're of Indian ethnicity.
To the foreigners (especially Americans) - I cannot make this up. When I was in 6th standard, we had a teacher that said without flinching, or perhaps completely deluded that - 90% of NASA employees are Indians. We knew this is bullshit even when in the 90's when there was no internet.
Currently, we've got the Indian media tied up with taking pride in the fact that Kamala Harris is Indian.
It's frankly embarrassing how much undeserved pride we constantly seek.
Slavishly? Eh? The comments also constantly remind how few talented people get lost in the haystack because of the noise. They are stating the reality.
> have some goddamn pride
We have seen how much damage pride has brought. If you still want to see
1) people without science knowledge claiming religious rituals have scientific reasons
2) people who don't know what linguistics is claiming Sanskrit is the first language
3) people without any knowledge of medicine heralding superiority of Ayurveda
> Like, literally everything in that paragraph could be written about literally any part of the world
Oh come on. If we are able to mentally swap out cultures in the OP to see how ridiculous your claim is, then you are too. And we have to think you did.
Do you think it could be a cultural artifact beaten into the Indian subcontinent by the British? Sort of a collective, areawide PTSD?
Tangentially, I personally wish people would stop using the "culture" excuse for a group's bad behavior. Culture doesn't develop in a vacuum. Certain cultural practices could potentially come from really problematic sources. Changing one's culture isn't an insult to anyone if you're changing it for the better. And in this case, even if Indian culture is to prostrate before those you see as your superior, I don't think that's an element of the culture that needs preserving.
I trust people who talk negatively about their own culture more than I trust people who talk positively. Every culture has lots of dumb stuff, and people who are willing to talk negatively about it strike me as more open-minded.
I can understand and relate to the point you raise. Constructive criticism and self retrospection is a key marker of any progressive society. The slight caveat is that each society is in a varying state at any given time. India has gone through a full circle from peak, to trough to hopefully a rising future. At this stage of the society, confidence is very fragile and mindset conflicted across the glorious to the defeated to the hopeful. This why you see the spectrum of emotions. As with personal image and attitude being sculpted for success, a nation's image and attitude need to be sculpted for success too.
> If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.
The Ferengi from Star Trek come to mind when I read this.
Less ethnicities than cultures and metaphors. Darmok notwithstanding.
The Klingons were originally intended to look Asiatic and resemble Mongols or Japanese samurai, with the Klingon Empire being essentially the Soviet Union In Space. And there is an uncomfortable elephant in the room that Klingons, a species mostly known for violence and bloodlust, are all (or almost all) black coded. While the implications are obviously unintentional, it's impossible not to draw parallels in the history in sci-fi and fantasy to the "swarthy, dark-skinned savage" archetype.
Speaking of which here[0] is a video on Klingons and the history of racial coding in Star Trek if anyone is interested.
The relationship between Cardassians and Bajorans is clearly a metaphor for post-war Germany, with the former being Nazis and the latter Jews. Romulans, obviously, are Space Romans.
The Borg clearly represent the dehumanizing effect of technology and collectivism, making them a perfect foil for the Federation with its techno-utopian ideals. I've heard but can't prove that the Borg were meant to be a parody of Japanese business culture. There are alien stand ins for racial prejudice from "Let That Be your Last Battlefield" and nonbinary gender persecution from "The Outcast," and the Trill species in general. In cases like these, the aliens are meant to serve as a mirror to some aspect of humanity.
And of course the Ferengi have already been discusssed here.
Although in one egregious case (TNG's "Code of Honor")[1] the "aliens" were literally just African caricatures in space. And of course TOS gives us planets with literal space Nazis, space Romans, space Cowboys, space Greek Gods, space whatever costumes they could scrounge from the Desilu lot that week.
> In America, people ask 'Do the Ferengi represent Jews?' In England, they ask 'Do the Ferengi represent the Irish?' In Australia, they ask if the Ferengi represent the Chinese[…] The Ferengi represent the outcast… it's the person who lives among us that we don't fully understand.[19]
This has less to do with India, and more about what happens when there’s no prior culture of open source, to balance against the willingness to “hustle”. The fact that a lot of these PRs might originate in India is only relevant insofar as there are a lot of people willing to hustle, and don’t have much open source experience. Chances are that they are oblivious to what happens on the other side of the table, and open source projects are abstract entities (which might as well be run by Github, or some other bureaucracy!) A useful reminder that the celebrated “hustle” is susceptible to the unintended consequences of Goodhart’s law.
If this was Sean Parker with Napster or Zuck with early Facebook, we’d be celebrating it.
(For all those who advocate for growth hacking techniques, or annoying ads, this is exactly how scummy most such techniques / dark patterns feel to users. I don’t think that is geographically localized in any way.)
> his "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.
While I don't disagree with the rest of your comment, this is not accurate. Unacademy focuses on test prep and thier anthem while sappy and gung ho, doesn't really have any references to gaming the system. Crack it is in the same vein as Cracking the Coding Interview,
Cracking coding interviews would be considered “overfitting” in statistical learning parlance. You may ace the interview, but for most people the performance at coding interviews has no correlation with performance in actual work.
Overfitting? Sure. But gaming the system? I disagree. Hell, I've heard of companies giving candidates the book to help them prepare for the interview. It's not ideal but this is what the system expects.
I just started interviewing with FB and got prep slides, two courses on educative.io, a 27 page document on the origins and purpose of the role, two 45 minute intro calls, and two 45 minute prep calls so far, and a recommendation to study up on a bunch of problems on leetcode in addition. I don't know how the rest of FAANG compares but Facebook drops a mountain of prep material for candidates.
Imagine I'm taking Calculus 2 and I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold" or I can get the final exam a few months ahead of time and simply memorize the symbols I need to write into the exam booklet. The latter is self-evidently gaming the system.
When primary school teachers teach directly towards the assessment exam, they are only incidentally teaching the subject and are primarily (IMO) gaming the system as well.
But the latter is not going on here. They are not memorizing the symbols.
> I have a choice to learn the material and take the final exam "cold"
What does cold means? Learning calculus without solving exercises? Or without solving variety of exercises? Intentionally ignoring last years tests and not trying them?
If your learning materials match what the test is supposed to test, you will solve a lot of exercises while learning from them. And the test itself would contain combinations and variations from these.
When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.
A test is a proxy for actual performance working on some useful task. The nature of useful work is usually that it can't be represented by two hours of multiple choice questions, whiteboarding, or anecdotes about "a time you disagreed with someone"; therefore, most tests will differ from the work. Learning to pass the test is easier than learning to do the work, but if you do that the test ceases to measure your work performance.
well check out italy, you can substitute italian with indians and keep the entire paragraph almost word for word.
I suspect it's a common theme of countries that managed to keep an identity while under a long foreign domination. when the state is the enemy for generations, the ethics and norm about law and legality become a lot more flexible.
Would this apply more to southern Italy more than north?
> Henrich anticipates a quibble about what he calls “the Italian enigma”: Why, if Italy has been Catholic for so long, did northern Italy become a prosperous banking center, while southern Italy stayed poor and was plagued by mafiosi? The answer, Henrich declares, is that southern Italy was never conquered by the Church-backed Carolingian empire. Sicily remained under Muslim rule and much of the rest of the south was controlled by the Orthodox Church until the papal hierarchy finally assimilated them both in the 11th century. This is why, according to Henrich, cousin marriage in the boot of Italy and Sicily is 10 times higher than in the north, and in most provinces in Sicily, hardly anyone donates blood (a measure of willingness to help strangers), while some northern provinces receive 105 donations of 16-ounce bags per 1,000 people per year.
The criticalness is a general Italian phenomenon. The one thing that unites Italians, north and south, is the perception that Italy is stupid and corrupt.
I was also thinking about Italy, especially with how popular people like Berlusconi always were precisely because they were never playing by the rules... but it's possible that it's still a difference in degree. I don't know if Italians would go to such extreme lenghts just for a t-shirt. I don't really know Indian culture though, so I can't judge.
well am not well versed about everyone history, but a cursory search says it maintained special status granting cultural and political independence for quite a while and rebelled within a decade of the russification project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Finland
you need to start thinking percentages and not counts. also, and in percentage, knowledge of what a github even is in Italy is far lower; IT is still seen as the nerd kids choice and not as a professional career.
More seriously, I have heard on a TV programme, and I have NO DATA for this, that britain put more resources and/or cash into the US than it ever got out (edit: until the US became independent, which is about the 300 years the poster mentioned). Does anyone know reliable sources that can verify, refute or somehow qualify that statement?
Edit: why is the parent post flagged and dead? Flagging should be used for proper offence, which I did not take and led me to an interesting question.
Glad that no offence was taken, my intent was to throw spot light on the root comment where it is easy to generalize on any human community. We all need to restrain ourselves from that urge. I don't mind it being flagged either, it does happen when perspectives are not fully understood either side.
This is one of the reasons Indians cheating on the OSCP is such an issue. I don't know if they realize that destroys the value of the cert for everyone... cool you got the cert but now its worthless.
Before seeing the video I posted my theory here [0] on where the spam was originating from and it seems this pretty much completes the explanation I gave that it's a classic case of academic spam [1].
That type of spam, especially on GitHub (so by folks trying to get into IT) really only reinforces the stereotype that 95% of Indian IT students can't code [3] [4].
Well Said pritam. I am also from India and i see many of my friends run away for free thing. eg: Till September 30 They used google meet for their online classes and now they are searching for another free alternate.
It is very sad to see this culture of spamming and gaming. Infact this is one reason why many Saas Companies dont prefer India as a matured market as they will use the free system and wont ever upgrade to a paid plan.
I live in a post-soviet country and the ~50 years of soviet planned-economy, arbitrary laws and constant shortages combined with an illegitimate regime (as any foreign power that is ruling by force on your turf is by definition) meant that people got a pretty deep ingrained attitude of "gaming the system" even tho there's almost 30 years of self rule. It is slowly fading away and being replaced by the capitalist "growth hacking" which I'm not sure is a lot different.
Can agree. Gaming the system was the norm in Russia. E.g. you couldn't buy or sell apartments. If you wanted one, you had to "move in" with someone and the other person would then "move out" later. Payment was handled under the radar.
