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The cognitive dissonance here is that DO want to give the low-quality contributors a t-shirt. These are Indian students with good hustle and poor technical ski
by dmurray 6y ago
The cognitive dissonance here is that DO want to give the low-quality contributors a t-shirt.
These are Indian students with good hustle and poor technical skills who market themselves as technologists. They're going to be managers making purchasing decisions at tech companies in a few years time, and they lack the technical sophistication to choose between DO and competitors on axes other than "I've heard of them"/"they have a good reputation"/"they gave me a t-shirt once". These customers are both more valuable and a thousand times more numerous than the ones capable of earning even a $10 bug bounty.
I'm generalising here, but hopefully not racially stereotyping too much.
- scrollaway 6y agoSo in your mind, hacktoberfest's marketing strategy isn't "let's sponsor a big public pro open source event so we get lots of good rep especially among open source enthusiasts and potential hires"... But instead it's some weird ass 5 year long-play betting that random indian students will, in the future, have purchasing power to choose Digital Ocean because they got a free shirt half a decade prior. "Generalising" isn't the word I would use.
- alanbernstein 6y agoThe people who are already making helpful contributions to open source don't need any additional incentives...?
- majewsky 6y agoBut it's still nice to get some recognition. And it would be a better play for DO. If they sent out 100000 t-shirts to those people who made the most accepted PRs over the last year, they'd hit a lot more longterm contributors and also get a better bang for their marketing buck.
- halfdan 6y agoNo, but people new to programming might enjoy a month of supported learning and get a gentle introduction to open source along the way. Let's not generalise in either direction. There are plenty of people who try to make meaningful contributions as part of Hacktoberfest.
- scrollaway 6y agoPeople are constantly (and rightfully) on companies' asses talking about how they need to "give back to open source". Now you're telling me things are fine as-is. They're not.
- domenicd 6y agoIf they want to give back to open source, they could use the money they're spending on seventy thousand t-shirts to sponsor projects or pay maintainers.
- scrollaway 6y agoThey do. https://www.digitalocean.com/open-source/ https://www.digitalocean.com/open-source/ Please stop telling people how to spend their money.
- dmurray 6y agoMaybe their original plan was to build good will in the Open Source community. But it's a story of bad incentives: the bycatch turned out to be valuable and now they find it difficult to change their methods (as evidenced by their extremely anaemic response to tackling the problem).
- addicted 6y agoWouldn’t it be easier and cheaper to just give away a few shirts at a college event? Or heck, just gift them to everybody.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoYour argument is 100% correct but doesn't need to say "Indian".
- inops 6y agoLook at the vast majority of the profiles/usernames of those making spammy PRs and you'll find it isn't an incorrect generalisation.
- dhagz 6y agoThat doesn't mean DO was targeting Indians specifically. That's more tied to the YouTube video that was making the rounds the other day.
- inops 6y agoNo, of course not. I wasn't implying DO were targetting Indians (and didn't read parent as doing that either). My point was that Indians are the ones that are mainly responding.