Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 623 posts

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#51

Post by ashtonkem »

nikivi wrote: post #50
ashtonkem wrote: post #40

Was github ever fun? It’s a tool, not a toy. I don’t expect my IDE to be fun either, I expect it to accomplish a task for me.

Why do something especially do something for majority of your life and not make it fun?

I enjoy what I do, I just don’t expect my tools to entertain me. One can enjoy carpentry without expecting their hammer to be “fun”.

I would strenuously resist any attempt to make any of my tools more fun at the cost of any ounce of productivity. These tools exist to serve the narrow needs of professionals, focusing on anything other than utility for the core group is counter productive.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#52

Post by ashtonkem »

romaniitedomum wrote: post #47

Every day now I see one, a comment, a blog post, something that reminds me of the words of Charles Babbage: > I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Babbage was talking specifically about Members of Parliament asking him whether putting wrong figures into his machine would result in the correct answers, but I find the remark generally applicable to so muc…

That quote fits perfectly for these situations where I find a suggestion so flappergastingly silly that I wonder if the author and I have experienced the same reality.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#53

Post by ashtonkem »

michaelterryio wrote: post #24

I used to use the elixir trending page to learn about new popular elixir libraries. It had twice as many repos as it has now. Now it’s garbage. I complained to GitHub when it happened. It’s purely worse.

I’ve always looked to $LANG community specific websites for suggestions on new and exciting libraries for $LANG. Such federated discovery is much better positioned to handle the needs and quirks for each community.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#54

Post by radicalriddler »

I stronly agree with the trending part. I used to browse it regularly to find cool projects, that may have been on HN or Product Hunt or something that week, but now, most of it is Chinese projects that are meaningless to me or large businesses latest nothing github project they made.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#55

Post by tzs »

nikanj wrote: post #44
root_axis wrote: post #18

Hard pass on the suggestion to add more social network features. Such features are only conducive to drama and anxiety, we need less of that not more.

Social network features are such a 2015 me-too fad feature anyway. What they should add is AI, or maybe blockchain.

Before adding the newest fad features, maybe the should go back and add old fads that they missed.

One big fad from 50+ years ago that I'd welcome is folders. I don't want to just have all my repositories appear in a flat list ordered by time since last update. I want to make folders so I can organize repositories by topic--just like I have my repositories organized in my computer.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#56

Post by kerng »

tzs wrote: post #55
nikanj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social network features are such a 2015 me-too fad feature anyway. What they should add is AI, or maybe blockchain.

Before adding the newest fad features, maybe the should go back and add old fads that they missed. One big fad from 50+ years ago that I'd welcome is folders. I don't want to just have all my repositories appear in a flat list ordered by time since last update. I want to make folders so I can organize repositories by topic--just like I have my repositories organized in my computer.

The modern version is tags, but they lack good sorting/viewing for tags

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#57

Post by jdsully »

young_unixer wrote: post #38
jdsully wrote: post #10

A major reason open source projects use GitHub is the social network features. It really helps you build traction and get noticed. Regardless of what you may think of it the trending page does indeed drive further traffic which drives adoption. Otherwise we'd all still be on SourceForge or migrate to something more OSS pure like Gitlab.

We don't all migrate to gitlab mainly because Github's UI is better and because of network effects. Nothing to do with social features.

The network effects come from the social features. That was the main innovation over source forge (aside from git support itself).

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#58

Post by vsroy »

I see a lot of disagreement with this post but I think it makes good points.

It's hard for small developers who make useful things to get noticed on GitHub. The only hope is to get retweeted by some established user. This seems silly, we need better ways of making sure people can find/discover good software.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#59

Post by nexuist »

vsroy wrote: post #58

I see a lot of disagreement with this post but I think it makes good points. It's hard for small developers who make useful things to get noticed on GitHub. The only hope is to get retweeted by some established user. This seems silly, we need better ways of making sure people can find/discover good software.

The problem is that open source software is inherently trust-driven. I wouldn't blindly execute any random code on my machine, but I execute code from people or companies I trust all the time. Of course I could review the whole repo, but that always takes time (and even then you're not guaranteed to not be hit by an intentional/unintentional vulnerability), and it comes down to "well, would me spending time vetting this be more valuable than just finding a more popular, more trusted alternative?"

So it's hard to spotlight anonymous devs on their own, because you can't establish trust with someone who isn't known for anything yet.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#60

Post by vore »

alessivs wrote: post #16

> (re: project discovery) We went from a flawed meritocracy to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles. This works well in two senses: 1. We went from a flawed meritocracy (GitHub) to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles (Twitter). 2. GitHub went from a flawed meritocracy to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles (CoCs, them-vs-us narra…

How can something a meritocracy if it's flawed? Either you can actually assess something on its merits or you can't, and if you can't, then you can't really call it a meritocracy, can you?
Post reply on HN