Hearing the stories from my parents, just getting furniture for a new apartment was already hard, since sometimes it just was not available.
> It is slowly fading away and being replaced by the capitalist "growth hacking" which I'm not sure is a lot different.
There's definitely a blurry line there. I'm not completely clear what "growth hacking" means, but I definitely think SEO crosses a line (basically hacking google's algorithm to mislead them and their customers). Even worse would be things like paying for fake traffic to drive up ad revenue. People generally understand there is a line between legitimate business and scamming people, even when greed/desperation drives them to bend the rules somewhat and rationalize it.
I can attest to this. In fact, in India, it's considered very stupid and laughable by a very large number of people to buy digital books and music, because they are available for "free" on pirate websites. Read that again: I'm not just saying that people pirate stuff, instead, I'm saying they consider it unimaginable and stupid to spend money because it's available for "free." Ethics never enter the picture, I promise you.
Also, it's considered acceptable and clever to order clothes, use them at an event, and return as "defective." Quaint concepts like morality are not even considered relevant.
Usually it will have to do with purchasing power parity.
The low pricing in one country doesn't translate to low pricing in another country, especially with digital goods.
Things are changing though now. Many streaming services are doing well in India as prices are appropriate and people are educated on the value of the goods.
It is also related to strong laws/enforcing of laws as well, which is also improving in my opinion.
Okay, so let's say some people can't afford to buy digital goods. How does that, by itself, explain a general belief that the few who do that are stupid because they "don't realize" that they are available for "free"?
Now, you or I might say that they aren't really available for free (they're stolen/pirated), but any thoughts of that kind just don't appear in many people (amoral, not immoral).
Yes, things get fouled up from time to time but this is really the same as the old hacker ethos. It is the mindset that led to Woz building a computer from scratch, the internet being an open system and the concept of open source thriving.
You could have explained it without using negative connotations like gaming the system. Student crowd in US also games the system. Humble bundles and exploiting regional pricing of Steam are few examples.
It might be a post-colonial cultural artifact. Speaking as an Irish person, we have a similar regard for bending rules, which is only beginning to show signs of change recently.
> Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
> Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
Everyone breaking a rule will say that they're doing this. They'll claim they're just bending the rules. Even when they're engaged in massive law breaking behaviour they'll claim that those laws don't really matter and that the ends justify the means.
Hacktoberfest highlights the problem with this paragraph of Graham's. Hundreds of thousand of people being "naughty", hacking the system, cause problems for other people.
I know your comment is in good faith because the core of what you're saying is correct, and I'm certainly not accusing you of anything... Instead of 'part of the culture' though I would phrase it as 'correlated with the culture' to avoid accidentally giving supremacists ammunition.
The point being, you have to rise above your circumstances. Just because everyone you grew up with is doing something gravely immoral doesn't make it correct. No culture should exude pathological behavior as a trait.
Your attempt at couching your comment in disclaimers is hilarious. You don't just give supremacists ammunition, you make everyone laugh at the absurdity.
"Part of the culture" is bad... And "correlated with the culture" is good. But "exude pathological behavior" is where you end.
Have you figured out yet that language policing is just tiptoeing around the things you're not supposed to notice?
I have a couple of vaguely popular repos on github (~100,000 downloads a month)
Generally speaking, (T-shirt farming aside), if you find a genuine typo, or small way to improve documentation, then that PR will be very much appreciated. README-typos are quite visible, yet easy for maintainers to overlook.
If you are new to GitHub, please do not be discouraged, and as with editing Wikipedia- be bold.
(In the large scheme of things, its really positive that so many people worked out how to make a PR, and were then motivated to do so- lets not shame them too hard. Although occasionally neccessary, we must be mindful about gatekeeping, especially with the young and inexperienced)
I have done one letter typo fixes to doc repos as a 3rd party and felt great about them. One of them was actually a typo in a command line that I found by going through their instructions step by step copying and pasting each line. I was seriously confused when it didn't work!
The point of the date it to tell people when the material was created. In some jurisdictions / situations, copyright expires N years after it was created, so that date tells people when copyright has expired.
Unfortunately, in many cases now, copyright is based on the year the author died, rather than the year the work was created, which means it is much harder to work out if something has entered the public domain.
Changing the date without changing the code significantly is arguably fraudulent.
doesn't moving the creation date forward in time make you vulnerable?
if you create some content in 2018 and I rip it off in 2019 and then you update your copyright to 2020, what's to stop me from saying I came up with it first?
That's partly why you have a span like "Copyright 2018-2020" - you are saying some of this material is older, some isn't. You need to keep copies of the older version with the older copyright to be clear which parts were invented when.
I want to like that idea. Unfortunately, I can counter with: When you (as an outsider) see two very similar projects, one claiming to be from 2018 the other from 2020, what will you look into/try out first?
Presumably, even if publishing date is relevant, it's only first publication that's relevant. No work should stay copyrighted forever just because it's constantly being republished.
I think they're referring to one example on Twitter (unfortunately, I can't find it again now) which was calling out a legitimate single-character typo fix. As someone who occasionally likes to report typos, I appreciate someone telling us they're appreciated :)
The pull request I have seen were changing "how to install" into "how to easily install" and such. They were not fixing typos or even making sentences better. They were just meaningless changes.
Not sure why the downvotes... the takeaway is it’s extremely easy for maintainers to tell a well intentioned docs change from the crap referenced in this article
Yes. It is easy to tell them apart. But some people are getting over 50 of these in a day, so even if it is easy to tell, it gets annoying and requires you to deal with spam.
That is the thing with spam in general - you can tell it from legitimate mail easily, but is it still annoying and requires you to deal with it.
That is why I still prefer old-style patch submissions via mailing lists - the bar is higher, so it usually weeds out exactly this kind of trash.
Of course, if a company started offering free t-shirts for mailing list submissions and some foolish (but well-meaning) youtuber would publish a tutorial on how to subscribe and post to a mailing list, I have no doubts that there would be a deluge regardless of this higher bar. :)
As a drive-by contributor to plenty of projects it raises the bar uncomfortably high though. A PR I can rebase and rework based on feedback that can be given right there on the line of code it pertains to. Easy as pie with GitLab or GitHub. Really bothersome with mailing-lists, and excruciatingly painful if they don't even use a modern DVCS like git.
(EDIT: I didn't mean to say that mailing lists are much better in every respect than GitHub/GitLab/etc, just that they don't deserve the hate they seem to get in every discussion about tools for collaborative development.)
As someone who has been contributing to Linux for a few years now, which uses mailing lists exclusively for all development (and not only do they use Git, they wrote it) I've found that mail-based workflows are in some ways better to GitHub/GitLab/etc:
1. You can review individual patches, you cannot do this in GitHub at all (commenting at the bottom of a commit doesn't count because it's not tied to the PR and the comment is lost to ether on force-push). GitHub also defaults to you reviewing the full diff and make reviewing individual commits kind of frustrating (you're just dropped into the commit history view rather than a proper review view).
2. All code reviews end up being line-based because the patch is the main body of the email. Design discussion happens as replies to the cover letter of the patch set, meaning you can easily tell which kind of discussion is happening. You can also directly comment on the git commit message, which the kernel community values a lot more than most projects.
3. You can far more easily be notified on patches sent to sections of the tree (though this is slightly tied to Linux's development workflow with subsystem maintainers). GitHub only lets you watch a repository and get the firehouse of events -- which is about as useful as subscribing to the main LKML and trying to keep up with the notifications.
As for difficulty, honestly the bar to entry to send a patch to a mailing list if you're using Git is just:
$ git send-email --to ... --cc ... origin/master
I would suggest doing "git format-patch" with --cover-letter and then checking the patch contents first, but you can do it one command for simple patches. Git was designed to make this mailing list approach work, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's actually pretty simple to use.
A code mirror and mailing list is a perfectly fine DVCS for the purposes of contributing code to an open-source project, and it doesn't lock a whole ecosystem into a monoculture walled garden.
> feedback that can be given right there on the line of code it pertains to
Done easily with a mailing list, and you can be sure that the comment won't just magically disappear because GitHub decided it was fixed even when it wasn't.
> excruciatingly painful if they don't even use a modern DVCS like git.
As far as local development is concerned, there's no reason you can't use all the git tools to manage your changes.
I don't want the walled garden — I don't care if its GitLab or GitHub or some other tool — as long as I can do stuff like rebase and squash easily and discuss the patch without having to subscribe to a mailing-list, set up inbox filters, prepare the patch for emailing, participate until the patch is in, then not forget to unsubscribe.
Comments about a patch are fleeting and should be gone after the patch lands — and should be treated as such. Any relevant comments will be in the source code.
GitLab (and several others) can be self-hosted for free; and the walled garden (GitHub?) is tolerable enough. And as long as you keep your software development practices sensible (centred around git, not GitHub), there hardly is a wall really.
> As far as local development is concerned, there's no reason you can't use all the git tools to manage your changes.
Certainly possible, but I didn't manage to get git-svn working the last time I wanted to contribute to a SVN repo. In the end I just created a local git repo in-place and generated the patch with git format-patch.
This is the outcome that would really suck - if people making their first contribution a legitimate doc improvement get their PRs caught up and marked as spam by maintainers who understandably mistake it as part of the spam.
I'm sure my first ever PR was adding an example to the docs for something, and if that had been closed with no response and labelled spam I doubt I'd have stayed around to contribute again.
One of the PR I made for hacktoberfest was fixing typo in a command in a doc. In the current case however, it seems people are not even trying to do something trivially useful.
On the other hand, I was told by boost project that my one line fix for a typo was "waste of maintainer time", so it seems to vary on per-project basis :)
It's so trivial to cherry-pick or rebase and merge such a commit if you understand enough of git to use it properly with branches and stuff. If the commit message is suitably worded it saves time too.
There are software projects out there, even highly used ones, that only use Github to mirror their SVN repository (or some other yesteryear source code system). For those maintainers these PRs do take up more time than they contribute though.
