51–60 of 113 posts
This is a fun project, however, what values can it provide besides fancy "social coding"? There are tons of information with github, and how to dig out the values behind sounds more meaningful to me.
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…
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.
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…
What do you think happens after GitHub earns a reputation for alienating OSS project leaders by incentivizing low-quality contributions?
This is yet another short-sighted and stupid decision towards making GitHub into the next SourceForge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Precisely. LinkedIn doesn't specialize in software, it's a glorified résumé database. We all know that résumés don't really tell you whether an engineer is going to do good work for you; if they did, the only purpose of engineering interviews would be for culture fit. At the same time, even if all of an engineer's contributions were fully in the open and linked to from their GitHub profile, it's all a bit too much fo…
I think you are riding a horse that is driven by a cart :D. Rather than looking at github from the perspective of hiring managers, look at it from the perspective of users. If the feature does not seem to serve them, it might not be a good one. If github is a tool, then the words hiring manager probably shouldn't appear. I don't think of "what will my product person think?" when I use grep. Also, didn't we do this wh…
It sounds like your perspective is that users don't get any value out of social media?
Why do people post photos to Instagram? Why post updates to Facebook?
You can take photos for your own benefit (like writing code for some non-GitHub-related benefit, e.g. work) and also share them on social media for your own gratification. You can live life for the fun of it and also share it on social media for your own gratification. (leave aside that social media is net-toxic, it's still worth it to understand the motivations of those who engage with social media).
Don't want to engage with the social media aspects of GitHub that they're adding (because social media is net-toxic)? Fine. Disable the achievements. They (smartly) built in that disable switch. But don't presume that there isn't a large portion of GitHub's userbase that won't get value out of this.