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GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

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Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#21

Post by Khao »

konschubert wrote: post #8
Khao wrote: post #2

Is this an April Fools joke? I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak, except for devs who developped clever git repos that make your contribution graph show pixel art (which is pretty awesome). I want to say if you feel pressure when looking at your contribution graph, it's all in your head and you should take a break because you're clearly not thinking straight.

If you are right and nobody cares about it, that's a good reason to remove it. If you are wrong and people care about it, maybe the poster has a point. Nevertheless, I think there is a point in having a coarse activity indicator in order to assess how likely somebody is going to respond to issues or pull requests.

I don't care about my own contribution graph, but I still find the feature useful when looking at other profiles. It's informative and it even looks nice. I do 95% of my work on Github in private repos at work, and 5% on open source projects, so my contribution graph is pretty abysmal. I don't mind, because it's what I actually do. It represents me in a fair way. It lets others looking at my profile know "hey, this dude does some open source" and I'm fine with that. When looking at other profiles, I'll know if this person is full-time open source or only does some contributions on the side infrequently, or it's an inactive profile. It serves a purpose right now.

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#22

Post by [deleted] »

Khao wrote: post #2

Is this an April Fools joke? I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak, except for devs who developped clever git repos that make your contribution graph show pixel art (which is pretty awesome). I want to say if you feel pressure when looking at your contribution graph, it's all in your head and you should take a break because you're clearly not thinking straight.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#23

Post by vdnkh »

donatj wrote: post #15
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People care a ton about their streaks and I have noted that before. It encourages people to not have weekends.

As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)

I used to hold a mental backlog of easy commits to keep my streaks going when I was too busy to do real work

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#24

Post by wyldfire »

Khao wrote: post #2

Is this an April Fools joke? I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak, except for devs who developped clever git repos that make your contribution graph show pixel art (which is pretty awesome). I want to say if you feel pressure when looking at your contribution graph, it's all in your head and you should take a break because you're clearly not thinking straight.

I did think it was an April Fools joke at first. (Oh, how we've all been trained).

But I got to thinking about the recent paper that was done analyzing contributions to repos on github [1] and thought that of that actual 10% of active users, there might be some with unhealthy tendencies.

I don't think that the contribution graph should be removed but I can see how it would be a net-negative to someone with those unhealthy tendencies.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00431

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#29

Post by MBCook »

grantcox wrote: post #12
Khao wrote: post #2

Is this an April Fools joke? I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak, except for devs who developped clever git repos that make your contribution graph show pixel art (which is pretty awesome). I want to say if you feel pressure when looking at your contribution graph, it's all in your head and you should take a break because you're clearly not thinking straight.

I agree that it's a largely irrelevant / frivolous feature, and if someone cares deeply about it, it's likely a sign of some deeper psychological issue. But deeper psychological issues are real, and gamification definitely pushes a certain agenda. When that agenda (in this case "streaks" and "commits per day") isn't really serving a community, it would be sensible for the community to tweak those rules. Putting some…

Just because you don't see a problem you assign mental illness in the poster?

That seems very harsh.

Re: GitHub contribution graph can be harmful to contributors

#30

Post by newjersey »

vdnkh wrote: post #23
donatj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)

I used to hold a mental backlog of easy commits to keep my streaks going when I was too busy to do real work

I just gave up and decided to make myself a rockstar with a couple of lines in the command line using /avinassh/rockstar. :)

the way I see it, it validates that I am capable of following simple directions and running a python script :3 that's got to be a valuable asset in an employee, right?

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