Isn't that pretty standard throughout the internets. Otherwise the sites will be storing your copyrighted material on their domain (IANAL but that sounds like legal troubles for the site):
This is from HackerNews' legal page:
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
The article can be summarised to: "Use the subreddit where your target audience hangs out"
Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy (and reddit has a "no promotion over 10% of account activity" policy). There are things like self promotion threads but its only visited by people looking to promote their products and not by other people. Users who don't cease the promotion on being warned will have a very real possibility of having their account and domain banned from the sub.
I've been on the moderator side of subreddits, and the general sentiment is that people are there because of a shared interest and not to be the promotion ground for some wannabe-rich guy. If a subreddit is for fountain pen enthusiasts, they'd rather see 10 posts going "Help me choose my first fountain pen" rather than some guy promoting his fountain pen store on etsy.
I'm the sole active moderator of r/electricvehicles, and you wouldn't believe the amount of self-promotion spam that I have to deal with on that sub. It's gotten to the point that I've written a custom Python app to use the Reddit API to pull all of the analytics on any new post and present it to me in a digested form: How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits? What is the actual content? Has the user posted the same URL to multiple subreddits? Has the user's activity received user reports? Fortunately I have some faithfully diligent reporters on my sub who will flag newly posted suspected spam in a matter of minutes.
If the post doesn't pass my sniff test, my script will remove the post, mute the user, and permanently ban the user with a single keystroke -- do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
I can't just rely on user reports alone because a few of the members of the community are overzealous about what they'll report. I need a variety of metrics to make the call, and it's much easier to use the Reddit API to collect, process, and report those metrics than to try to click around in Reddit's horrible moderation UI to get the information I need to make a reasonable decision.
Confession time: I started writing the script about 5 days ago, and since I'm waiting to start a new job, I've actually made this script into a bit of a hobby to kill the time. By now it's morphed into a multi-threaded Mutt-like Reddit moderation tool, where it displays all mod queue content via a curses interface that I navigate with VIM key bindings, and keystrokes issue commands onto an asynchronous queue that another thread consumes and acts upon via the PRAW package. For example, the keystroke to approve a submission will immediately delete the post from the curses view because I love wicked-fast and responsive UIs, but the deletion on the backend could take another couple of seconds, especially if I'm rapid-firing 5 or 6 approvals in a row, and I just let that happen on the queue. Maybe if I refactor so that Python experts' eyeballs won't bleed when they see my code (e.g., I'm manually grabbing and releasing locks on stuff that's shared between the curses interface code and the async queue code rather than using more elegant synchronization capabilities in Python) I might consider releasing some source.
Many years ago I got banned by a moderator on a sub for answering someone's question. I did have a product but didn't pitch it directly except in paid ads on the sub. My username was the website.
I emailed the mod for clarification as to what line I crossed because it seemed arbitrary. She never replied.
So be careful with your metrics. What happened to me was definitely not cool. And, I quit my paid advertising there to boot.
I'm a big fan of the idea that it's ok to be a person with an account and a company, but not a company with an account. The dynamics of the latter situation feel very wrong - the goal should be to make online interactions as human as possible.
Obviously I don't know the details of the situation and certainly don't know the mods reasoning, but from your description if they banned you because of your username that sounds ok to me.
Your paid ads are irrelevant, an interesting consequence of reddit not paying moderators is that moderators are also not going to be biased because you are paying reddit.
My username was a handle like most others (almost nobody comes in under their real name). It never occurred to me, for instance, to go to gpm.com— likewise, almost nobody made the connection on the site.
There was one time that somebody was asking about a gpa calculator or something so I threw one together on my web page. I don't recall telling them that it was available because the conversation would have been over. I made my calculator so that you could triage your studying- so given some guesses about how much you thought you could increase your grades in your classes, it would tell you where to spend your time. I can't recall if I was banned around this or not, but that was as close as I came to being "spammy."
As I said in the sibling comment, I thought I at least deserved a conversation.
Why would their username being the same name of their website be a ban worthy problem? Sure it may feel "wrong" but I don't think it should be a ban-able offense
I run a sub called r/ClothingStartups and the day I took it over -- it had been dead -- people began self promoting. I decided to embrace that and set rules about how often they could do that.
