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The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

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Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#21

Post by Newky »

tuke wrote: post #18
munchor wrote: post #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.

Obviously with $100M cash, big things will be coming for GitHub. It is hard to imagine that they haven't thought about other collaborative communities.

Will big things be coming? I hope they use that money to grow on the core things they are good at rather than try to capture markets which don't need capturing.

They have a unique position in that almost 100% of its users can only say good things about it (bar maybe Torvalds).

I want small things from Github, glorious small things.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#22

Post by BasDirks »

"Facebook! Twitter! LinkedIn! VK! Renren! These are among the most famous and largest social networking platforms in the world. But are they important? Of course they are. They’ve changed the way humans interact. But let me challenge you and ask: Have they changed the way we work and think? I do think they have, to some extent."

"To some extent" is comically naive. These platforms have played a considerable part in the youth of internet/earth.

Perhaps the author suggests that github is part of the next phase, which is more credible.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#23

Post by mistercow »

samstave wrote: post #20

The most important social network: GitHub ... (as long as you're a developer) Clearly my mom has no reason to know github even exists.

>Clearly my mom has no reason to know github even exists.

Your mom probably also has no reason to know that the Haber—Bosch Process exists, but it's still one of the most important scientific developments of last few centuries, even to her.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#25

Post by jmduke »

DivisibleByZero wrote: post #16

Reading this post I get a nice feeling of joy for belonging to the software community. Being so entrenched in the software world it becomes easy to gloss over these details. The outside perspective of this article really shines a light on how well the software community collaborates and shares. I can't think of a single community that even comes close to the level of collaboration we have in software.

Honestly, I had the opposite response. I think the claim that Github is the most important social network is willfully ignorant of the role Facebook/Twitter plays in every industry beyond software development -- or, more accurately, the role Github doesn't play.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#26

Post by paulsutter »

aggronn wrote: 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 the central point of the story is that github is more like a social network than many of us realize. It's interesting, and could indicate some useful future direction for the service.

if the story were titled "Github - a major social network" or "Github - more of a social network than you may think", would that change your opinion of the story?

It's surprising to me how much of the criticism here on hacker news ignores the central point of the article, and instead focuses in on individual phrases or semantics.

I agree with you that they could have chosen a better title. But I found the article interesting and thought provoking.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#27

Post by eevilspock »

aggronn wrote: 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…

Because the thing that overthrows Facebook could very well be collaboratively created on GitHub. The conflict between Facebook's business interests and its user's interests is the biggest painpoint and thus most ripe for disruption.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#28

Post by Raphael_Amiard »

eevilspock wrote: post #27
aggronn wrote: 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…

Because the thing that overthrows Facebook could very well be collaboratively created on GitHub. The conflict between Facebook's business interests and its user's interests is the biggest painpoint and thus most ripe for disruption.

> Note also that Linux powers Facebook, Google and much of the rest of the web, and Linux itself relies on GitHub for collaborative developement.

Now that is not even hyperbole, but just plain incorrect. Linux does have an official git mirror on github. None of the development of Linux is done via GitHub.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#29

Post by cletus »

To paraphrase Leonard Nimoy from the Simpsons [1]:

The following article is true and by "true" I mean "false". It's all lies but they're entertaining lies and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is "no".

We geeks seem to often be susceptible to hype and hyperbole. Someone is really in love with Github and thinks it's the greatest thing ever and it's going to change the world. It's easy to get caught up in your own excitement. I get it. That's fine.

But I have to admit to having some Github fatigue. We've gone through a spate in the last year of "Github is the new resume", "Github will change engineer recruiting" and now "Github is the most important social network ever".

In many cases I don't believe the author is being deliberately "linkbaity" but that's ultimately what it is.

Part of the problem too is that you get a certain about of "bubble thinking" in tech circles. You see this when VCs get excited about Quora thinking it's going to be the Next Big Thing [tm] because "everyone" is using it (meaning "lots of other people in the Valley"). That's what I mean by "bubble".

I play boardgames a lot and it's much like "groupthink" there (an isolated group of players will evolve a play style and view on strategy very different from other such groups).

In all of the above cases the cure is just to get out of the bubble and expose yourself to different influences and views because the end of the road for this kind of thinking is simply stagnation and becoming out of touch.

Github is great. Their engineers are great. Source control is important. Some will be able to use it to demonstrate their work ([2] really resonates with me). All of this is true but let's not go overboard.

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701263/quotes?qt=qt0332688

[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244420

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#30

Post by readme »

eevilspock wrote: post #27
aggronn wrote: 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…

Because the thing that overthrows Facebook could very well be collaboratively created on GitHub. The conflict between Facebook's business interests and its user's interests is the biggest painpoint and thus most ripe for disruption.

I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever. It's planted very firmly. Backed by mega corps and huge international banks.

Facebook is down right scary in the way it has permeated the life of almost every person on the globe. It's monolithic and we have little insight into what they will actually do with all of our data. A little government + facebook cooperation and we'll really be a dystopia.

With that said, I don't use Facebook and hope some more people wake up and smell the coffee too. We need a decentralized network, as that is the only way to avoid corruption.

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