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GitHub isn't fun anymore

jaredpalmer.com

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Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#451

Post by bendergarcia »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #440
bendergarcia wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you speak to the historical racism or slavery associated with the name red black trees? I’m genuinely curious as I don’t know the history.

Lynching black people and hanging them from trees where their red blood ran. "Red black tree" reduces that history to a mere three words and should really be changed. That may sound preposterous, but it's making the same claim as the rest of the moral panic over names in tech.

According to Wikipedia it’s because of the printing capabilities in the 70s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93black_tree#Histo...

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#452

Post by pdimitar »

joncrane wrote: post #443
ardy42 wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you had a online tool I used to quietly manage production at my cardboard box factory and then you went and added leader boards, badges, xp, recognition points and an influencer score, then box manufacturing better be pretty bloody exciting for me from now on. We now have an entire generation of software developers who have never known these tools without the gamified experience. Maybe I'm just a little too old,…

That's what makes those systems so great. It has a positive effect on the people that DO care, and essentially no negative effect on anyone else. It's a free win.

They are a distraction -- and many websites utilise dark patterns to make those UI elements hard to ignore.

Plus many professional tools need to make use of every square centimetre on the display, and putting this "fun" cruft in it is going to detract from the usefulness of the tool because it now can't accommodate all the necessary UI elements.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#453

Post by vorpalhex »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #429
vorpalhex wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of folks who are more worried about looking for the latest crusade to join than who are worried about a well developed view of any topic (feminism, transgender rights, etc). These folks will use any and all excuses to jump on the attack bandwagon, and that they happen to be self-labeled progressives is itself almost incidental at best. Rage mobs aren't new, they still can cause plenty of damage and r…

And I think it is unreasonable to assume that a single bad take on a subject made by an anonymous user years ago should be held as an example that there is an overwhelming movement of harming the OS community. It is simultaneously possible that plenty of individuals have uninformed, clumsy approaches to a topic and that it is not an overwhelming movement or agenda.

> an overwhelming movement of harming the OS community

I think there's no global intent. There's no formalized group that has a weekly agenda of "Destroy Opensource!"

> It is simultaneously possible that plenty of individuals have uninformed, clumsy approaches to a topic

Right and this is what I mean by the crusade/rage mob analogies. Somebody gets upset about something, and they may be genuinely offended (and still wrong), so they go to Reddit/Twitter/etc and create a post "I can't believe X is doing Y! They're evil and we should stop them!"

Now, there's a whole bunch of people who don't have nuanced well researched opinions on X or Y. They just want to be upset and have a good fight, and this is a nice convenient thing that feels just to fight about. So they hop on and start jumping in on a side. This is why I use the crusade analogy - you don't care about the pretense, you're just in it for the battle.

The issue with rage mobs, whether it's in regards to the open source community or what broadcasters can air on television, are purely destructive. They don't care about fixing problems, they have no interest in improving the community or advancing things, they simply want to join in a fight and express anger. If a rage mob gets it's demands (you cancel that sitcom that portrays a gay family positively) then the mob doesn't go away - it just finds something else to attack and eventually it attacks itself.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#454

Post by bendergarcia »

Koshkin wrote: post #383
bendergarcia wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree with this. I would say someone will respond (were all not liberal). And that this is beyond liberal and conservatism. This about signaling and human decency. Words make people uncomfortable and words have history.

Question, then, is: where does this end?

I don’t think it ever ends and I don’t think it needs to. We live the human experience which is subjective and we use language to communicate that experience. Until we become a singular entity we will always rely on language to externalize our world, because of that we should always think about the language we use to communicate and express ideas. Words shape the world we see and the world we experience.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#455

Post by zoomablemind »

cushychicken wrote: post #395
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #100

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool , though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of…

I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool, though. Yeah, seeing the headline of this article made me think of how I've never heard a carpenter exclaim what fun it is to use a cordless drill.

I'd argue, it _is_ fun to use a well-made tool. As opposed to using an ok tool that just does the job. For example, Fossil SCM as mentioned on HN few times.

GitHub is a well-designed tool for multiple use cases. One aspect was the 'Social Programming' as they were marketing it back then. Trending, stars, fork counts were feeding into that aspect. Even the Issue tracker is a kinda social feature.