I made that decision in part because I was homeless for a long time and while homeless I participated a lot on Metafilter where people would squee at me for "caring" about them and giving everyone good advice for free, but no one was willing to help me solve my biggest problem which was that I needed to develop an earned income adequate to get back into housing. And they ultimately banned me for supposedly "self promoting."
People there were promoted all the time. You just had be in good with the right people and your crap could make the front page constantly.
And on r/ClothingStartups, a lot of people posting appear to be people of color and appear to be trying to start something while out of work during a pandemic. And they do all kinds of stupid, ham-handed stuff that looks really lame.
And as long as you don't have all caps in the title or violate the self promotion guidelines, I don't care.
This idea that you have to be adequately smooth in your self promotion techniques is a hardship for a lot of minorities and marginalized peoples who have no business experience, no money for ads, etc and no one will give them a break.
My sub is growing at several people a day and it has more than just self promotion, though it does have a lot of that. It also has discussion about "Where can I find a manufacturer?" and so forth -- which is exactly what it's for.
I don't know how much value it has for people to self promote there. I don't know if people are really turning that into an income. I don't have data on that.
But when I was homeless, I was surrounded by well-heeled people who were happy to benefit from my expertise for free and accuse me of "panhandling the internet" for having donation buttons on my websites. What I knew as a former mom is stuff people expect women to do for free out of the goodness of their hearts and it was an abusive expectation because they expected me to care about them but no one cared about me. No one cared that I was homeless and going hungry and was making an honest effort to figure out how to establish an earned income in spite of my medical situation.
So I think we need more spaces on the internet where they cut you some slack for being new to business and having no idea what you are doing.
Upper class people who know how to do the smooth thing and promote themselves everywhere in the socially acceptable fashion and are pro UBI are the same people that then have some problem with people doing something overly blatant like using their company name as their account name on Reddit.
It's a "Fuck you, got mine" policy masguerading as faux compassion. UBI is not about helping the poor. It's about actively treating them like parasites and actively turning them into parasites while slamming all other doors shut in their face because you can only self promote if you have a Harvard education and know how to do it the right way in accordance with the sensibilities of other Ivy Leaguers.
And that boils down to "Fuck all y'all currently poor people. We are not only pulling the rope ladder up behind us, we are burning it in front of you and pointing and laughing at your predicament."
I posted recently on a large subreddit to promote my app. I read the rules on the side of the page that indicated which day to self-promote and what flair to add, etc. I still got banned a few minutes later, and the post taken down.
I asked the mod why and they directed me to yet another page with a huge list of rules that weren't referenced in the self-promo rules I had seen. I understood the intent and it's their rules, but it did leave a bad taste in my mouth, having tried in good faith to follow their instructions.
My user name wasn't clearly an ad. I use that same username on, for instance, the Coral City webcam chat. I remember one person on the subreddit getting an "aha" as s/he was asking something and I wouldn't direct him to my site, but I said this information was available on the web.
I tried very hard to not be spammy. I always offered information.
I think I at least deserved the opportunity to discuss it.
The mods don't receive benefit directly from the ads, but I bet somebody at Conde Nast (or whoever owns them now) cares.
Haha, can relate to that. After a certain point the Reddit tools become really inadequate. I used to mod a super popular subreddit (the kind that are always on the r/all) and we had 3 bots and two dozen moderators and still the mod queues was always filled.
I'm about to graduate so I've stopped all that except for helping a moderately popular sub. Overall it's given me plenty time I needed in other parts of my life, but I miss the small joys that came from my little python scripts improving the day for 20 or so people. That was the first time when something I created made impact on another person's life.
All those little pieces of code, are what keep millions of subs from just not collapsing.
Say whatever anyone wants, I think reddit is the future of human moderation (millions of experiments), over FAANG and their army of invisible workers and rules.
That's a tough sub to moderate. It seems like half the users are there because they genuinely like EVs, and half see it as the no man's land cold war between RealTesla and TeslaInvestorsClub, depending on whether they're short or long.
A while back there was somebody that was only posting VW press releases. They were promptly called out by somebody, who themselves turned out to only post pro Tesla articles and a handful of VW FUD.
