worked well for a bit. but then the program became popular and that’s when it hit the curb. terrible loss, imo. it was a brilliant idea to encourage open source work with a token reward. it relied heavily on good intentions, which quickly disappeared with the popularity.

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wink 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have one of these and it was really nice in the first 1-n years.

People gamified it and then it sucked, but the idea wasn't so bad. One would expect people would not stoop this low for a free T-Shirt.

	▲	ryandrake 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is no limit to how low someone will stoop to get even a tiny token for free. I remember a local community fun event from a couple of years ago, which was set up by the library to encourage kids to read. They would count up these reading tokens at the end of it and give some tiny $2 teddy bear to the winners, and of course a bunch of adults swooped in, gamed the system, and all the toys went to them. People are totally shameless assholes when even an insignificant free prize is on the line.

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latexr 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s still ongoing. The difference is they now no longer offer t-shirts (at one point they planted trees instead, unsure if that still happens), and projects must opt-in.

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david_allison 6 hours ago | parent [-]

They offered T-Shirts in 2025

	▲	latexr 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for the correction. I thought they had stopped that but I see you’re right. Seems to be more restrictive, though. https://hacktoberfest.com/participation/ > Swag - Get an exclusive Hacktoberfest T-Shirt, but its only for ‘Super Contributors’ who contribute 6 accepted PR/MRs to a worthy repository. (T&Cs Apply \| Valid only for the first 10,000 contributors completing 6 PR/MR)

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blitzar 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

this is why we cant have nice things