7 ms·

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

by Khao 11y ago

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.

hobs 11y ago
Reading the first sentence, this is definitely an april fools joke.
- Khao 11y ago
  I genuinely can't tell.
konschubert 11y ago
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.
- Khao 11y ago
  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.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    Some people would not prefer that this information about them is easily publicly available like that, as I mentioned in my other comment about how this has come up in job interviews in a negative way.
    - Khao 11y ago
      If you contribute open source, your contribution will be out in the open. That's the whole point of it. If you remove it from Github, any website will be able to pull the same info and display it since it's all public information.
      - p4wnc6 11y ago
        But few employers will navigate to a site other than your actual GitHub profile. If a third-party scrapes that data from commit logs, the employer has to trust the third party and also do the extra work of going to their site in addition to your provided profile, and that's far less likely. Hosting the stats directly on someone's profile landing page at GitHub is incredibly, hugely different and more problematic than if someone else aggregates it later and hosts it elsewhere.
the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
People care a ton about their streaks and I have noted that before. It encourages people to not have weekends.
- donatj 11y ago
  As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)
  - arien 11y ago
    Or a little cronjob that commits harmless changes later in the week? :P I don't care about the contribution streak, but do have friends who comment on theirs on Twitter now and then. I suppose it's just another thing to be proud of...
    - donatj 11y ago
      There actually are a handful of tools that let you cheat including one that lets you write text onto the chart.
    - kedean 11y ago
      And then what's the point? You aren't proving anything to the world, and they can trivially see that you didn't do any real work. It's like saying "I'm going to write a part of my novel every day from now on", then every day you type one letter. It's very clearly gaming the system, and for absolutely no gain. You gained no skills, you didn't show yourself to be of value, you don't even get an imaginary reward. The intrinsic reward of tracking systems is lost because deep down you know you didn't do anything.
      - arien 10y ago
        Exactly, I do agree with what you said. But, this is true whether you commit a few irrelevant lines manually or automatically. So if you're going to do it just for the sake of showing off, at least make it efficient, no? :P
grantcox 11y ago
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 upper bound on them (for example, no "penalty" for missing days here and there, or stopping counting at some point) makes no difference to people "who don't care about it", but may make a positive difference to those people who care too much about it.
- MBCook 11y ago
  Just because you don't see a problem you assign mental illness in the poster? That seems very harsh.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    I don't see a claim that any particular person cares deeply about the commit graph.
  - grantcox 11y ago
    "Mental illness" and "psychological problems" both have such unfair negative connotations. But yes, if someone is finding the pressure of an activity graph and "breaking a streak" is negatively impacting their work-life balance, I think they likely have a problem. These problems are quite common, hence the great success of free-to-play, extremely-gamified mobile apps. In many of those cases exploiting the most vulnerable users is the entire point, but not so for Github. So for Github to consider how they can maintain the interesting / fun / motivating (or irrelevant) aspect for most of their users, but temper the positive/negative reinforcements that some people may find literally addictive, it seems quite responsible.
    - KirinDave 11y ago
      > But yes, if someone is finding the pressure of an activity graph and "breaking a streak" is negatively impacting their work-life balance, I think they likely have a problem. So your misplaced value judgements, loaded language and dismissals aside... You realize that just because you might not value it, that it isn't being used to value you? Lots of employers use github activity as a signal for hiring. And so making sure you can demonstrate very active participation in the community is often quite important to getting a job. Even then, given that overwork seems to be something of an epidemic in the software industry and the entire industry is famously full of signals suggesting that a 60 hour work week is normal and reasonable (hell, somehow they decided that working on saturdays wasn't enough, now people say you need to work 8.5 hours every day to be "normal" and 11 hours a day is "crush")? The signal and the reward for more work isn't healthy after some point. There is an environment around github that github has to consider.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
wyldfire 11y ago
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 http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00431
emodendroket 11y ago
Why does this site, and Github, and StackOverflow, among others, all feature a points/reputation system? After all, they're all meaningless; you can't go cash them in somewhere. And yet it still affects user behavior.
- hk__2 11y ago
  You can’t cash personal satisfaction; that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. The reputation system feeds you with rewards so you continue.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Yes. I agree.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ronnier 11y ago
I saw people talk about it at Amazon (internally there's the exact same concept as github's contribution graph)
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
> I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak[...]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. Interesting deduction but it's extremely anecdotal and ultimately false. If history has taught us anything it's that people want to control their appearance to others. If there are rockstar developers with a huge contribution graph then people will start to associate that as a pattern to being a rockstar at which point it becomes a goal for people to shoot for. Yes people shouldn't care. But they do. It's simply how the human mind works. While you say you don't care and you probably don't, I wouldn't be surprised if you cared even if it was just a very, very tiny bit even subconsciously. This affects users of all social networks. People even develop eating disorders because they're worried about negative social evaluations[1]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3660512/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3660512/
jcoffland 11y ago
GitHub is totally over thinking this. I barely notice the social networking aspects of GH.
vivekian2 11y ago
But its a real thing - both peer pressure and the pressure of your own expectations. So the post is definitely worth pondering over and not to be discarded. I have reviewed multiple intern resumes in the past year and for sure anyone having a solid contribution graph on github would only have stepped up in the shortlist. So to be dismissive about this issue is just not right.
hinkley 11y ago
There are people out there who judge you on your contribution consistency. Some of those people are involved in the hiring process. In the interview process, we tend to worry about what we telegraph, and we should really spend more time worrying about what the other guy is telegraphing. For some of us it's hard to remember that anybody who thinks committing 7 days a week means you're a better person... isn't someone you want to hang around with anyway. Rejection stings, even though being rejected by someone you objectively can't respect shouldn't hurt that much. We are human. If you prick us we bleed.

by Khao 11y ago

hobs 11y ago

Reading the first sentence, this is definitely an april fools joke.

