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1. Versio+Qb[view] [source] 2026-01-23 11:29:40
>>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.

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2. weinzi+Zg[view] [source] 2026-01-23 12:10:45
>>Versio+Qb
"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have."

And this is one half of why I think

"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."

isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.

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3. anonym+jj[view] [source] 2026-01-23 12:30:56
>>weinzi+Zg
> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior.

Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate norms, then society's higher levels of corrective behaviour can involve things like establishing laws and fining or imprisoning people, but you don't want to start with that level of response. Although putting these LLM spammers in jail does sound awfully enticing to me in a petty way, it's probably not the most constructive way to handle the problem.

The fact that shamelessness is taking over in some cultures is another problem altogether, and I don't know how you deal with that. Certain cultures have completely abdicated the ability to influence people's behaviour socially without resorting to heavy-handed intervention, and on the internet, this becomes everyone in the world's problem. I guess the answer is probably cultivation of spaces with strict moderation to bar shameless people from participating. The problem could be mitigated to some degree if a Github-like entity outright banned these people from their platform so they could not continue to harass open-source maintainers, but there is no platform like that. It unfortunately takes a lot of unrewarding work to maintain a curated social environment on the internet.

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