Live data from Hacker News

Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

theregister.com

131–140 of 155 posts

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#131
post #48

> Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole bunch…

> Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope. I think that the common complain is not "it isn't showing what I personally want" VS "it isn't showing what people generally want" but rather that the algorithm is often no…

Most of the comments here are incredibly dystopian - automation is bad, rehire the editor you've replaced at 75% of the salary, stop pushing engagement, what brings the company most money, megacorporation pushing slushy mass....

Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys invokes such vitriol.

There are dozens of news apps on smart TVs these days. Under the covers, it's pretty much the same deal - in go the raw feeds. Editors always do a first pass. Recsys algos do the 2nd pass. Ranking algos come in next. Personalization is usually last. Out comes the news. Viewers then have their say with thumbs up & downvotes. Those get fed back into personalization. On & on it goes...

Its not magic. Its not perfect. But its how pretty much every smart tv news app works under the hood. There's dozens of them. Pick any one of them that works well on your TV for your temperament, I guess. Recsys is just a standard comp science discipline. We have our textbooks, our journals, our papers. We all read the same stuff, pretty much roll the same code with minor frills.

Nobody's out to get you.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#132
post #130
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Social" is not a synonym for "facebook". Github is a collaborative social platform. This still seems pointless and offbrand. There is no contradiction here.

What's collaborative about github's platform? Were these features developed because the users asked for them?

Its source tracker + issue tracker. Literally software designed to solve the problem of how multiple people collaborate writing code.

I think this thread is losing track of what the word "collaborate" means. Its not about emoijis and cat memes

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#133
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>github is not a social website you may not like it, but Github has always been a social website, and now more than ever, just like LinkedIn.

Hopefully in the near future, we'll see them launch "GitHub Dating". I've always wanted to filter my potential partners by their stars and choice of language.

100% needs a checkbox for tabs vs spaces..

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#134
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope. I think that the common complain is not "it isn't showing what I personally want" VS "it isn't showing what people generally want" but rather that the algorithm is often no…

Most of the comments here are incredibly dystopian - automation is bad, rehire the editor you've replaced at 75% of the salary, stop pushing engagement, what brings the company most money, megacorporation pushing slushy mass.... Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys invokes such vitriol. There are dozens of news apps on smart TVs these days. Under the covers, it's pretty much the same deal - in go the raw feeds. Editors al…

I don't have to think someone is "out to get me" to believe that the current state of affairs is deeply broken and that you can't fix it with a better mouse trap.

This is just a really easy way for you to dismiss any criticism and avoid cognitive dissonance over your work. I believe you have good intentions. I also believe that those "dozens of news apps" all burn a whole bunch of watt hours on producing nearly identical results and are largely just facades over a handful of media companies.

And that's not speculation or a conspiracy theory, it's plainly true. Media conglomeration has happened at an incredibly fast pace over the last 40 years and local media has been decimated. No one has to be a cackling evildoer with a fancy mustache and a british accent to make this happen, they just have to keep grinding harder and harder at inventing new ways to 'fix it' with more conglomeration.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m convinced the ai recommendation audience is the origin of the “death of the internet”

It certainly seems like a watershed moment where the primary purpose of our machinery has shifted to serve the machines instead of the people.

the money*

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of those algorithmically selected? If not, then my argument stands. Sure, the one sentence you picked, taken out of context, makes it look like I'm generally against feeds. When you put it in the broad context of my comment though, you can easily see that it's the AI bit that's the problem.

The other sentence in your comment was: > I think the issue is not with it being social in general, but rather with it becoming a similar flavour of social to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm sorry I didn't understand you were using "flavour" to indicate AI, I just thought you were referencing social features in general, it wasn't that clear to me, sorry for that.

Yeah, that's cool. I guess I could have been more precise in my phrasing.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#138
post #85

Nobody asked GitHub to become a social media platform. Why not improve search instead? When I want to find something, I will look for it, and know what I’m looking for. There’s no point in pushing a bunch of random repos in my face with an algorithm that can and will be abused.

For searching, https://grep.app/ is one of my favourite tools.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, if you never looked at any of the social stuff in Github I bet any new recommendation system isn't going to bother you either. Unless they actively undermine their code/repo search functionality to push social stuff, let them do whatever they want for people who actually like browsing GitHub? (Not that I can imagine who actually browses GitHub)

Social stuff on GitHub is weird. I have a couple of old colleagues that fill up most of my feed daily with stars to repos.

I’ve liked how they recently roll these up, like “sixstringtheory starred such-and-such and 5 other repos.”

When they switch from stars to hearts, we’ll know the end is nigh.

Re: Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not have used it as such, but GitHub always aimed to be a social platform and launched as such. Here is their landing page when they first launched: https://web.archive.org/web/20081111061111/http://github.com... Notice how the entire page is making you believe they are building a social coding platform? That's no accident, "Social code hosting" tagline in the logo included.

Their aims from 15 years ago notwithstanding, it is not a social platform, and does not get used for social networking topics. Yes, we know git repos get used by clusters of people. That is not the accepted meaning of "social network." Nobody is posting the news, their kids, or joining film groups on Github.

Social simply means activity that occurs amongst a population of people.

A pull request with the requisite commentary/discussion is absolutely a social phenomenon. Even simply pressing the approve button or the star button is a social act as it is a transaction involving more than one person.

And if you’ve never encountered the toxicity commonly thought of as only belonging to “social networks” in a PR or issue, then lucky you.

Post reply on HN