The comments themselves are generally pretty based, though. Bad actors are quickly downvoted. It's one of the few places on the internet that gets just as excited by the Model Y launch as they do the ID.3. I read it daily, thank you for your work!
>How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits?
these kinds of policies are the death of the throwaway account. many subs don't even allow you to post in the first place now if you haven't ground out a posting history in other subs that do allow new accounts. maintaining anonymity for anonymity's sake has become increasingly difficult over the years on the site
I strongly believe "if you're already famous" part is the most disgusting part of self-promotion policies (in general, not with these examples), because popular creators get at least 10+ people that will post their content as a link for karma, and then people starting out get none of that benefit, and starting out is the most difficult phase.
If everything/everyone adopted a no-self-promotion policy no product could get any popularity. I think the rule is often instated for reasons really involving low-quality content and spam (but with more exterior objectivity), but it hurts the already-disadvantaged in the process. The only good thing that may come from it is having to focus on features and benefits of the product more since you can't just dump the link to the product, but again already-famous people/companies don't have to deal with that.
As in "you have an audience for your content already". This is more relevant on other platforms than reddit is, although you can get famous as a 'reddit-specific' user I think it's more difficult.
> Nothing wrong with the advice, but most subreddits have a no self-promotion policy
So, instead of "Go to my site to buy X!" you just talk about X in the third person. You mention your product/service X alongside the obvious brand names, you always have a story ready about how X can do what OP wants, etc.
The self-promotion rules just force you to be dishonest at all times.
Works well because people have a knee-jerk hate for "check out this X I made" but they are completely blind to "check out this X I found." You can see this a lot in r/gaming when solo devs share their work.
> The self-promotion rules just force you to be dishonest at all times.
No one is forcing you to compromise your morals. You can get free stuff from stores if you grab it and run out the door, but that doesn't mean that price tags force you to steal.
Very much depends of the subs. I spend a lot of time on /r/startups, the rules are super enforced. Way more than /r/Entrepreneur for instance.
The goal isn't to spam Reddit, but to leverage the audience without trespassing the rules. And, like all social networks the key is to help others (for real) and create value
I have successfully promoted my company on Reddit, but it is tricky, for the reasons mentioned. There are two techniques that worked for me.
0. Be a chronic reddit user for years, with a main account that has thousands of karma and a couple of throwaway accounts that also have various content.
1. Write an interesting blog post with useful content that relates to your product, and post it on a relevant subreddit. Put a call to action like "Buy Now" at the bottom of that post. Post it a maximum of twice in any 24 hour period. If it doesn't succeed on a given subreddit, you can try it maybe once more with a different headline before you should move on to a different subreddit. If you post it more than 4-5 times total anywhere on reddit, you're liable to get banned.
2. Hang out in subreddits where people discuss products like yours. Answer questions with useful information. After providing the information, link your site as the source. Do not just link your site without also providing a useful answer on reddit.
Reddit does drive quite a bit of traffic, something like 60-100 hits per upvote. It's great, but it still often doesn't result in as many sales-per-click as facebook or instagram.
Posts in our company's page or on our own walls gave us the best clickthrough, and we did a lot of grinding to build up our audience there. Facebook ads did well also, we would pay about 30c/click and something like 10% of those turned into sales. Instagram actually didn't do well for us - we got a higher sales capture rate but fewer clicks. We just didn't give the insta account the attention that it deserved (before I left the business, anyway).
Yeah, we were getting crazy good results from our first $1000 of ad spend! Unfortunately diminishing returns set in pretty quickly after that, haha, but we had some winning strategies.
Yes of course, don't spam or self-promote if it's not permitted!
However, you can create some valuable content for the subreddit and share a link to your blog. Most Subs are ok with that (if you really bring value) and it can drive you some serious traffic.
Varies from subreddit to subreddit. This is purely anecdotal but on a big subreddit it's usually like 1 in 100 submissions linking to external site get the to "serious traffic" level of traction. You can instead write the same content as a subreddit post and add a link to your site at the end, such posts will have a much higher chance of reaching the subreddit frontpage.
Most moderators are already wise to people doing this. I moderate a decent sized subreddit (50k users) and whenever I see a wall of text post with a link at the bottom I just remove it. 99% of the time what is written is garbage and adds no value to anyone.
