Week 5: The $100 Bounty That Nobody Wanted
I offered $100 to whoever could win the auto-merge. All three serious contributors declined the money.
The experiment: OpenChaos is a repo where anyone submits a PR, the community votes with reactions, and the most-voted PR merges — automatically on Sundays, daily by the maintainer. Last week, someone tried to delete the constitution. This week, I tried to buy progress.
The Problem
The community shipped auto-merge on January 26th — PR #63 by @Loeffeldude. Every Sunday, a GitHub Action would merge the most-voted PR automatically. Democracy in a cron job.
The problem was obvious before the first run. PR #13 "Rewrite it in Rust" had 748 upvotes and permanent merge conflicts. The workflow only tried the top PR by vote count. If that PR couldn't merge, nobody won. Democracy elected a PR it couldn't ship, and that PR blocked everyone else.
On January 30th, I posted Issue #154: $100 Bounty: Win the Auto-Merge. Two days later, the first Sunday run confirmed it: nobody won.
Every Sunday, the auto-merge picks the most-voted PR and merges it. That's "winning." The bounty rules were simple but cruel: your PR had to be the overall vote leader — not just the highest-ranked mergeable PR — with no conflicts and passing CI. If the top-voted PR can't merge, nobody wins that cycle.
In other words: to claim $100, you had to out-vote a meme with 748 upvotes. A meme the community loved but could never ship.
The issue got one reaction. A thumbs down.
Three Responses
@Daviey submitted PR #159: "🔥🎰 00 BOUNTY HUNT! Random Upvoter Wins! 🎰🔥". Instead of keeping the $100, he wanted to raffle it to a random person who upvoted the PR. Horrible emojis. Slot machine energy. Maximum chaos.
@Saturate submitted PR #161. A straightforward fix: skip unmergeable PRs. Clean, functional. And a bounty clause: if it wins, Saturate gets $0 — he picks a charity, I donate the $100 there instead.
I had to shut both redirects down. A bounty paid to a PR author is a contract. A bounty raffled to random upvoters is a sweepstakes — different legal territory. And a bounty redirected to charity changes the payout terms. I posted a clarification: the payout goes to the PR author, period. Merged code can't change the terms.
@bigintersmind submitted PR #168. The most technically complete fix: net votes instead of thumbs-up only, tiebreaker by creation date per RULES.md, CI verification, mergeability retry for GitHub's API quirks, correct workflow permissions. He posted a detailed comparison on the bounty issue explaining exactly where #159 and #161 had gaps.
Then he added this:
"If #168 wins, I decline the $100. I don't think a cash prize should be a factor in which fix gets merged. It's created a situation where the conversation around #159 and #161 is dominated by arguments about money rather than whether the code is correct. I'd rather people just vote for whichever PR they think is the best fix."
Daviey replied:
"I'm of the same mindset. I also didn't want to do it for the money, which is why I thought it would be more fun to give it to a random person that upvoted it. Sadly the latest addition to the rule killed that."
Three responses, three refusals. bigintersmind declined on principle. Daviey thought redistribution was funnier than winning. Saturate chose charity over self. Nobody wanted the $100.
What the Bounty Actually Did
It was supposed to attract quality work. The quality work was already coming.
bigintersmind didn't just submit #168. He also shipped PR #129: Deprioritize PRs with merge conflicts, which merged February 2nd. Before this, conflicting PRs with high votes sat at the top of the ranking even though they could never win. Now they sink to the bottom. The list matches reality.
Two infrastructure PRs. Both from the contributor who declined the bounty.
What the $100 actually did was shift the conversation. Instead of "which fix is correct?" the thread became "who gets the money?" — exactly what bigintersmind called out. The bounty didn't corrupt anyone. It just added noise to a signal that was already clean.
One thumbs down on the issue. No thumbs up. Not one.
Meanwhile, in the Chaos
PR #62 "1.337% chance to see nothing" merged and permanently took the site down. A Math.random() joke in a Server Component poisoned the ISR cache — one unlucky render, and Vercel served a blank page to everyone indefinitely. bigintersmind diagnosed it and submitted the fix. It sat in the vote queue behind a DOOM port. Then the DOOM port shipped — and it had the fix baked in. Trojan horse. Site back up. No bounty needed.
The site also shipped 10% of PR links replaced with rickrolls, fart sounds on scroll (PR #90 — powered by fartscroll.js, built by The Onion's engineering team), and a PR titled "I pinky swear I won't force-push something weird to this branch at 16:59 UTC".
The Numbers
| Metric | Week 4 | Week 5 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 842 | 933 | +11% |
| Forks | 69 | 72 | +4% |
| Open PRs | 58 | 67 | +16% |
What I Learned
Transactional money corrupts communal contribution. Not because people get greedy — nobody did. Because it changes the frame. The moment there's a prize, the conversation shifts from "what's correct?" to "who wins?" All three serious contributors self-selected against the money. That's not an anecdote. That's a pattern.
The best contributors are already here. bigintersmind shipped two infrastructure PRs and declined the bounty. Saturate wrote a clean fix and redirected the money to charity. Daviey built a 1,367-line OAuth voting system the previous week. These people aren't here for $100. Offering it was almost insulting.
One thumbs down is data. Not everyone agrees that bounties belong in open source. The community spoke — quietly, with a single emoji.
What Happens Next
PR #13 "Rewrite it in Rust" — 748 votes, the unmergeable meme that blocked the bounty for weeks — closed on February 5th. The author walked away. The roadblock is gone.
Sunday's auto-merge is live. For the first time since the bounty was posted, the top-voted PR might actually be mergeable.
Someone could win $100 this weekend. Given the pattern so far, they'll probably decline it.
Week 5 of ∞.
Follow the chaos
Weekly stories from a repo where the internet decides what ships. No spam, just drama.