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The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

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Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#2
What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?".

Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume must be business purposes.

This must be hyperbole. That would make sense.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#4
post #2

What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?". Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume…

Guess you should write your own blog post. :-)

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#5
post #2

What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?". Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume…

I think his point is that Github is about actual work artifacts, while all other business networks are basically talk about a more or less specific topic - more flexible, but also less focused.

Github is much closer to the topic at hand. There is almost no way around attaching comments to a piece of code.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#6
post #2

What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?". Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume…

He uses a metric for importance other than just size.

That said, his points that there were 600000 software developers in the US 10 years ago and more than a million GitHub members now, SO there must be significant developer mindshare seems nonsensical unless maybe if you assume GitHub is completely dominated by Americans, which anecdotally doesn't seem the case to me (I spent a few minutes looking for a breakdown of users by country, but didn't see any).

Also, confirmation bias.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#7
post #6
post #2

What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?". Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume…

He uses a metric for importance other than just size. That said, his points that there were 600000 software developers in the US 10 years ago and more than a million GitHub members now, SO there must be significant developer mindshare seems nonsensical unless maybe if you assume GitHub is completely dominated by Americans, which anecdotally doesn't seem the case to me (I spent a few minutes looking for a breakdown of…

For sure about the confirmation bias, but I would propose that the post is meant to encourage scholars to come up with their own falsifiables and prove it one way or another.

The 600,000 vs 1,000,000 means: A lot of Americans, and the excess are people who are not from the USA or have multiple accounts. But the main point is that in gross numbers many of those 600,000 have accounts.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#8
If you were a designer, you would claim Dribbble instead of Github.

Either way, you would be delusional. Social is just a useful paradigm on the web. More and more products would use it as default. Just like every site now has a search box. Github also has a search box. It is not the most important search engine.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#9
I don't really agree with the claim, but I'd love to see Github enter other areas of science like Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. Not just programming and computer science. That would be great, Github could work as a center of science all around the world.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#10
post #4
post #2

What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?". Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume…

Guess you should write your own blog post. :-)

"The Most Important Social Network: Real Life"
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