zlacker

>>mefeng+(OP)
The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroughly tested and reviewed pieces of code I have ever written. I just really, really don't want to bother someone with low quality "help" who graciously offers their time to work on open source stuff.

Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.

>>Versio+Qb
I would imagine there are a lot of "small nice to haves" that people submit because they are frustrated about the mere complexity of submitting changes. Minor things that involve a lot of complexity merely in terms of changing some config or some default etc. Something where there is a significant probability of it being wrong but also a high probability of someone who knows the project being able to quickly see if it's ok or not.

i.e. imagine a change that is literally a small diff, that is easy to describe as a mere user and not a developer, and that requires quite a lot of deep understanding merely to submit as a PR (build the project! run the tests! write the template for the PR!).

Really a lot of this stuff ends up being a kind of failure mode of various projects that we all fall into at some point where "config" is in the code and what could be a simple change and test required a lot of friction.

Obviously not all submissions are going to be like this but I think I've tried a few little ones like that where I would normally just leave whatever annoyance I have alone but think "hey maybe it's 10 min faff with AI and a PR".

The structure of the project incentives kind of creates this. Increasing cost to contribution is a valid strategy of course, but from a holistic project point of view it is not always a good one especially assuming you are not dealing with adversarial contributors but only slightly incompetent ones.