I’d love to know what your genuine motivation is. Is it a desire to genuinely improve projects? Because I’ve always had the impression that people who do this just want to boost their PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.

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basscomm 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not everyone is a developer. Finding and fixing typos benefits everyone and allows nontechnical people to participate in the projects to improve the software they use, even if they can't contribute code.

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henrebotha 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Genuinely, I am trying to improve things. Making documentation more readable has a real cascading positive effect. Of course, most of these PRs are tiny — just a word or two — but that means it takes me almost no time to submit them, so the ROI is still positive.

One of the most enraging things to me is when a text search of documentation fails because the word I'm searching for has been misspelled in a key place. That's one of the things I'm trying to solve for.

I'm also just a stickler for good style. It bums me out when people misuse heading levels. Heading level is not a font size markup!

Of course doing this does generate activity on my GH, but I think all of us have probably moved on from caring much about the optics of little green squares.

Also like someone else said, it's just fun. I like typing and making Git do a thing and using my nice keyboard.

	▲	jkubicek 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I'm also just a stickler for good style. It bums me out when people misuse heading levels. Heading level is not a font size markup! I want to start a company with you and mandate all documents use appropriate styles.
	▲	saratogacx 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		One of the things I've done that has helped with my writing consistency is to use whatever version of "project" or "library" your LLM of choice has and pre-load it with a technical writing guide (I used the Red Hat Technical Style Guide[1]) and push my docs through that to identify improvements. It has been a great way to keep my own writing consistent and remove randomness from just having my own writing improvement prompt. 1 https://stylepedia.net/style/

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LandR 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's been a couple of projects with typos, that I wanted to fix but didn't for exactly the reason above!

Didn't want to be seen as just padding my github.

	▲	boothby 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This makes me a bit sad. Over the years I've posted PRs to several, but not many, repos with a one-off fix, issue or improvement. It's a great opportunity to say hello and thanks to the maintainers.
	▲	somehnguy 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I opened a 1 letter typo fix for NextJS not that long ago and had the same thought run through my mind beforehand. I (obviously) decided to just do it anyway and let people think what they want, who cares. I know my intention was simply fixing a typo I stumbled on while reading the docs..and the effort level is so low to open a PR to fix it

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krageon 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I used to do this when I had more free time and I did it because I just enjoy doing it. When I write it down like this I realise it sounds kind of obvious, but here we are

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cgh 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I once submitted a typo fix, among other things, to XFree86 way back when. Talk about love of the game, good grief.

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jbd0 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.

This used to mean something, but I don't think it does anymore.

	▲	seattle_spring 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I still see a disturbing amount of people claim it does matter a whole lot to them on LinkedIn. Hell, Sam Altman himself made a big deal about someone he knows "committing 100k lines of code per day with AI," as if that code was anything other than complete garbage.