It is hard to know what content will go viral for sure.
From my experience is pretty much correlated to the value you bring to the community.
If you're honest, transparent and teach something, relate your experience or your difficulties then you get engagement.
Most subs don't allow you to promote your own blog posts. Because why not just make the post right on the subreddit? That's what reddit is for.
The whole premise of trying to drag users away from reddit to your own domain is totally against what reddit is trying to do, expect to get blocked no matter how you work around it.
I have known a few people who got a lot of users from reddit. Their attitude was that accounts are cheap so while they were banned numerous times, they just kept on going back.
But if the goal here is "advice on how to reach a target audience"... it's probably worth getting an account burned (not like they cost money), if it gets your post to the top of a relevant subreddit.
Except if you're self-promoting, you're not going to get your post to the top of any healthy subreddit with an active user base. In my experience on r/electricvehicles, self-promotion/spam posts stay at 0 upvotes with a handful of reports and complaints in the comment section. It's literally just spam that wastes everyone's time.
One pattern is for a YouTube channel to try to spam their content on the sub. I know it's the channel owner (or someone affiliated with the channel owner) because each video they post everywhere has the same logo in the upper-left corner. And those videos are pretty much all they post. They get banned from my sub very quickly, and in my experience they don't come back.
You won't get banned if you participate to the community and respect the rules. And that's also how you'll get the best results!
That's the same for every "social networks", if you're just spammy you can get some short term results but if you bring some value to the community you'll get visitors, reputation and even fans.
Take the time to read the rules, participate to the subs, learn what works, what don't and try to help others in the topic you're into. Then, create some valuable content that help the community and post it with a link to your blog if you want some traffic, or ask for feedback on your idea.
Honestly, I'm pretty over the reddit contribution rules. The rules are oriented at people who post links all day, and incredibly unfriendly to casual users, or people who generate OC.
Ex, many of them ask for a 90/10 other/self-promotion ratio. Well, I don't surf reddit and submit links all day, so I violated this in /programming by posting two self-posts (in a year) about OSS side projects I've worked on, and got shadowbanned. They weren't monetized at all, they were describing completely OSS personal projects (exploring d3.js and other graphics libraries).
If that's not what reddit wants... then I don't care what reddit wants. I'll use burner accounts and post like a normal human being, and if they get banned... I'll make new ones.
This is why subreddit have a account activity requirements to interact on a subreddit. It could be a threshold of account age, total post/comment karma, comment karma on the subreddit or a combination of them. Getting an account above that threshold is gonna cost you in time and effort. Imo there are better use of time than grinding burner reddit accounts.
Also, if a user is banned the content that led to ban will almost certainly be taken down. Not to mention, getting an external link to top is going to be a challenge in itself
Most of the self-promotion posts you see on reddit usually are titled "Look at the so-and-so my girlfriend/boyfriend/sister/mother/whatever made!" Even if its not the skirt the no-self-promotion rule I think they tend to do better in general.
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.
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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.
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".
This kind of comments are really difficult to get rid of, especially so in a site that doesn't strictly tie with your real self.
Also, that kind of behaviour is extremely hard to curb. If moderators lay guidelines on what kind of talk is and isn't allowed, people attack the mods and the subreddit for taking away their freedom. If mods are lenient, this and much worse happens. I used to moderate a popular sub (top 100 subs on reddit), and I hate to say that these are mild by reddit standards and about what you should expect on a popular post (the key being "reddit standard"). I'm pretty sure mods are cracking down on these comments, but a mob of people can generate them much faster than a dozen or so volunteers can delete away
> especially so in a site that doesn't strictly tie with your real self.
In the bigger view, that isn't really something to fix. In fact it might be a good thing - let people make mistakes, be downvoted, see what enlightened people commented and maybe learn.
Also https://nextdns.io/ on the cloud. I run my ios devices with no ads thanks to this honest service.
Can i modify the DNS resolver on a samsung tv (i do not intend to have one ever)
> you can but if it cant resolve it will fallback to googles resolver automatically. At least this is what happened on my model.
