Why do I feel insulted Re: automated bots making pull requests
An open source project is a lot of work. There are features to be built, bugs to be solved, releases to be made, documentation to be written and the inevitable support you have to provide via GitHub issues, Twitter and mailing lists.
Like anything worth doing, throughout this process there are hard problems that need to be solved. Valued contributors are ones who study the project's philosophy, understand the subject matter and are thinkers who gift their experience and time to the cause.
Therefore a person or a bot who joins in with a pull request that was a result of running a tool against the project's source code—like code linting or stripping of unnecessary whitespace—is a lowest form of contribution there is. It makes the statement: “Here, I didn't bother to see what current problems are in need of discussing/solving, so I ran a widely available script from the command-line that takes literally a second to run and submitted the result in form of a patch, hope you like it!” or “I couldn't fix any of the outstanding bugs in your JavaScript code, but I linted it so here's a commit in which I change your established coding style and add unnecessary semicolons.”
Even worse, the author of such a contribution likely even ignored the very problem that their change is addressing. In the case of stripping whitespace, the person/bot just stripped excess whitespace, but didn't analalyze where the whitespace is coming from. Why not provide a pre-commit git hook for authors to install so they get warned before they check in trailing whitespace? Why not configure CI to fail for changes that add unnecessary whitespace? Simply stripping extra characters treats the symptom, not the cause.
But once this low-value pull request is here, no harm in actually applying it? Wrong. However trivial the change is, their contribution is recorded forever in git (as if it had any merit) and it affects a lot of linewise authorship information. The next person who runs git blame will find out that "Vanellope von Schweetz" changed virtually every line in the project. A quick git show afterwards will show that her change was trivial and now they'll have to consult the git log to find out who actually authored the line of code in question and why.
We don't need more trivial contributions from people who couldn't be bothered to get acquainted better with a project. Especially if they're automated bots, they're wasting our time and attention, and creating noise for everyone participating in issues/PR discussions. We need debuggers, problem solvers, documentation writers and other kinds of supporters.
people are really using github like some kind of game scoring platform, dudes making const correctness garbage pull requests in bulk and advertise themselves as """""avid open source contributors""""" haha,