random_visitor

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.

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.

> not like they cost money

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

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.

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.

"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".

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.

> 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 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

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.

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

That's pretty much what a pi-hole is. According to my friends who use a pi-hole to filter their connection, it makes almost everything ad-free