> You have to add a pain threshold that people will only cross if they think it's worth it for the reward. If the terms included "the PR must be in good faith or constructive to the project and not merely fixing typos or other immaterial changes", people would assume they need to put in real changes, which would be more than it's worth to them for a t-shirt.
You'd think, but never underestimate the pain that people will go through to get some minor profit for free. It becomes a numbers game. If you think your "immaterial" PR has a 1/10,000 chance of slipping by, you just make 10,000 immaterial PRs. There are a nontrivial number of people who will absolutely sit there and manually copy/paste 10K pull requests if they think it will get them $1-$2 worth of stuff. The smarter ones would find a way to automate it.
You'd think, but never underestimate the pain that people will go through to get some minor profit for free. It becomes a numbers game. If you think your "immaterial" PR has a 1/10,000 chance of slipping by, you just make 10,000 immaterial PRs. There are a nontrivial number of people who will absolutely sit there and manually copy/paste 10K pull requests if they think it will get them $1-$2 worth of stuff. The smarter ones would find a way to automate it.