I built my own router with a raspberry pi. I installed pi-hole and use that as a dns resolver. I then use an iptables rule to NAT / forward all dns traffic on port 53 to the pi-hole resolver, similar to how ISPs often intercept dns requests. This prevents IOT devices from bypassing the dns server configured via my DHCP. Letting pi-hole block the requests helps prevent errors from dns request timeouts.
I set my router dns to use the custom values nextdns provides for my account, which enabled it for the entire residence. It was fun to see the flotsam in the nextdns logs. I love this service.
Yes, this happens. But then you make a firewall rule to route outbound port 53 traffic that doesn’t come from the Pihole to go back to the Pihole.
It gets rather elaborate.
Ads on my Samsung TV is the entire reason I decided to finally pi-hole my entire home network. It's wonderful. No ads on my TV and much less on my tablet, phone and PC. Too bad pi-hole doesn't stop Youtube ads.
The only complaint is from my wife who sometimes Googles stuff and clicks on the top result, which is often an ad and will end up blocked. She now has to scroll down a bit to the real results.
I'm in my final year of college and for over last 3 years I learnt a good part of my coding skills from scrimba. I was sold from the moment I found we could pause the video and copy the code (no more rummaging through github and pastebin). Its really good to see you guys grow and reach even more learners.
That exactly what Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are. Assuming, you aren't expecting this public utility to be 100% lawful, since the other parties involved here (universities for instance) don't seem too keen on the idea of a having their work circulate openly.
> other parties involved here (universities for instance) don't seem too keen on the idea of a having their work circulate openly
Hum... What?
Universities at worst don't care. Most really want they work circulating and will do a lot of things to get it (many useless things that miss the point, but well, that's how people are).
Universities could push it harder. But they are surely pushing on the correct direction.
"Very early in this post-arrest period, MIT decided to “remain neutral,” as between the government and Aaron Swartz, in the investigation and eventual prosecution. Initially this meant simply that MIT would not take a public position on the prosecution.Throughout the following (almost) two years, MIT’s decisions were mostly guided by this posture of neutrality."
"With regard to substance, MIT would make no statements, whether in support or in opposition, about the government’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz, the government’s decisions about charges in an indictment, or any possible plea bargain stances of the prosecution or the defense. [15]"
"[15]: This position of neutrality would not have necessarily extended to the sentencing phase of the prosecution, where MIT might have been prepared to advocate on behalf of Aaron Swartz had he been convicted."
I agree and both these two projects are remarkable contributions.
My point was admittedly an aspirational one that requires major changes to the current IP ownership model of (often publicly funded) scholarly work. For example: see how publishers have used the legal system to throw the book at projects like sci-hub or individuals like aaronsw.
I do disagree that the main issue is universities not being keen on having their work circulated openly.
My take is this:
1. Publishers used to have a reasonable value prop, but are now basically robbing the public blind.
2. University admin roles, even at public universities, are more and more occupied by metric-obsessed, run-it-like-a-business types leading to:
3. Academics are stuck on the publish-or-perish hamster wheel that is fueled by a vague amorphous notion of journal prestige, set up and profited by said publishers.
I can't see how we can fundamentally change this situation without either of:
- top-down structural change in academic admin system allowing people to pursue academic careers without h-index and citation obsessions. Major tenure reform?
- bottom-up mobilization of academics or public interest groups, forcing publishers' hands into a more sane (and less profitable) business model. They will fight it tooth and nail of course, hence the need for mass coordinated action (boycotts, public shaming, etc.)
Both these avenues need playing politics on one level or another.
Aside from the question of being lawful, I don't think they quite fit the bill alone for a few other reasons. First, they are not truly public or accountable to the scientific community -- while they accept uploads, they are both designed and managed by unaccountable private parties. Second, they do not maintain much in the way of metadata, making it hard to verify basic details such as the publication date, authorship, and revision history.
This second points is important for having a coherent discussion of the literature and avoiding fraud to some degree, and to their credit, the major journals do provide this (but not the first point). In this sense, I think Pubmed Central is an example of a good way towards a public utility model:
Why would the universities mind having their work circulated for free? They don't make any money from the current system, but pay exorbitant fees for journal subscriptions.
While not exactly a fix for your case, Firefox on android has a prompt for opening sites in their apps if it's installed on your device. Match that with its extension support and it makes most of the mobile web far less obnoxious.
This is from HackerNews' legal page:
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