Limiting interactions is not the same as disabling pull requests wholesale (you can disable issues completely), they are temporary in nature (you can only disable them for 6 months at a time), and in addition I believe my comment was posted before they announced the new feature -- and this is a feature people have been requesting for a decade now.
Yeah, some maintainers are friendlier then others, and some seem to care more about their precious time then about encouraging people to make (legitimate) contributions unfortunately...
I received two pull requests for two projects on GitHub last night. I am the author of one and the maintainer of the other.
At first, the pull requests did not make sense at all. One of them made minor changes to a README, e.g., changing "this book" to "the book". It was not fixing a typo or incorrect grammar. It was merely choosing a word different from the one I had chosen. In fact, I preferred "this book", so the pull request (PR) was inconsistent with my preference. There was no explanation whatsoever regarding why this change was warranted. Then I looked at the PR author's profile and found that the same person had submitted several such trivial PRs to other projects too, all of them changing "this" to "the" at some places in README files.
It all began to make sense when I looked at the calendar. It was Oct 01. This looked like PR spam due to Hacktoberfest. For now, I just labelled the PRs as "invalid" (as suggested by https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/faq/), closed the PRs, and moved on.
Like all good things created with good intentions on the Internet, spam is hurting this event and bringing bad reputation to it. The possibility of large scale, endless spam should be worked into the design of any new Internet-based event or solution.
I also received one pull request that I thought was spam, where the author made several nonsensical changes like changing "#Features" into "#Features:" in the README. Now it makes sense.
I'll probably tell thank them for their contribution and point out a few ideas for things that would really help us, instead of merging this just for the sake of Hacktoberfest.
Yeah. Best approach I can think of would be something like:
Cool, looks like you've getting the hang of creating Pull
Requests on GitHub. :)
The actual change here though isn't useful to us. :(
Would you be ok spending some time improving [XYZ] instead? :)
eg combine encouragement for the bit they got right + info on what needs work, and point them in the right direction for fixing it
Some people will probably just not be bothered, but others might get involved in the suggested way. Hopefully. :)
The problem is that this takes time. On one PR, sure, okay. But if you have 50 of the spammy PRs, even with Copy and Paste, this will take several minutes (maybe up to an hour, depending) of a maintainers day (and really, per day, however long Hacktoberfest goes on). That's time that they're not spending coding or updating docs in a valid way or spending with family. It would probably be tenable if there were some heuristic that was 100% certain that this was a spammy PR, but I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
Don't waste your time. The people doing this don't know anything about programming.
There's no reason to ever look at or respond to PR from someone who doesn't at least have their own repo (or at least a fork of a repo) with non trivial commits (at least to a toy/learning project)
But this is not spam. It's based on morons trying to make it in the software world without any basis that they should be there.
They're doing this so that they can put "I have x amount of accepted pullrequests on github" and fool an employer to hire them. To become shit team members or outsourced to become shit offshore team members*.
I have seen these kinds in many a project. Real world experience. Real talk.
The episode name would be something like "haker man"
And Ricky (drunk like always) would probably say:
"Morty, gonna tell you something, everybody these days call themselves 'programmers/coders/hackers' all they do is watch a Javascript Course, barely, type some stupid shit like 'Hello World' and they feel like a great scientist Morty, you really understand how stupid is this, Morty?! They share that in all the 'social media' trendy moron stuffy like Twitter, a place even more cancerous than me Morty.
In the end Morty, burrp, I'm actually the Genius who discovered Time Travel and invented the Portal Gun."
> They're doing this so that they can put "I have x amount of accepted pullrequests on github" and fool an employer to hire them.
Yes, I have seen a bunch of those on popular repositories over the years. It is an annoyance, but usually so little, even on popular repos (I contributed much to PHP as example of project size) that it's easy to ignore (or even simply merge if it's somewhat useful, the fooling won't lead them far)
The difference with this marketing stunt is that there is way more active encouragement for that and way more of it at once ... multiple a day instead of one every few months
This has become a pet peeve of mine ever since a former co-worker told me his scheme of setting up a cronjob to add a single commit with a timestamp to a project on his Github profile on a daily basis, so future employers would think he was a 10xer or something to that effect
It is for publicity purposes of digital ocean. Gray area, they do incentivize participation in open source but also are responsible for this hug of death.
These contributions are junk and spam. I don’t think any maintainer will be upset if they get 100 legitimate and well intentioned pull requests, but we’re talking about spam here.
There is a good amount of questions on SO or tutorial blog posts that are basic, really basic stuff. Things that if you had barely any idea of what you were doing you would figure out but you don't.
Oh and now guess what, this flood of PRs raises the bar and annoyances for everybody.
I agree that the spam is problematic, but I feel the need to call out his "data collection".
As evidence that CodeWithHarry is the cause, he says
> A search for "Amazing Project" is now showing 21,177 issues.
and
> A search for "improve docs" shows 319,251 issues.
???
Improve docs has been a common beginner level PR since the beginning of time. Do you really think that 319k spam issues have been filed in the last day?
If you want to count how many spam PRs were directly inspired by the video, you can try searching "an amazing project" (with quotes), and filtering by newest. It looks like there have only been about 50 PRs directly inspired by it.
Github allows you to search by dates (newer than, date ranges, etc), so for example, you can add the query "created:>=2020-09-30" (the date the youtube video was uploaded) to get a more accurate list.
From this search, it looks like it's definitely on the order of hundreds:
Sorting by relevance doesn't get you a representative sample - that bubbles PRs who say "amazing project" in the title to the top(which are indeed mostly spam).
I'm trying to get a lower bound on spam PRs filed. If you sort by oldest (instead of by "relevance" as the parent commenter did) and do a spot check, you'll see that a lot of the PR's are legitimate: https://github.com/search?o=asc&q=amazing+project+created%3A...
Certainly, restricting to the title misses plenty of PRs. But his search provides 252 PRs, and I'd estimate that easily <100 of them are spam.
The results I got show 4 spam PRs out of 10 on the first page. Same on the second and third pages. 60% is not a vast majority legitimate and 40% spam is not inconsequential when it's 86k PRs.
Presumably the spam onslaught is slowing down with time from the video being posted so looking at the most recent results will give an ever fewer percentage of spam. If you look at page 100 of the results (for example, currently 18 hours old) there's a lot more spam.
It is so indiscriminate that repos that could be considered dead (7+ years without activity) by the maintainer seems to get massive attention from new accounts just to get that T-Shirt. O_O
Wonder if NTFS 'lets' you. I know the API does not let it. But I wonder if you could get it in a different way. I know you can sneak case sensitivity in here and there.
A lot of those accounts also seem to be created just a few hours before October 1st. Can GitHub time gate new accounts before that can make public PRs?
I feel like that would be counterproductive given that GitHub is a tool, not a social network you need to gather account age or fake internet points on to use. Don't really see anything wrong with somebody signing up and immediately creating a PR.
I realize GitHub is one of the most popular choices out there but the activity stream is already social mediaesque enough for my taste. There's other ways to tackle this, DO could make their marketing stunt opt-in and GH could respond to the people wanting to add friction to their repo's workflows in a way that provides value, without crippling the general user experience.
I think this would be a bad direction. I bet that most people create an account on GitHub to report an issue or create a pull request directly. I think this should be encouraged.
Some people are giving him the benefit of doubt because you don't understand hindi. Please don't.
This person really did encourage his 600k+ subscribers to spam the PRs in no uncertain words. He explained how developers with swag clothing and brand stickers look cool and get respect. He told people "it won't improve you much as a developer. But hey, free t-shirt swag, and there's a well defined path to get it. I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week".
I guess this was bound to happen since hacktoberfest and similar programs have become so popular. Part of me is sad that some influencer is so careless and rallied 20 something enthusiastic kids to do this and adding another bad incident Indians will be remembered for.
Edit: I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile. When everyone involved is a beginner, you get unintended outcomes. It's just so much of a convoluted mess, that even the capable students distance themselves from it (convoluted, as in these capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now. And the one club head is a former part of these guys who really hasn't improved in the 2 years after that). Much of this bad guidance contributes to that statistics you see on how "90% of Indian coders are unqualified"
Edit 2: (just dropping my reply down the thread from) Someone mentioned that I shouldn't drag other Indians into this. I guess that was bad judgement on my part as it doesn't really matter here, I apologise it I came off as disrespectful to fellow South Asian demographic, that wasn't my intention, I just wanted to bring attention to an underlying issue. We have a lot of bad rep for filling sites like Quora and Medium with loads of low effort content, sending unsolicited messages on LinkedIn and AngelList, and in general bad etiquette in messaging others over the internet. Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populace), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people on how to conduct written communication and how to behave in casual to semi-formal settings in the internet.
I can understand Hindi well enough to skim the video, which I just did. The impression I got was that this person was an enthusiastic YouTuber with somewhat good intentions: “get free swag”, “learn how to open a pull request which you’ll need to know how to do”, “if your pull request is garbage it’ll get rejected and you won’t get credit”. The issue was that he picked some random repository and made a useless change for sake of demonstration-I assume to make it fit in the video, but this basically set the example for everyone watching it. So unintentionally he’s taught a bunch of people who are really motivated in getting this free shirt and also maybe learning how to get into open source (not necessarily the wrong audience, but maybe a bit wet behind the ears) to spam projects. And there is nobody to guide these people but this video. I think the outcome is obvious in retrospect, but I forgive this dude for making this video although I would very much like him to make a follow up where he shows how it’s really done.
There is a general problem (everywhere, but particularly in India where there are a lot of people but very little guidance) of eager people who are willing to participate in programs that get them interested in software development and open source and coding. And I think that’s really great. The issue is that providing people with free swag and walking away is really just pretending to help, rather than actually doing work to help.
As far as I can tell his video only did damage: it taught people to spam open source projects, created a lot of bad blood, probably made open source maintainers more suspicious of new contributors, and gave a large number of potential contributors a bad experience.
It could have been so much better if he'd actually put in the effort to create a real, meaningful pull request. Show how to clone the project, run it, fix a bug, write a test for the fix, and then submit the pull request. That would have put a lot of people on the right path.