I find GitHub as a tool is still a fun/joy/handy to use...if only they fixed the odd bug in mobile view that requires me to refresh several times before it loads the styling files.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#456

Post by pdimitar »

chrisandchips wrote: post #372
blondin wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having a hard time understanding what the author is saying. i never considered github to be a place to have fun at. and i am surprised by this article and curious how other people see or use github... by the way, the trending page is not everything about github! i keep discovering and bookmarking github projects every now and then. for example, this repository where the author has implementations for trigonometry fun…

I don't use trending often enough to know that I'm correct in saying this, but I get the impression that the author is describing a shift from "most star-ed projects each day" to some new algorithm which seems to resemble "most interesting projects as of late", with the later being less dynamic. I suppose that's in part why they feel less excitement and less value in the tool. I agree that a lot of the recent changes…

> I suppose that's in part why they feel less excitement and less value in the tool.

Any karma system (in this case GitHub stars) can be gamed, exploited, and used to generate hype.

I would be very glad if GitHub started moving away from that (although I have no clue what would replace it, if anything at all).

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#457

Post by sigzero »

JoBrad wrote: post #335
xwdv wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The master and slave debate was dumb, and reflects a creeping of political correctness into coding and software over the years that I do not look forward to. React’s keywords have been similarly attacked for promoting a “bro” culture with use of words like props or mount. And man-in-the-middle attacks are increasingly being described as person-in-the-middle, at the expense of alliteration. So many other examples out…

This is a bit longer than I intended, but is my point of view, and not intended to dismiss what you’re saying at all. I think it’s easy to dismiss conversations like master/slave whitelist/blacklist as overly PC or childish. I certainly don’t appreciate the overly-preachy feeling I sometimes get from people pushing their point of view. And my nature is to find pleasure in giving The Man the proverbial finger. The sel…

Git doesn't have master/slave terminology. It has a master "copy" which is not the same thing at all. It's a stupid conversation. Really it is.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#458

Post by bendergarcia »

TeaDrunk wrote: post #378
bendergarcia wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point. Engineers love to use signaling as a tool to prove points, yet are conveniently saying signaling doesn’t matter here. It’s signaling that prejudice and racism matter.

Yes, I think that it is an easy signal that Microsoft (and GitHub) believes racism and prejudice is worth an adjustment in language. It’s much harder to actually perform systemic changes and I’m sure people would do plenty of gnashing of teeth about any significant movement, such as if Microsoft had grants only available to BIPOC (black/indigenous people of color, who have unique hardships in discriminatory systems i…

I think I follow what you’re saying. And I don’t think it has to be one or the other.Corporations and People need to both signal and action towards more equality. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

It is much harder but through signaling we raise the importance of the issue and increase the likelihood for action.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#459

Post by elboru »

baryphonic wrote: post #438
lqet wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential: what is up with this inflationary expectation that everything should be "fun" and "exciting" and "thrilling"? I feel like western society as a whole is thinking more and more in terms of a six year old. For adults, there lies incredible satisfaction in mastering any but the most exploitative professions or jobs and fulfilling them dutifully, even if they are be no means "fun".

I think the prominence of consumption industries like entertainment, media and social media have hooked us on the idea of happiness/meaning as perpetual bliss. I suspect these industries learned it from advertising, an industry which they created and evolved. The schools and religious organizations have tried to follow suit, with only mixed success. "Fun" is a very poor imitation of "zen" or "peace" (the Christian co…

As a Catholic I can confirm. So many priests and lay people are trying to make Mass “fun”, it’s sad and most of the time cringy.

Re: GitHub isn't fun anymore

#460

Post by jolmg »

_fnhr wrote: post #349
CydeWeys wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these problems you've actually had? I have various stuff on GitHub and none of this has remotely happened to me. What you're describing does not jibe with my lived experience of what GitHub is actually like.

You don't really need to experience it to see how this one day might happen to you. Here is a recent example with RuboCop: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091 "Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or wh…

Wow, Rails actually changed blacklist/whitelist to denylist/allowlist.[1]

[1] https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/33681

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