Is it only me who found the idea of #Hacktoberfest ineffective? Encouraging people to have only one month in the year to create and contribute to a movement about freedom is counterproductive.
I see many companies doing marketing-fueled efforts to support it and many community members competing with questionable PRs to get a rank or something. I miss the talk about #FOSS's value and how we can sustain this effort.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that!
Top comments (20)
I think the idea is sound and the implementation is flawed.
It's a net good to get people involved with FOSS and rutting around in the sausage as it's made. The biggest barriers to contributing are:
The idea of breaking down those three barriers is good and I think a lot of participants acted in good faith.
The implementation has always been flawed. In previous years the no-opt-out has been disastrous with weak pull requests and read-me edits. I think it could be salvaged, but it's tough to regain any credibility and public trust after one ill-conceived YouTube video led to thousands of Godawful PRs for a free t-shirt.
Good point Drew,
What could we do to change that?
Wish I had a concrete answer for that. I think we've made some progress in some areas. I see more "How to Contribute" and "Code of Conduct" sections in README files now than I have in the past. As well as sites like up-for-grabs.net/
Every little bit helps.
What a great website! Thanks for sharing!
You aren't. I participated in my first hacktoberfest last year and it was mostly a successful learning experience.
Now it did help me feel more at ease contributing to OSS whenever I could but a problem I'm currently facing is this weird pressure to make four contributions this month, which feels very disingenuous.
I'm still going to participate while trying to truly provide value (which I feel is to goal of most participants) but is this the right way to support OSS contributions, IDK?
I don't doubt that it's an excellent way to start exploring the topic and the need to contribute back to the space. Kudos on trying to provide value. What stops you from doing it all year round instead of just a month? @arndom
Well, I do contribute at other points in the year, but in a lesser way, from pointing out issues, to builds for hackathons and the occasional PR.
Finding the spare time and the "right" project are my limiters, because all what I listed are based on interests but for Hacktoberfest that comes once a year, it seems to push me to find that time and potential project which may not be such a bad thing.
IF you spread the time you spend during this event over the whole year + add some extra it would be very beneficial.
That's fair, I'll try forming a routine that feels natural around this.
LEt me know if you need any help :) I can nudge you :)
Please nudge me !!!!! Because I only know JS the way W3schools taught me and every time I look for repos that are JS I get Stuck!!!!
all i see is sparghetti JS!!! never seen such stuff i been searching and searching.
Aside from the questionable PRs that you've mentioned, I've also seen people come up with repositories that don't even contribute to anything and are only there for commits to count.
I've also witnessed people flocking to comment on issues asking to be assigned even when someone else has already commented and is clearly working on said issue already.
While the idea of Hacktoberfest is good, I fear that something needs to change with the implementation to make it actually work as it is intended.
look. I am a noob. I am not ashamed. And I have a passion for JS. its an addiction. it is an infatuation.
When the opportunity for me to make contribution came. I was so excited . But there is an entry level barrier in the repos. All I saw was Stuff I couldn't understand.
I only slighlty seemed to comprehend that there might be some node.js involved and or some react etc ...I could never understand why there were so many folders.
I imagine there are a lot of new people that wanna make contributions but....learning curve.
And also the repos guys seem to be slow to respond on many of the repos.
I saw some repos that were a year or many years old with no response to questions and requests.
Some seemed fresh but still no responses.
There is a lot of things
maybe I should blame the big guys for not organising this properly.
I think there should be an official list of active and alive repos and their active and alive maintainers that should apply for hacktoberfest to say that they wanna be involved and be placed on a list. And that they have issues and would like to have them fixed.
And their list should be propagated and made public especailly for the newbies.
and there should be a good thought into what a newbie should be able to fix !!!! cause all these spaghetti codes is too pro for many many eager people.
We never find opportunity and when they find it then they are relegated to maybe doing a Readme or something like that.
But then that is another learning curve to go through because to write a blog or to write a read.md now I need to know how to write in a new markdown language. That I never knew existed. That I need to learn before october ends.
And or before someone who knows already knows the markdown comes and snatches the opportunity that took me three days to find. While I'm still bumbling about trying to learn it.
So all in all there is an opportunity here for a tutorial on how to deal with the many files in a repos. what is what for what languages and or framework and or libraries. Its a tutorial all on its own after learning everything and git!!!!
Wow, So much feedback. Thanks!
I'm 100% with you - I've even heard from some (I'm not saying all) OSS project maintainers who hate it. It's just a bit of an easy/lazy way to "do OSS" with a minimum of commitment.
Thanks, Leob. I heard the same. It brings too much noise into the mix, and it's counterproductive in some of the cases. How would you organize it better?
Maybe by not organizing it at all? :-D
Joking a bit - I admit that there is some value to it, I mean, if you get people enthusiastic about the idea of contributing or of doing OSS - in principle (or in theory), yes there's value to that.
However in no way, not even remotely, is it a substitute for those people putting in the grunt work, by being a core maintainer on OSS projects that we all benefit from - those people are hugely undervalued, they keep these projects running and alive.
Joining a hackathon and submitting a few quick "vanity PRs" can't be compared to the blood, sweat and tears put in by those OSS maintainers ... it requires big personal commitment.
I think the 'solution', if anything, is that those core maintainers/committers are valued more, also financially - for instance through sponsoring by companies which benefit from these projects.
I agree with that. It's hard to find projects for beginners, so people create projects only with the purpose of getting the contribution (myself included, in the past few years). I did discover nice projects and helped with something like translation or minor features, but after that, I never touched them again. It's hard to feel compelled to contribute, and we have limited spare time after working hours, study time, etc
But I don't know a solution to that either. Should companies rearrange the event to last more months or the whole year? Or create a "hackerrank" for contributions, and gamification of open-source in exchange for prizes? I really don't know. And I guess Hacktoberfest will also slow down this year since they are not given t-shirts anymore either
I know some companies are doing that, and if you ask me, every company using opensource should contribute back and have a mechanism to encourage everyone to do so, not just developers.
Thanks for sharing. I am so happy that I am not alone.
I also noticed today there are a lot of people exploiting the hashtag to sell stuff :)