But it's much easier and quicker to just do a quick, meaningless change, and as a result give a really bad example.
Even worse, since he's speaking Hindi, his campaign rallied Indians into a massive cloud of bad behavior and made thousands of GitHub community members a little more prejudices against Indians in the future. Even if he meant well and didn't profit at all, he hurt the people he tried to help
I entirely understand why this change was picked and will maintain it was a bad choice. However, I don’t think I can fault them for doing that when the alternative would take significantly more time and effort and detract from the point they were trying to make, which is the steps necessary to make a pull request and not the expected content of one. Given the results, however, I would very much appreciate it if the author of the first video made another one which filled in the gaps of their first one.
Well, I'm considering it in the context of a YouTube video, where there's a length limit and such. Usually you get around this by actually doing the work beforehand and swapping it out, or doing something simple and then saying that this isn't actually representative which is easier and doesn't require a cut but can lead to the issue we see here. Again, I can't fault them for choosing to do this, but I can still say it ended up being a poor choice.
He still could have prepared a legitimate pull request in advance. It was a terrible example, and the more I read about it, the more I think it was intentional and never had the intention to help Open Source projects in any way.
Yep. Most spam PRs were on website repositories, which is exactly what he used as an example in the video.
I don't know Hindi, but since it's a "free swag" video I assume some people with limited or none technical knowledge also saw it. There's a big chance people are just following it without knowing the consequences of their actions.
I am curious, when you say there is very little guidance what do you mean? To me in some european states there is zero guidance in IT, or what exactly do you mean.
Well, I’m not saying that Indians are the only people without guidance in this area; it’s just that India in general has it relatively bad. This video was in Hindi-the amount of material actually telling you how to file a good pull request in that language (as opposed to English) is comparatively much lower. In the United States I mostly figured this out by looking at other pull requests, and schools are beginning to teach it as well, but for many in India this video is the best they know of.
I literally came here to say this. The first thought I had by looking at the screenshot of the PR(without watching the video) and reading the highlighted comment was that "This guy must be an Indian". I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but after watching the video, I was appalled by what I was hearing. And the worst part is, that he says you will learn how to make a PR. Sorry, but no, you will not learn how to make a genuine PR by watching the video. Another thought that I had was, how many kids are getting into software development because of the "swag" and how many of them are genuinely interested in understanding the intricacies involved in building good software.
If you go through some of his other videos, it seems he gains viewers by making clickbait-ish videos. One of videos says "Learn python in 1 video". The video is about 2 hours long.
> capable folks are outnumbered by the enthusiastic kids, who, despite their best intentions shouldn't be guiding others right now.
I am also an Indian student and can confirm this is very true.
There are so many people posting 20 line tensorflow 'projects', often copied code, for the "swag" of it.
Even competitive coding is gamed a lot. You can't judge people on competitive coding profiles.
> Much of this can be attributed to us having 1/6 of world's population (more if you just count English speaking populance), but that doesn't excuse people's bad behaviour.
This is mostly better attributed to the rat race mentality that is so common among Indians. Everything wrong with education in India stems from this. The rote learning based education, high competition for entering CS degrees despite lack of interest, low quality work in indian outsourcing firms, and company politics to become manager ASAP.
> CodeWithHarry is not a bad guy, I don't want to cancel or shame him
I say, cancel him. And all his fans. CC's think they're hot shit because they can produce a video and upload it to youtube, forgetting entirely that it is the content of the video that gives it any worth. We hate on moronic Medium posts idiotic PR releases, and other low-effort media, why should this be any different? If he deputizes his audience to be assholes he should pay for it.
Stop letting ignorance be an excuse with these folks.
Disagree. It is a problem with hype and code being more centralized. Yes, an annoying for many, but to say this ruined anything is probably exaggerated.
> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice.
I think this gives the spammers too easy an out.
They're adults who live in a society. They know full well that spamming is not OK, either offline or online. They also know that what they're doing is spamming, not accidentally overly fervent contributions.
Don't cut them any slack. This is pure and simple vandalism with a profit motive.
The thing is they may not. For all we know, they're hearing about pull requests the first time and just seeing the presenter showing how easy it is to do, by altering/adding a few words, and get a free t-shirt. I think the blame is all on the channel. The least he could've made a proper pull request by fixing an issue. That said, the blame should also go on DO since they could've made hacktoberfest opt-in. Instead they encourage PRs on any public repo.
Plenty of blame for both. The channel is appealing to people to spam crap PRs to inactive projects for the sole purpose of winning some swag, and his followers go spam projects for the sole purpose of winning swag.
One guy encourages people to be assholes, and the people respond by acting like assholes. Both leader and followers are wrong in this case.
You alone are not a spammer. You would need to anticipate the behavior of others. That there are 4 or 5 people on the internet is something that is slowly learned.
They live in a society that is not your society. I think it is entirely possible, and anecdotally even likely, that they do not realize what they are doing.
He did, his statements (translated to English) were:
-"Don't send PR to popular repos, they'll mark it as spam"
-"Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out of 20 is doable"
-"Hacktoberfest has had seasons when they didn't get enough participants and had leftover merch. I request every single one of you to go grab one"
The thumbnail can be translated to "Big Co. distributing free t-shirts, go grab 'em"
Also, his previous pinned comment asked people to tell him about swag-grabbing tactics from other events so he can make another video on it (There was a comment where he was enquiring a guy on how to get Azure merch). His entire video was appalling to go through.
Is "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs so at least 4 sit for more than a week"
The same translation of:
"Send PR to repo with little activity, it'll increase the chances that it'll sit for 7 days. The lesser known a repo is the better, 4 out 20 is doable"
It is times like this that a third translation would be nice, preferable with a bit more context around the "4 out 20" quote.
"4 out of 20" was directly mentioned by him, stating that a it's unlikely that you open 20 PR to random repos and every one of them is marked spam in next 7 days.
> I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs
This is the translation of his long winded explanation rationalizing on how "Improved docs" PR which adds "Awesome project" to docs is actually an improvement, and the PR is just asking the owner to incorporate these "improvements" to his codebase. Spam wasn't directly worded (I don't remember there being a hindi word for that), but he explicitly mentioned to write random crap in the docs and post it to repos they find on page 100 of repo search, so I guess that's a plausible enough to be translated as "spam".
Is there any translated transcription of the video? It seems established that "I request every one of my followers to make 20 spam PRs" is not an translated quote but rather an interpretation of the underlying meaning. That is good and all but I would prefer seeing the original source myself, and since it is in a different language, an translation that is as close to the original as possible.
The translation I am most interested in is the 1 minute before and after the "4 out of 20".
Languages aren't mathematics, you can't losslessly translate between them. All translations are at least to some degree "an interpretation of the underlying meaning".
As someone who was raised bilingual, I always struggle when asked to translate a specific phrase between languages because literal translations are often less useful or accurate than the "interpreted" translation. I would be very suspicious of anyone who claims they have translated something someone else said without changing its meaning at all.
I have huge respect for the difficult job of translators and there is a definitive distinction between a paraphrase and a quote. I personal know professional translators and a key aspect of that role that they like to talk about is how they are proud to avoid making personal interpretation of the underlying meaning and instead relay as exact as possible what has been said and how it was said so that the client can interpret the meaning.
As an example of that, translators sometimes get jobs to translate at parties like weddings, and sometimes a drunk person comes up to the client and try to hit on them. If the person is muttering then the translator translate the muttering. If they are rambling they translate the rambling. They don't interpret and tell the client that the person is hitting on them, and they don't hide the drunk speech by making it sounds more coherent. Their job is to relay what is being said as exact as the two languages allows it. Naturally as languages has different concepts and ways to express things you do not get a lossless translation, but you do get the nearest translation based on the skill of the translator.
Yes, skilled professional translators who are native-level in both languages are possibly the closest to a perfect translation you can find and arguably they are one of the reasons that international diplomacy is at all workable (though they are still imperfect, purely because languages represent concepts with different nuances, and translating the nuance of any given phrase could require distilling an entire lifetime of cultural experience into a few sentences). That being said, I doubt you'll find one on HN who is going to bother to translate a Hindi video about how to create spam PRs, so you'll have to make do with a native speaker (who isn't a professional translator) has said -- hence my comment.
And my follow-up comment about being suspicious was about the vast majority of people who do translations (especially online), and I would go so far as to argue that some degree of suspicion should also be applied when newspapers use translations as though they are direct quotations. But I wasn't (generally speaking) talking about professional translators.
I don't think that I will get a professional translation but sometimes HN do surprise me, and I generally consider it worth a shot to ask for it when I see two people making quotes with quotations marks about the same translation.
I fully agree that translation should make one suspicious, especially those involving politics. When news in my native language has translations from English (second language) that sounds just a bit too much on the nose it usually prompt me to go and read the original source. Almost every time i find that the original statements involve a lot of contextual nuances.
It's also bad from Hacktoberfest that they reward unmerged PRs. It would be better if they only rewarded PRs that are actually accepted or at least do something meaningful.
I worry the spammy set would then turn into a competition on how to harass maintainers to "merge my PR really quickly please please please!", but maybe.
If the DO team weren't completely self-serving anti-socials, they'd have set it up to spend 5 seconds eyeballing each PR before sending out a t-shirt, and warning people that only good PRs would count, and giving a few examples from past years.
Or just direct newbies to a bunch of volunteer/sample repos dedicated to helping newbies learn the system, and maybe offer a competitive higher tier of prizes for PRs nominated by repo owned and chosen by DO.
I would say he probably should have shown that many repos have a todo or even suggested starter issues that one could look at instead of just making some unnecessary change for no reason.
> Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice. In my college, sophomores teach freshmen about Google's Summer of Code, open source and events like hacktoberfest. These endeavours are headed by the one or two guys among the students who happen to get into GSoC/ICPC or (in majority of the cases) have a good competitive coding profile
In my mind the problem lies with the college, they should be teaching their students how to contribute meaningfully. Spamming behaviors will only hurt the reputations of everyone from that college.
> It’s a systemic problem, and the fact that you’ve somehow “risen above it” is not a reason to virtue signal.
