[mcv]

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.

[srtjstjsj]

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

[saagarjha]

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.

[tremon]

I don’t think I can fault them for doing that when the alternative would take significantly more time and effort

Isn't that basically the definition of spam: "but making something useful would take significantly more time and effort"?

[saagarjha]

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.

[mcv]

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.

[saagarjha]

He could (and should) have, but I do not think that he intentionally tried to hurt open source projects.