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New GitHub Profile Badges Beta

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Re: New GitHub Profile Badges Beta

#73
post #21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, GitHub's original slogan was "Social Coding".

True, but why do people think they need validation to collaborate?

I was really desperate to contribute to an open-source project in high school, specifically an iOS or frontend web one, and it was hard to find projects that I could make a substantial contribution to. Many with `good first issue` tags were not very active, and the ones that were active were hard to get my foot in the door.

I was able to do a variety of "good first" things: readme updates, typo fixes, adding small features -- but it was hard to feel really _validated_ that my work was valuable, or that contributing to open-source was an impressive thing to do, because I (felt like I was) was surrounded by engineers, and nobody ever told me that OSS was "cool", until I met a company 3 years into college who valued OSS (more than just "wow, great job, you fixed a typo!")

Re: New GitHub Profile Badges Beta

#74

This is not stupid. It's not a waste of time. It doesn't matter if this leads to a proliferation of shit contributions. It doesn't matter if it encourages bad practices. It doesn't matter if you don't like it. It's smart. This is WHY Microsoft bought Github. Software is eating the world and Github is where most of the eating happens. There are many career paths that require you to live on Twitter or LinkedIn or whate…

I'm quite conflicted with this; while I agree that it's a smart move in terms of forcing user engagement, I think it sucks that Github is and seemingly will continue to be THE Git platform. I'd argue that other platforms such as Gitlab and even Azure DevOps provide a better overall experience, especially when it comes to CI/CD, so it's a little sad that the battle for users seems to be going into the 'social features' territory rather than improved user experience.

Re: New GitHub Profile Badges Beta

#76
post #36

This is a really dumb feature. Out of everything you could add to GitHub, why spend time on this?

It's fun. You remember fun, right?

Just because HN is a fun free zone, some evidently believe the rest of the world has to be also. The only way I can understand some of the reactions in this thread is that many are holding a belief the only reason to use Github is your anonymous desk job. Like the question of does the "YOLO" achievement apply to your automated CI pipeline is itself giving away private information by implication.

I'm over here with 80% of my commit history just being recipe markdown.

Re: New GitHub Profile Badges Beta

#77
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but why do people think they need validation to collaborate?

Here's my hot take. I work for a small company, I'm the solo programmer. Our company's code is important, so it's all private. I work full-time and it is stressful enough, and don't have interest in working longer. Because I'm solo, I don't need Pull Requests for my own work, among other things that a team needs. Under this system, I get no badges. I appear as though I have nothing to show. Even though I have arguabl…

Isn’t this true on a private repo, or any non GitHub repo, solo or not? It’s been this way for a long time; if you cared about showcasing your contributions you would work on public projects, blog, or make a bunch of noise in some other way.

Re: New GitHub Profile Badges Beta

#78

I know this is supposed to be fun, but I’m also mixed on it as so much of my work is in private repositories. This means that these badges are like “privacy leaks” from my closed source work to my public GitHub profile. I suspect this is why this discussion is getting so negative as GitHub is not a social fun place for us anymore, it’s the place we work everyday with coworkers and managers. So in general please GitHu…

It sounds like these badges will only come from public commits, and you can also turn them off. So I don't think your concern is warranted.

Re: New GitHub Profile Badges Beta

#79

Can we please stop turning everything into a social media experience? Why the constant need for personal validation / ego gratification? It seems like almost every tool or platform these days needs a friends feature, bragging badges or other form of social validation.

>social media experience

*videogames

And the term for introducing in non-game areas game elements such as achievements is gamification.

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