(As an Indian) As much as I agree with you, I feel like this is different. I'm worried spam on this scale will damage the reputation of Indian OSS contributors.
I completely agree with you, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter who shoulders the blame if OSS maintainers start to get wary of README/docs PRs from github users with Indian-sounding names.
It’s fairly trivial to tell a spammy PR from a legitimate one by just looking at the content of it. Even if a docs change by an Indian account who joined yesterday, if it fixes a real typo or something then it is legitimate is it not?
I've gotten very tired of the term "virtue signal" being thrown around as a means to discredit someone's argument. It's both not persuasive, and it attacks the other person's intentions and not their arguments, which is not a good thing.
I don’t know why the protagonist being Indian is something that would be strongly remembered. I’d guess anyone whose audience has more time than money could’ve hatched a scheme like this, regardless of nationality.
I mentioned this because I've seen people bash Indians for ruining sites like Quora and Medium with lot of bad quality content. Spam job offers, freelancing sites with bloated profiles, sending unsolicited messages and resume to people in LinkedIn and AngelList. Much of this comes from us having 1/6 of world's population, but that doesn't excuse a big group from their misdeeds. I personally believe that there's a need to teach people about etiquette in written communication and how to behave in semi-formal to casual internet settings
I'm almost afraid to ask this, so please assume good intent and bear with me - I promise this is a genuine question :)
Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on entrepreneurship and that "go get'em" attitude you often see in motivated sales / business people.
I wonder if that's a factor the behavior you observed - if there's a cultural pressure to assertively put themselves out there and actively look for jobs in these ways.
So with that said - I'm interested in other people's takes and happy to accept constructive criticism :)
> if there's a cultural pressure to assertively put themselves out there and actively look for jobs in these ways.
I am a student so my world-view is highly myopic. That said, in my personal experience, there is a pressure among engineers to stand out, else they won't get a good job. Also there's a rat race mentality inculcated by our parents to excel and always one-up others, rather than to co-operate and collaborate. It was okay when we were school-students and had to contest for entrance into a renowned college. But, the "I was the topper in high school, I gotta excel in adult life, be it through hook or by crook" mentality still runs in college and (hearing from seniors and relatives) in jobs. People are eager to do the 4 hour course on Tensorflow and mention "Tensorflow expert" in their resume to get an edge, people will and do write "Hacktoberfest 2018 and 2019" in their resume, a guy who can fire up an EC2 instance will call himself "moderately proficient in AWS". I'm not joking about these, job-hunting season is starting and I've seen resume of other students mention all this. People see videos of conferences where engineers wear swag t-shirts, and associate swag with good developers, that was further intensified by this guy's video and people wanted this swag for all these reasons.
I guess I've gone slightly OT here, so I'll summarise: Herd mentality due to poor guidance, peer pressure among engineers and the societal pressure to stand out (for securing jobs) is a big culprit here
> I'm not joking about these, job-hunting season is starting and I've seen resume of other students mention all this.
Be very careful with this. At a company I used to work for, the hiring managers started to have a negative view of Indians as they became known for their inflated resumes.
A year ago I was required to hire two developers from TCS. One pattern I noticed is that a lot of developers from TCS, when they don't know the answer to a question, just answer a different question. Another Indian that I did hire, explained that this is a product from Indian culture where not knowing something is seen as a weakness, so people don't want to admit they don't know something, and hide it by answering something else and hoping for the best. I really strongly prefer developers who know and are honest about their limitations. Nobody knows everything, so it's fine if you say you don't know. That makes it a learning opportunity. That opportunity gets closed off when you pretend to know something you don't.
This makes it really hard to hire people from TCS. I did eventually find two good ones, fortunately.
Nope. As the parent comment said, there is lack of guidance and mentorship. Many people are unaware of the spam they are creating and genuinely believe what they are doing is acceptable.
Culturally, India is not really homogenous so I can't say anything for the 1.34 billion people but at least in the region I live in, cheating is normalized since first grade. Be it contests, exams or any other status games. Shortcuts are encouraged. There is little incentive for anyone to play fair. Schools want to look good on paper and competitive so they help students cheat, pay for false advertisements and enrollment. Parents do the same and well, kids will learn it if you incentivise that.
For the job seeking, it's pretty much desperation and high unemployment rate.
Certainly there are cultures where this holds to some extent. However, the spammy PR, the low-effort oncoming nature that is being discussed is not associated with folks from this culture, as much as it is by some commonly prevalent sentiment in CS colleges, which generally move you to be proactive, get your name known, have a colorful (green) github commit frequency chart (?), and other faux markers of excellence which (are believed to ) increase the chance of getting hired for good positions.
> Different cultures definitely consider different things to be acceptable / polite / etc in the same situation (e.g., do you take your shoes off when entering another person's house?). I've heard that there's groups of Indians (possibly the descendants of certain castes?) that place a high value on entrepreneurship and that "go get'em" attitude you often see in motivated sales / business people.
I have been told something to this effect. That some families, for example, are "business oriented" and raise their children to view everything as negotiable and for the taking. While other families may be focused on engineering or something else. It fits with strong parental involvement there, and the expectation that the children must support the prior generation. Easiest to push children in a direction you know. Basically multi-generational career goals.
Eh, I would the say the ratio itself looks bad here. I am always surprised by how normalized and acceptable spamming is in the form of whatsapp forwarding. It's truly frightening watching my family use facebook and whatsapp groups. The spam to content ratio is like 10:1 or heck 20:1. Maybe even worse.
.
I am guessing you havent been on the internet 20 years ago when Indians were barely on the internet and email spam and forwarding was a huge thing.
The issue was solved by Google (and others) stepping up their spam detection game. The spam problem can and should be stopped with the technology, but I am not sure if Facebook has the motivations to do this.
>I'm college student (graduating in about 8 months) and I'll highlight that there's a very massive guidance problem here. Enthusiastic students have no one to mentored and direct them and it makes them act on lot of bad advice.
Looking back at all prior HN stories with "hacktoberfest" in the title or with "hacktoberfest" and "spam" in the comments, I can't find any that talk about it being a big problem before this year.
I found one maintainer who said they got a non-negligible number of garbage pull requests for it, but they still said Hacktoberfest was cool. There was also one post about a filter one project adopted a year ago that used heuristics to identify and automatically reject Hacktoberfest pull requests from new submitters that were too trivial.
I'd have expected more if it was a problem to the extent that it seems to be this year.
One of my repos got spam PRs for last two years. So I archived the repo this time before October as a proactive measure. I got spam PRs in other months too, but October was the worst.
Same. I don’t think I got a single spammy PR I could attribute to Hacktoberfest before this year, I had thought it must be people staying inside for COVID or something. But I guess I know the actual cause now.
It’s because they made a rather cheap Linux VPS that is extremely easy to get up. It’s 4 clicks on DO (login with GitHub, click new droplet, click $5, click create), vs 15 clicks on Azure or AWS (where you have to create a bespoke account, go through the silly billing configuration, etc) where they expect you're running all of this past your procurement people and that they’ll want to configure stuff too.
A twitter user mentioned that some youtubers are themselves creating assignment aggregation type repos, and encouraging their viewers to contribute some copy paste code to those repos and they approve the pull request. That's insane.
These type of repositories have existed since the first Hacktoberfest. They might even be useful for beginners to learn how to prepare their first pull request. But the idea of Hacktoberfest is clearly not to submit all your pull requests to such a repository.
It even seems as though DigitalOcean is blocking these type of repositories. From the FAQ:
My pull request is marked as being on an excluded repository. What does this mean?
Unfortunately, your pull request was made on a repository that doesn’t align with the core values of Hacktoberfest. We’ve decided that pull requests made to this repository will not count toward completing the challenge.
I don't understand this. You don't have to defend the actions of individual(s) even if they share their nationality with you. It's sufficient to call them out for unacceptable behavior. For people who ascribe this to all Indians, it's on them not on you.
It's a common thing that online polls/contests/games generate this kind of behaviour. Online polls a trolled, games are hacked and online contests that rely on making others work create a mess.
Why? They accept pull requests to your own repo. I was merging some stuff to a fork to create a PR and later logged into hacktoberfest to check my progress, when I realized that I already had four pull requests because two of them I had approved myself for myself.
Reading a lot of these comments ... the number of indians making a point of calling out this bullshit on the part of their countrymen is honestly kind of awesome and I'm kinda proud of y'all.
Too many countries' populations would be more likely to be reflexively defensive instead.
Though I'm in england and grew up considering british indians' self deprecatory sense of humour something to aspire to, so ... I'm not going to tell you not to feel ashamed, but I -am- going to tell you that your comment mostly reminds me why I like the culture that leads you to say that :)
You raise a fascinating point, which is of how different Anglo-Indian and just generally how different anglo south asian culture is from the norm. The subthread author (or a commentator) mentioned that one thing you'll see a lot is when folks don't know the answer to your question, they'll answer a different unrelated question and hope for the best because not knowing something is seen as weakness. Of course, that is generally not the case with any of the anglicized south asian diasporas.
Yeah pointing out what's wrong with a society which is focused on wrong metrics and gaming the system is wrong. And I have also pointed out it makes life harder for genuinely talented people.
You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did at DigitalOcean was "just for marketing" - everything we did was because we genuinely cared about developers, that's why the company grew. Certainly it's a shame that a few bad actors are ruining the project, but I take real issue with all the vitriol. Maybe it's gone off the rails and needs to be revised or reconsidered, but creating "shitoberfest" twitter and putting things in blog posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive. (I haven't worked at DigitalOcean for 5+ years)
> You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest
I find it weird that none of your suggestions involved allowing the maintainers of the software project to decide if the contributions were worthy of a reward? I also find it odd that people who had contributed meaningfully to OSS would suggest a numerical bound on PRs as a measure of meaningful contributions.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with. The "bad actors" are assholes, sure, but I think you also need to revise your concepts about meaningful OSS contributions.
Well I haven't worked for DigitalOcean in many many years. My reply was to calling hacktoberfest "shit". I do agree given the scale the initiative has reached, projects should reach out to DO, get on a list and be the "approved" project. As a point of interest on your "but I honestly don't think this was particularly well designed to begin with" - how would you have designed it?
