Editing Perverse incentive (section)

===Promotional schemes and public relations ===

* Hacktoberfest is an October-long celebration to promote contributions to the [[free and open-source software]] communities. In 2020, participants were encouraged to submit four or more [[Pull request|pull requests]] to [[Free software|any public free]] or [[Open-source software|open-source]] (FOS) repository, with a free "Hacktoberfest 2020" T-shirt for the first 75,000 participants to do so.<ref>{{Cite news |date=25 September 2020 |title=Hacktoberfest 2020 |url=https://laravel-news.com/hacktoberfest-2020 |access-date=31 January 2021 |website=Laravel News}}</ref> The free T-shirts caused frivolous pull requests on FOS projects.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Claburn |first=Thomas |date=1 Oct 2020 |title=Open-source devs drown in DigitalOcean's latest tsunami of pull-request spam that is Hacktoberfest |url=https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/digitalocean_hacktoberfest_pull_request_spam/ |access-date=2024-02-29 |work=[[The Register]] |language=en}}</ref>
* Around 2010, online retailer [[Vitaly Borker]] found that online complaints about his eyeglass-sale website, DecorMyEyes, pushed the site to the top of [[Google]] searches and drove more traffic. He began responding to customer reports of poor quality and/or misfilled orders with insults, threats of violence, and other harassment.<ref>{{cite news |author=David Segal |date=2010-11-26 |title=For DecorMyEyes, Bad publicity is a good thing |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all |work=New York Times}}</ref> Borker continued writing toxic replies for a decade despite serving two separate sentences in U.S. federal prison over charges arising from them.<ref>{{cite news |last=Segal |first=David |date=2 May 2021 |title=Has Online Retail's Biggest Bully Returned? |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/business/has-online-retails-biggest-bully-returned.html |access-date=3 May 2021 |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref>