The Free T-Shirt That Broke Open SourceWhy incentivizing digital contributions backfired.

From the show

When Rewards Backfire

Physical rewards for digital participation can have disastrous unintended consequences. In 2020, a cloud hosting company offered clothing to anyone submitting code to public repositories. This well-meaning campaign immediately triggered a massive wave of automated spam and low-quality submissions, overwhelming project maintainers and turning a collaborative community into a transactional game.