Let maintainers choose to add a hacktoberfest label to contributions they think are worth rewarding, if they want to opt-in and they like that particular contribution.
Don't emphasise t-shirts, emphasise fun and the rewards of helping OSS.
These are not difficult challenges, they could fix the process right now if they wanted to. Yes their numbers would go down, but they'd be rewarding genuine contributions, as originally intended.
> You know, as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk through the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS, revising and revising till they landed on hacktoberfest, I don't find this hilarious in the least. I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of its existence who truly benefited from the contributions. Nothing we ever did at DigitalOcean was "just marketing" - everything we did was because we all genuinely cared about developers, that's why the company grew. Certainly it's a real shame that a few bad actors are ruining the project, but I take real issue with all this vitriol. Maybe it's gone off the rails and needs to be revised or reconsidered, but creating shitoberfest twitter and putting things in blog posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive.
I find it troublesome that a room full of people and no one raised a concern about how the whole thing would be misused, and wasted time of hundreds of maintainers who now have to clean up their repo. Did "the room" consider this, at all, and what if they did, what was the conclusion?
Edit: I added neom's original comment, still have it on my browser.
> I find it troublesome that a room full of people and no one raised a concern about how the whole thing would be misused
As someone completely unaffiliated with Hacktoberfest (only attendee over several years), my impression is that there really haven’t been much issues with it until this year.
I’m quite confident it was all done in good faith.
Exactly what I thought. I don't really care that digital ocean had "good intentions". The scheme is obviously abuseable and seems to have indeed wasted the time of a number of actual developers.
To be honest, we are well beyond hundreds of maintainers that will need to clean up their repos. I've been crawling the "Improve Docs" spam issues since they started appearing.
As far as I'm aware, there are already 4500+ repos which have had a low quality, single-line-change, "Improve Docs" PR opened in the past two days.
Just to pull out a few repos out for example purposes:
Heck, take look at the PRs and commit history of https://github.com/azmat21/UyghurWebsiteCrawler. It's been two days into October, and this repo has gotten 55 PRs. It hasn't ever gotten a single PR before this as far as I can tell.
Not to be pedantic but I think there is some conflation here between PR/repo and maintainer? How do you define "low quality" hacktoberfest was originally also focused on people learning to code who could help clean up docs/fix typos etc.
Yeah, this really makes me wonder what the room gets up to during threat modelling session at Digital Ocean. But perhaps they don’t do that sort of thing.
> I talked to many maintainers in the first few years of it's existence who truly benefited from the contributions.
For sure, but the Hacktoberfest promotional website treats this as a second order effect, instead of the primary goal it really should be.
The primary motivation for participants is the free t-shirt, because that's the incentive that's being pushed. What is not promoted - and should be promoted - is the impact of contributing: making a change for the better, the social good, taking a step towards connecting with new people, learning opportunities, making a mark in the world with your name on, etc.
The problem OSS faces is not just finding enough contributors. It's finding contributors who are intrinsically motivated to actively engage with a project.
And so, the current campaign inadvertently targets loads of people who don't really care for the code or the projects themselves: they just want the exclusive t-shirt as a trapping and not much more.
I'm sure the campaign still attracts contributors who genuinely want to submit a good PR (I sure am going to do an effort). But frankly, if the campaign ends up devolving into a frenzy for t-shirts, it's hard not to feel demoralized: that's not the spirit of the campaign, and that's quite likely not what DO originally intended, right?
Digital Ocean is not a student under our guidance that we owe a supportive feedback style. They don't even behave like a peer where things can be discussed eye to eye. They interact like a business: as if they're correct and infallible until sufficiently proven wrong that their face is covered in egg.
>posts like "Finally, and most importantly, we can remember that this is how DigitalOcean treats the open source maintainer community, and stay away from their products going forward." is certainly not constructive
That's entirely constructive advice... for the end consumer. It is smart to remember the results of a business' prior actions when you consider future dealings with them. Even if they're all well-intentioned and lovely people that wielded their one-to-many relationship poorly.
>I take real issue with all the vitriol.
The mirth of a "shitoberfest" twitter account and consumer advice in a blogpost aren't all that vitriolic, what they are is simply not friendly to DO.
I can easily see how the original concept is a great idea (honestly, anything that can get more folks into contributing to FOSS is probably worth considering!), but the thing is, after the first few years of people suggesting that this was going to be a problem and that it should be opt-in by the affected maintainers, I think it's fair to say that DO gets the blame. If you do something with good intentions and something bad happens as a result, it's not necessarily on you (and indeed, I would hesitate to assign blame in all but the most extreme "what did you think was going to happen!?" cases). But if you do something with good intentions after being repeatedly told by multiple independent parties on multiple occasions that it's going to cause a problem, then you get to be responsible when that problem actually arises from the actions that you knowingly took while ignoring warnings.
(parent post tried to abolish blame and called out the grandparent post as the issue, hence why the lack of continuation)
I don't, you messed up!
The fact that you're actually incentivising contributors to make PRs of any quality and without standards, whilst forcing the burden on to maintainers (without reward) and you do very little (no tutorials about how to make quality PRs, no standards information on what comprises of a good PR, no quality guidance what so ever!).
This seems like a marketing stunt that has backfired and you're saying that you don't deserve some backlash?
Would you be willing to share what you'd recommend? I don't work at DigitalOcean but I know a few of the folks working on hacktoberfesst and I'm happy to forward our suggestions. je at h4x dot club.
> as one of the people who sat in a room with my colleagues, listening them talk about the hours and hour of thinking they had done around how to contribute meaningfully to OSS
Don't let your sunken cost and in-group bias distract you from seeing the unfortunate externalities of decisions here. You're separating intent from effect when that is the exact problem. DO created a program which incentivized spam that puts long-term strain on a community which it derives revenue from long-term, just for short term benefit.
If you or anyone else who designed that program doesn't understand that and take action until a /satirical twitter account/ has to pop up, that's really bad. I don't think you should try and make excuses for it. You should try to understand why the incentive broke and caused unintended side effects first before you go criticizing others.
Talking about how you get paid to pat yourself on the back isn't going to win the sympathy of people you mistreated. Now is the time for apologies and amends not tone-deaf whining about being held accountable by people who are actually giving freely of their time and IP.
Here's some constructive criticism: DO should send $20 to the donation box of every repo owner who got a spam PR.
And since you don't even work for DO but seem to like them: stop creating more bad PR for them by making embarassing comments in their name.
This guy is just straight up begging for a PR merge so that he can get his free T shirt -- I'd wager a good portion of these PR submitters have no idea what they're getting into, they just think they can get a free shirt if they do this according to what the youtube video said.
They said that they didn’t want you to not get credit because you worked for hours on a PR only for it to be not accepted because the maintainers didn’t like it for some reason. Even if that reason was that it wasn’t any work at all. But I think they want people to mark real-bad PRs as spam so they can not count them.
On the topic of pull request (PR) spam originating due to Hacktoberfest, here is some useful information from Hacktoberfest FAQ [1]:
"As a maintainer, how should I handle spam pull requests?
We dislike seeing spam pull requests just as much as you, so please give them an invalid or spam label and close them. Pull requests that contain a label with the word invalid or spam won't be counted toward Hacktoberfest."
It is really quite easy to follow. The 'invalid' label is available by default already, so flagging spam is as simple as selecting that label and closing the PR. See also Hacktober's recent update on reducing spam [2].
It’s still work, though. I assume for most people it’s not a big deal, but I have heard of maintainers of many popular projects being inundated with spam-which they, not DigitalOcean-need to deal with.
Glad I saw this article! I got two pull requests on one of my otherwise inactive repos last night. The first one just tweaked one thing in the README pointlessly. Seemed odd, but benign. Then a second one came later; another small silly tweak. Good to know the reason now.
Luckily that repo isn't terribly important and was only two pieces of "spam". But I can't imagine the shitstorm real open source projects are going to experience. Either they have to weather the storm or, what, disable PRs for a month? Yikes.
> Misaligned incentives always cause trouble, scapegoats not withstanding.
Yes. Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Stepping on a soapbox, I think a certain kind of economics thinking should be introduced to students at a reasonably young age, no later than secondary education, that thinking being "Incentive Analysis" where students are taught to think through where various people's and groups' incentives are, and why it matters. If nothing else, it should clear up fuzzy cliche-based thinking which can be misleading even though it has a kernel of truth: "If you aren't paying, you're the product" is wrong in some very important ways, starting with the fact that if you are paying, you might still be the product. For example: You pay for a service, in effect giving the company money for selling your information to other companies eager to have a line on a high-value paying customer.
I've reported his video as a spam. He is promoting his fraudulent methods to teach people how to get a free t-shirt at the cost of the wonderful open source software community. I wrote the following in the details of the spam report. To be honest, I don't think he is a bad person. He probably didn't think that his video would cause this. But as a decent human being, the least he could do is take down that video.
```
This video is promoting and teaching people how to get a free t-shit by showing them how to do spam pull request. These requests have flooded real world open source projects on Github. This is ruining the community's efforts.
```
Being from India, his videos did show up on my recommendations. And I have opened some of them. The tone of the videos are bit off for me. He has some photo copyed written notes that everyone does in colleges in India. Needless to say I never could go beyond these display of notes.
After doing all these programming videos, he then started doing laptop recommendations and what not. But I never expected this. I mean there are lot of simple tech videos coming out of India some good some bad but I never expected to see encouragement of such kind of behaviour.
But I have also seen videos by Indian "gurus" who preach how to get free websites on github, without understanding what github really is.
Its good old Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
This culture of submitting a PR to get into conference or get some swag has been there for a while. If I recall correctly, during the peak of openstack summits, it was a requirement to submit some BS PR to show that the engineers contributed to openstack repo.
The point is that this is not just a problem of Hacktoberfest - there are some automatic quality assurance tools that check if libraries used in project does not have bugs and they do this also by searching GitHub for reported bugs. If there is a reported and unfixed bug, library is marked as not safe.
