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The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

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Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#61

Post by dinkumthinkum »

cletus wrote: post #29

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 i…

Thank you for saying it. I like Github. It's fine. Is it the new resume? No but it makes feel better to say, especially if we are under 22. As much as I like Github, I feel all these groupthink and just mutual masturbation about it makes me tend to want to not like it. This whole attitude just makes me feel like this industry is like lemmings in a way that no other one is. But maybe there is hope yet, maybe after four or five more years of this we may see the light and stop over hyping anything remotely social.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#62

Post by dinkumthinkum »

mistercow wrote: post #23
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.

Oh that's just ridiculous. I mean there's a point of "jumping the shark" here even though I hate that phrase. I mean come on, it's not that great. It's arguable that this whole attitude about Github is massively pretentious and overblown. I don't think we can compare Github to the development of agriculture, pasteurization, classical mechanics, etc.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#63

Post by dinkumthinkum »

samstave wrote: post #56
mistercow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You're comparing github to the Haber-Bosch process??! While I think that is ridiculous, your claim appears to imply that even though my mom is not aware of github, its existance is as important that a major part of our civilization's sustainability relies on it? No, thats just plain stupid. Anyway - my original comment was that github is only valuable as "the most important social network" to a very narrow portion of…

The funny part about this is that most software that the generally public deals with regularly is not on Github anyway and even the ones that are existed just fine for many years before Github so it's not as if there is some contingenct on Github or something.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#64

Post by eevilspock »

readme wrote: post #37
eevilspock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever. Just rhetorical exaggeration, right? But just in case you're that naive: IBM, Microsoft, Windows, Google. The Roman Empire, the British Empire. Need we go on? I give Facebook ten years max. It may already be near its peak.

IBM, Microsoft, and Google -- None of them have been overthrown. The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years. Facebook will be around long after you and I are dead. It's not another myspace or friendster. It's a firmly ingrained institution that people probably value more than their wallet at any given time.

"Overthrown" does not mean "disappear", it means "no longer king."

IBM was once the king of computing. It was overthrown by Microsoft. Microsoft was then king, but it is no longer, though those living in the past will point to its continue dominance of the PC, a dominance that is both declining and becoming more irrelevant. Google was crowned the king of the web, with users spending most of their time on google.com, but now they spend far more time on Facebook.

> The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

We're talking technology, not geopolitical power. The former operates on a vastly accelerated time scale, aka "Internet time". I recommend you read the Innovator's Dilemma, or at least the cliff notes on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation. There's a nice list of things many of which weren't expected to be overthrown so quickly.

I'm wondering if you might actually be a celeb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#65

Post by mistercow »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #62
mistercow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Oh that's just ridiculous. I mean there's a point of "jumping the shark" here even though I hate that phrase. I mean come on, it's not that great. It's arguable that this whole attitude about Github is massively pretentious and overblown. I don't think we can compare Github to the development of agriculture, pasteurization, classical mechanics, etc.

I didn't compare github to any of those things. I simply pointed out that "X doesn't even know about Y" is not equivalent to "Y isn't important to X".

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#66

Post by mistercow »

samstave wrote: post #56
mistercow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You're comparing github to the Haber-Bosch process??! While I think that is ridiculous, your claim appears to imply that even though my mom is not aware of github, its existance is as important that a major part of our civilization's sustainability relies on it? No, thats just plain stupid. Anyway - my original comment was that github is only valuable as "the most important social network" to a very narrow portion of…

>You're comparing github to the Haber-Bosch process??!

No, don't be dense. The point of the analogy is that something's importance to a person is independent of that person's knowledge of that thing.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#67

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

cgrubb wrote: post #59
cletus wrote: post #29

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 i…

Agreed. Long ago I remember trying to get a non-developer to use cvs, which is much less complicated than git. It's not for everybody.

Which is too bad, I imagine that some version control even in it's simplest form could be good for everybody. At least I know a couple of non-tech types that could use it.

But you're right, it's very complicated.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#68

Post by conradfr »

readme wrote: post #37
eevilspock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever. Just rhetorical exaggeration, right? But just in case you're that naive: IBM, Microsoft, Windows, Google. The Roman Empire, the British Empire. Need we go on? I give Facebook ten years max. It may already be near its peak.

IBM, Microsoft, and Google -- None of them have been overthrown. The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years. Facebook will be around long after you and I are dead. It's not another myspace or friendster. It's a firmly ingrained institution that people probably value more than their wallet at any given time.

You can say that a website that most people on it use for less than five years will outlive us ?

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#69

Post by philwelch »

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…

100 people creating value >> 1 billion people wasting time.

Re: The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

#70

Post by SethMurphy »

I think the term "social" is being overused here in the context of a startup, and was probably stuck in the tagline like many buzzwords, with an eye on marketing. The whole internet is social to a point. I think the term collaborative is more apt. The words that tended to jump out to me in the article were collaborative and commentary. He says "GitHub puts the social exchange at the very center", and I disagree. At the center with my view I see a strong tool to manage code that enables great collaboration. When you see a getting started tutorial with Github, the communication aspects are rarely mentioned. In the few projects I have seen getting popular there are usually external forces at work (i.e. Hacker News, Blogs, Large Corporate Support). It may be nice if Github was better at marketing your project. I suspect they may have to be better at it now and the product will undergo many changes in the coming year. That substantial portion of that 100m will likely all go to marketing efforts, not more engineers, which I think is a good thing.
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