It happened several times that there was a reported bug, which was totally bogus or added by mistake (added to wrong project for instance), however repo owner hasn't closed it, so the tool gave false positive.
Obviously said tool allowed adding exception rules, etc. but I can't imagine how annoying it would be if there were hundreds of such crappy reports and it seems we are going in that direction.
This looks like another consequence of globalization and leaving in the "global village", everyone can jump in into someones village and do harm over there and it is hard to get rid or somehow punish such unwanted visitors.
People would do a lot to gain 15 minutes of fame, even if this is just wearing some t-shirt.
Maybe that is not a big surprise, some people beat their parents or girlfriends or boyfriends and put that on Youtube for fame and money - whole "pato" streamers market is built around this (with said victims participating in the show to earn even more money).
> This flood of low quality PR spam appears to come from a YouTuber with an audience of 672K where he demonstrates how easy it is to make a Pull Request to a repo.
> Where he went wrong was demonstrating a low quality PR, thus setting the bar low for his viewers who went on to copy exactly what he did.
This is the problem on the industry today. All these “how to...” and no depth
I speak hindi, and in fact he is actually encouraging spam and is BSing in the response. He has said to look for repos with low traffic and do a pull request changing the readme and to do it 20 times, so if most will be marked as invalid, at least 4 wont.
This is literally how DigitalOcean is advertising their program, too. It’s just that they intended their audience to be people who fully understood the goal of what this was supposed to be, and the YouTube video was watched by many who didn’t.
Hindi is my native language. CodeWithHarry, in fact, is actually subliminally asking the users to create very low quality PRs. Or at least very heavily implying it.
In one part of the video he mentions that last year DO was not able to distribute all the t-shirts as they didn't have enough PRs. He goes on to mention that "this year, we don't want any T-shirts to remain".
If I get time, I'll point out more lines from the video where he is promoting PR for the sake of PR.
I do agree that it may not be totally his fault in the whole larger context of things.
I looked at the video and it seemed fine. Only problem is that complete rookies were watching it too.
I hang out in some rookie forums and it seems like every other day someone posts a snippet and I find that they have used foo/bar somewhere in the code without realizing it was supposed to be a placeholder. CWH made a tutorial on how to get some text from your computer into an open source repository and that is commendable, but his viewers have forgotten to do the bit where they actually produce content worth merging and that is not his fault.
> A whole new Twitter account @shitoberfest was created to track this
Not looking to discount the severity of the problem in terms of productive time lost, but the use of the word "whole" there wins my overstatement of the year award.
That assumes that the spammers know what they are doing. They are just following a video. Many of them probably are clueless about even what Github is for.
Fact is, we would have done the same after watching his video if we didn't know what PRs and FOSS contributions are. He doesn't explain what PRs are for, or what good PRs look like. He doesn't even teach how to use git for PR - all those spam are using Github's web editor. There is absolutely no clue given about the harm it would cause. For comparison, imagine a hardware DIY tutorial that never mentions any safety concerns.
Now I guess I will have to make some sort of solution that autorejects anything that doesn't have the word amazing (or some synonym for amazing, I'm not a tyrant)
on edit: hmm, there's a typo in the Readme, a good start.
I am really looking forward for every Hacktoberfest. I try to look for issues, which i can fix with my knowledge. My problem often times is, that i do embedded software and finding an issue here is often times hardware dependend. So now i am looking for other things i might be able to fix. Of course i also want to get my 4th hacktoberfest t-shirt. But i really hate it that people start to spam repositories. Try to fix a real problem, not just changing a name.
i gotta say all this shittoberfest hype now really killed my mood and i hope that in the end the 70000 t-shirts will still be enough.
Also i did not have the time to start hacking on the 1st october directly.
it seems to also be a problem of scale. At first only a select few knew about hacktoberfest. now so many people want to participate, that they try to limit the possible reward. So yeah i hope it is still enough for me and not gone, because too many people gamed the system...
Isn’t the solution obvious? DO needs to change the rules, so that all this gamification becomes useless.
Either projects opt-in, or they add some qualification to what is an acceptable PR.
Of course the Youtuber has a role in this, but I feel like they’re just playing the game; the real solution needs to come from the source of the problems, which is DO.
I don't understand why a person or persons create new repos and merge PRs into each others hello world empty repos. This would be be the optimal solution no?
When I first heard about Hacktoberfest a few days ago, I thought it was neat. I am relatively new to programming, and as a newbie I got excited that there was an event like this. It prompted me to read about how pull requests work, and to research several open source projects that I could contribute to. I haven't made any contributions yet, but it's on my to-do list for October.
I suppose you can already count me as one of the beneficiaries of this program, simply because it got me to learn new things. I think Hacktoberfest is a good idea, speed bumps like this one notwithstanding.
Simple fix for hacktoberfest maintainers - make it opt-in. Only merged PRs with the tag hacktoberfest from maintainers should count.
It's absurd that even closed prs count, and absurd they put the burden on maintainers to actively flag spam and auto-include all repos, many repos simply don't want changes of any kind.
Yes this means it won't apply to lots of repos and less people will be involved. That's ok.
When we review a serious flaw which caused downtime in production, we aren’t wishy-washy around who and what caused the failure. However, it’s expected that everyone knows it’s a mistake and not deliberate and that there will be an effort to improve and rectify the situation.
Another thing that sucks about this: will this deter people with legitimate improvements to documentation from contributing, for fear of being seen as a spammer? Docs are great, and hard to do, real docs improvements would actually be a serious contribution....
Oh so this is what's happening to my repos. I maintain one that gets ~60 million downloads a week, and is usually the first thing people run to for help when something unrelated goes wrong.
This is nothing new, though the volume has increased a bit.
Why can't Digital Ocean, this youtuber and Github just work together to make the world a little bit better? It's OK not to be perfect, but they can acknowledge their mistakes and work together to improve them.
DigitalOcean could work with maintainers to allow registration and get some kind of participation icon for maintainers to put on their repo.
Maintainers, Github and Digital Ocean could work together to define parameters of acceptance for PRs (maybe an integration?).
The YouTube could then become the face of the thing for India and show people how to make a meaningful PR on a digital ocean repo. It would also serve as an ad for them.
Couple minutes, free t-shirt, I'm sure folks say "why not?"
At the local sandwich shop folks will stand in line for an hour to get a free crappy sub $5 sandwich...
Otherwise some folks in other theads indicated that in some places, specifically india, participating in hacktoberfest and getting PRs was good for resumes and educational recognition.
T-shirts are worth significantly more (relatively) in poorer parts of the world. It might be worth 0.5hr of average wage in the us but be worth 5hr of average wage in India.
Yeah I learned this lesson too. I run a coding education nonprofit and for years we have offered free shirts or stickers to people who bring someone totally new to coding (usually artists or musicians who want to work on a game) to one of our events in certain areas.
We tried it with an online event in August and it was immediately flooded with fake signups from people in poorer parts of the world.
(Honestly made me sad more than frustrated. But we're not equipped to give out that many shirts.)
It's not just the t-shirt, the guys goes on to explain how developer "swag" is something you must have, you'll feel more confident and respected if you have a tech related t-shirt.
It's really sad that a guy who teaches coding asks people to spam FOSS projects to get that so called "swag".
I'd much rather spend a minimum of $20 for the t-shirt and have the proceeds go to an open-source project of my choosing (or a pre-selected list of projects).
-
+ This is an amazing project made to dimplify [sic] things
- However, not all topics are supported.
+ However,not all topics are supported.
- We are glad that you liked our package.
+ We are glad about all those who liked our package.
Not fair to say he ruined it. Even if he promoted people creating spam PRs.
He exposed the weak foundations for this campaign and hopefully now they will fix it.
DO said, it has been 7 years handling spams and they haven't fix the issue. Now it is so visible, that they can't ignore it anymore.
This would be a continuation of that story, where someone did investigation into the cause. The original story you linked did not have a cause mentioned/found at the time it was posted.
I don't ever merge low effort or self aggrandizing PRs. I just implement the change myself then add the PR person as a contributor on the commit via GitHub desktop.
The fact that GitHub doesn’t allow you to close pull requests for your project is a very strange choice. There are so many open source mirrors that literally write bots to close pull requests because they don’t accept patches through GitHub…
Unfortunately his actions will be used by racists for years to come to justify hate and discrimination.
I'm hoping github can quickly step up and ban all accounts that submit spam PRs, to protect the integrity of open source but to also protect people from themselves.
But also the difficulty of dealing with distributed buggy/problematic clients. Same reason that fail2ban is less effective against large botnets, password spraying defeats many rate-limits, and abusive NTP use by routers (https://slashdot.org/story/06/04/07/130209/d-link-firmware-a...) is so hard to deal with.
The Latin idiota is borrowed from Greek ἰδιώτης idiōtēs which is from ἴδιος idios meaning "private" or "peculiar".
Idiot has historically meant "retarded" so if you wanted to say "ignorantly" you could have just said that, or "idiotically" is fine but don't pretend it has such wholesome roots.
Spam PRs are frustrating but this rant just reads as petty and vindictive.
The author claims that he doesn't "want to cancel or shame him personally", which just rings of false humility considering he named the article "How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020" and then chose to expose his Youtube name repeatedly, something even other frustrated tweeters chose NOT to do.
Here's what CodeWithHarry did:
He created an example video of submitting a PR to an open source project that repeatedly reminded its viewers to make worthwhile contributions.
He then posted a lengthy response to again inform his viewers to NOT submit spammy PRs.
He's acting responsibly and in good faith.
Does this deserve lynching by the twitter mob?
Edit: Yes, the video appears to be mostly about showing kids how to get free swag with open source contributions without too much concern for whether these PRs are worthwhile. But the author of this post is absolutely trying to shame/cancel him personally.
I am not sure if it was entirely good faith. In the video he explicitly states (in Hindi) that this is an easy way to get a free t-shirt in few clicks, you don't even need to know anything about GitHub.
The top comment in this thread (from someone who speaks the language) says that he openly encouraged people to spam meaningless PRs in order to get "free swag." I think the rebuke he is getting is deserved.
Even the title of the video is "How to Earn Free T-Shirt, Swag & Goodies Online!", and the description is in the same vein mostly focusing on getting swag, while seeing (meaningful) PRs as secondary.
What a crappy framing. No, one guy didn't ruin it! He was just showing people how to do a PR, and since it was a video, he made a small change. He didn't frame it as cheating; he was just trying to get people into Open Source.
Sure, the result is annoying, but it's really unfair to lay this on Harry's feet.
This sucks. Everyone involved who was named is just trying to encourage open source.
A lot of minor changes are important though and blanket closing all diffs with minor changes will take out legitimate changes with it. Also, it's so easy to get around this by just making diffs with two files changed. Or making a diff that copy pastes the same line 100 times.
"There's almost no limits, so if your request is merged into any Open Source repository, you qualify. Amazing." Well, not all open source software is using git, and even some that is, doesn't use GitHub. Also, how do they see if you qualify, really? (Do you need a GitHub account? The linked document doesn't seem to say that, or if it does, it isn't very clear.) (Anyways, I wouldn't want to submit a pull request merely for the purpose of the shirt. I would ignore that when making such a thing. If I get a shirt too (and I do not already have enough shirts, although I think I do have enough shirts), then that is a bonus, I suppose.) (I do not use git myself. I think I have never received any patches to my software, except maybe one, but I do not really remember if it is or not. I have, however, merged in other people's changes when I found them, although these aren't requests. Actually, other people have sometimes merged in some of my changes too despite not being a pull request, too. How will that ever count?) Hopefully, it can be explained better.
[edit: Possibly I'm being too hasty in recommending swearing off Open Source contributions. Go forth and contribute, I suppose :) Leaving my original comment below for completeness.]
For other South Asian/Indian people like me, a pessimistic but practical counterpoint to this -- if you happen to be Indian and have a username that marks you as such, just lie low for a bit and don't contribute anything; especially during Hacktoberfest. I promise you that this will actually be a net positive for your career.
Work on proprietary (aka closed source software) and earn money. Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us in the first place, and the tradeoff of marketing freebies versus being viewed negatively as a group is and a society is not worth it.
> Open Source was never particularly welcoming to us (Indians) in the first place ...
Do you have any evidence to support this? I am an Indian and my own experience has been totally opposite. The open source community welcomed me, guided me, and appreciated my work when I began contributing to open source. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NUTCH-559 for an example. This was my first significant open source contribution to an Apache project. I was young, naive, and had very little prior software development experience. The change I submitted added new features but it also removed a lot of code that I incorrectly assumed to be not serving any purpose. The Apache committers helped me to refine the change, make it better, and even appreciated it with a "Wow" with this comment: "Sorry for the late review... I have finally reviewed your patch and I have to say: Wow!"
I think this was very welcoming. It filled me with confidence to tackle more complex problems both at work as well as in open source. Thanks to that good experience, I still contribute to open source whenever I can and I write and maintain a few open source projects of my own.
No. Just look at my username; you don’t get more Indian-sounding than that. The way forward is to submit high-quality pull requests, not spam them to get a free T-shirt, and certainly not to give up and let people ruin it for you. I personally guarantee you that it’ll work out.
> Just look at my username; you don’t get more Indian-sounding than that.
I know, right! Incidentally, a past draft of my advice was going to refer to you and 'manishearth on the Rust core team as "good" examples to emulate. All this talk about "Shitoberfest" and such is driving me up the wall though.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. I feel like we are not welcome, but I guess a lot of people in this thread are saying otherwise, so I should consider that perspective.
People don’t want to be racist. Nobody here (at least, I hope) is getting pleasure from saying that a bunch of Indian people are spamming them with low-quality pull requests. But the fact is that this is happening, and it’s better to try to figure out what is actually happening rather than throwing up your hands and saying “these people have tarnished my ability to ever file a pull request”, it’s much more useful to try to identify what’s really happening and then see if we can fix it.
The fact is that DigitalOcean basically ran a lazy but well-meaning program that was promoted with a poorly-thought-out (but also well-meaning) video on YouTube to a majority Indian audience who largely had no experience with open source etiquette and thus we have the logical result. It’s not that they’re bad people or stupid or whatever, but they were just in the perfect storm of things that told them to do what they’re doing right now because they literally got no guidance at all. This is just “I accidentally sent my feature request email to the development mailing list because I’m unfamiliar with how this process works” but magnified by several orders of magnitude and also slanted towards participation by a certain group of people. The frustration is of course towards the circumstances that led to this happening but it’s often hard to express that and much easier to tweet angrily about “Indian dudes spamming me with PRs”.
> "Shitoberfest" and such is driving me up the wall though.
People are complaining about actual spam that in no way improves their repo, and are angry at DO and GitHub for not being prepared for that. This has nothing to do with actual contributions and the people making them.
The heck are you talking about? I’ve worked on a good number of open source projects big and small, and spent significant time working with at least one Indian in the process. While a certain subset of people like to force identity politics down everyone else’s throat (mostly by claiming nonexistent discrimination), the vast majority of people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether you’re Indian, or black, or female, or gay, or whatever, and only judge your contributions by what you’re actually contributing. You’re not welcome if you spam, that’s for sure, but even then you’re just a spammer, not an Indian spammer.
> It's not the username in these examples that's the problem.
It totally is. Make a profile with a Western-sounding, preferably female name, and submit a similar typo-fix PR. I can guarantee you that it will be accepted, or at the very least, not featured on a Twitter account called "Shitoberfest".
Minor typo fixes and such have been an established way to make a first bite-sized contribution to OSS projects. What changed this year that people are suddenly yelling at the top of their voices about the 30 (yes, thirty!) emails that they got this week?
Have you not seen the PR spam examples people are reacting to in TFA? You can't pick an {avatar, username, nationality, gender} combo that's going to get this diff accepted into React:
That’s not what’s happening here. Have you actually looked at the examples of the PRs linked? They’re not fixing minor typos, they’re introducing nonsensical copy pasted changes. These are not low effort commits that you could argue don’t hurt the project — these are quite literally spam.
>> It totally is. Make a profile with a Western-sounding, preferably female name, and submit a similar typo-fix PR. I can guarantee you that it will be accepted, or at the very least, not featured on a Twitter account called "Shitoberfest".
I have made a genuine typo fixing PR and it was accepted by the repo. And yes, I don't belong to the group you refer to in your comment. I don't know what's happened with you or why you feel that way. It would be better to support your point with an example or an incident.
> The reputation comes from mediocre youtube tutorials, sweatshops like TCS and infosys, bullshit sites like geeksforgeeks, and incidents like this.
I'm not Indian, and I think the reputation comes largely from the proportion of educated people not behind the Great Firewall of China that are Indian, and people mistaking “the proportion of people who do I see do X thar are from Y background” with “the proportion of people from Y background who do X”.
> I am an Indian, and I think I have no right to complain about that reputation.
I think that we are in agreement regarding that? I have no right to complain about it either.
I can offer advice to bypass Open Source contributions altogether, which would have the side effect of stopping incidents like this. And it's not like projects are starved for README contributions either, coding bootcamps or someone else will pick up the slack.
Then, should we stop writing good code because some shitheads set a bad example?
Let me be clear, when you write open source code there are incentives like creating / improving tool for our own use, experimenting, or having a legitimate contribution, even if it is for sake of resume. The software we want to write as OSS is often not the software we can write as proprietary, sell and make money.
Should we give up all the advantages of open source for our side projects? Aren't other people contributing to open source and that's making world better? Should we do a disservice to ourselves and open source community because some people among us have created a bad reputation?
It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?
I’d really like epithet to reserve that for people who are actively malicious. There are no signs to the contrary for the people submitting spam PRs being enthusiastic developers looking to get into open source and score some swag while they’re at it but lacking the guidance to really understand that they’re being annoying to other people.
> Then, should we stop writing good code because some shitheads set a bad example?
No, I'm saying that we should write great code, and not open source any of it. I don't understand why the concept is so unpopular?
> It's not like anyone says "He is Indian, his contribution is probably worthless" about Sanjay Ghemawat or Vikram Adve, right?
Absolutely not. But I think that today, if Ghemawat made a typo fix contribution to 10 random projects for Hacktoberfest, at least one of those project maintainers who didn't know about him would be yelling about "spam". I'm not sure how to prove this; maybe someone who knows him can ask him to try? :) This is HN after all.
Also, since you bring it up, I'm guessing that the vast majority of Sanjay's code at Google is proprietary and not available to the world.
I'm an Indian and I beg to disagree. I have made small contributions to open source projects, including fixing typos, and have never felt unwelcome.
I'm a teacher of economics and open source software including Python, Julia, LaTeX, R and Linux are essential to my work. I would find it hard to pay for proprietary equivalents of all the open source software I use. I consider it my duty to contribute back in whatever way I can.
My national pride is not hurt just because another Indian who did something wrong was criticised on the Internet.
* "Gaming the system" to get your desired outcome is widely accepted in Indian society. Especially if it doesn't involve breaking any laws (not ethics). Even in many cases Gaming the system by breaking the law is considered OK as long as one doesn't get caught doing it. (In fact this might be the only way to come up in politics in India, but that's another debate.) Once they are caught the general attitude is "they had it coming".
Consider this highflying Indian start up, Unacademy[1][2]. Here is their anthem [3], "Let's crack it". This "crack it" is basically about "Gaming it" and succeed at it any how.
* Majority of Indians have a lot of attraction towards free. I have seen even people from millionaire families, spend 10-15 minutes of their time to get something free that is of $1 or $2 in value. The attitude is like, am I doing anything else productive here? If not I might as well do this and earn Rs. 100. In fact this attitude is cultivated from childhood in certain business class families. Don't let go of any opportunity of earning a profit, however small it might be.
Here we are talking about student population which is generally low on cash anyway.
So if you are any company offering something free to Indians, expect them to come in droves, and milk you as much as possible. Here I think Digital Ocean doesn't mind being well known in Indian students. Many of these Indian Students are going to make purchasing decisions on servers in a few years to come. Unfortunately, it's the OSS community suffering because of it now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unacademy
[2] https://unacademy.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvIfiblHz1I