Khao 11y ago
I genuinely can't tell.

konschubert 11y ago

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.

Khao 11y ago
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.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  Some people would not prefer that this information about them is easily publicly available like that, as I mentioned in my other comment about how this has come up in job interviews in a negative way.
  - Khao 11y ago
    If you contribute open source, your contribution will be out in the open. That's the whole point of it. If you remove it from Github, any website will be able to pull the same info and display it since it's all public information.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      But few employers will navigate to a site other than your actual GitHub profile. If a third-party scrapes that data from commit logs, the employer has to trust the third party and also do the extra work of going to their site in addition to your provided profile, and that's far less likely. Hosting the stats directly on someone's profile landing page at GitHub is incredibly, hugely different and more problematic than if someone else aggregates it later and hosts it elsewhere.

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago

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

donatj 11y ago
As someone who used to care about streaks, it only takes one small commit and it can be a small reword of a readme ;)
- arien 11y ago
  Or a little cronjob that commits harmless changes later in the week? :P I don't care about the contribution streak, but do have friends who comment on theirs on Twitter now and then. I suppose it's just another thing to be proud of...
  - donatj 11y ago
    There actually are a handful of tools that let you cheat including one that lets you write text onto the chart.
  - kedean 11y ago
    And then what's the point? You aren't proving anything to the world, and they can trivially see that you didn't do any real work. It's like saying "I'm going to write a part of my novel every day from now on", then every day you type one letter. It's very clearly gaming the system, and for absolutely no gain. You gained no skills, you didn't show yourself to be of value, you don't even get an imaginary reward. The intrinsic reward of tracking systems is lost because deep down you know you didn't do anything.
    - arien 10y ago
      Exactly, I do agree with what you said. But, this is true whether you commit a few irrelevant lines manually or automatically. So if you're going to do it just for the sake of showing off, at least make it efficient, no? :P

grantcox 11y ago

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 upper bound on them (for example, no "penalty" for missing days here and there, or stopping counting at some point) makes no difference to people "who don't care about it", but may make a positive difference to those people who care too much about it.

MBCook 11y ago
Just because you don't see a problem you assign mental illness in the poster? That seems very harsh.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  I don't see a claim that any particular person cares deeply about the commit graph.
- grantcox 11y ago
  "Mental illness" and "psychological problems" both have such unfair negative connotations. But yes, if someone is finding the pressure of an activity graph and "breaking a streak" is negatively impacting their work-life balance, I think they likely have a problem. These problems are quite common, hence the great success of free-to-play, extremely-gamified mobile apps. In many of those cases exploiting the most vulnerable users is the entire point, but not so for Github. So for Github to consider how they can maintain the interesting / fun / motivating (or irrelevant) aspect for most of their users, but temper the positive/negative reinforcements that some people may find literally addictive, it seems quite responsible.
  - KirinDave 11y ago
    > But yes, if someone is finding the pressure of an activity graph and "breaking a streak" is negatively impacting their work-life balance, I think they likely have a problem. So your misplaced value judgements, loaded language and dismissals aside... You realize that just because you might not value it, that it isn't being used to value you? Lots of employers use github activity as a signal for hiring. And so making sure you can demonstrate very active participation in the community is often quite important to getting a job. Even then, given that overwork seems to be something of an epidemic in the software industry and the entire industry is famously full of signals suggesting that a 60 hour work week is normal and reasonable (hell, somehow they decided that working on saturdays wasn't enough, now people say you need to work 8.5 hours every day to be "normal" and 11 hours a day is "crush")? The signal and the reward for more work isn't healthy after some point. There is an environment around github that github has to consider.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

wyldfire 11y ago

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 http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.00431

emodendroket 11y ago

Why does this site, and Github, and StackOverflow, among others, all feature a points/reputation system? After all, they're all meaningless; you can't go cash them in somewhere. And yet it still affects user behavior.

hk__2 11y ago
You can’t cash personal satisfaction; that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. The reputation system feeds you with rewards so you continue.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Yes. I agree.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

ronnier 11y ago

I saw people talk about it at Amazon (internally there's the exact same concept as github's contribution graph)

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

> I've never seen anyone who gave a fuck about their contribution graph and record streak[...]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. Interesting deduction but it's extremely anecdotal and ultimately false. If history has taught us anything it's that people want to control their appearance to others. If there are rockstar developers with a huge contribution graph then people will start to associate that as a pattern to being a rockstar at which point it becomes a goal for people to shoot for. Yes people shouldn't care. But they do. It's simply how the human mind works. While you say you don't care and you probably don't, I wouldn't be surprised if you cared even if it was just a very, very tiny bit even subconsciously. This affects users of all social networks. People even develop eating disorders because they're worried about negative social evaluations[1]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3660512/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3660512/

jcoffland 11y ago

GitHub is totally over thinking this. I barely notice the social networking aspects of GH.

vivekian2 11y ago

But its a real thing - both peer pressure and the pressure of your own expectations. So the post is definitely worth pondering over and not to be discarded. I have reviewed multiple intern resumes in the past year and for sure anyone having a solid contribution graph on github would only have stepped up in the shortlist. So to be dismissive about this issue is just not right.

hinkley 11y ago

There are people out there who judge you on your contribution consistency. Some of those people are involved in the hiring process. In the interview process, we tend to worry about what we telegraph, and we should really spend more time worrying about what the other guy is telegraphing. For some of us it's hard to remember that anybody who thinks committing 7 days a week means you're a better person... isn't someone you want to hang around with anyway. Rejection stings, even though being rejected by someone you objectively can't respect shouldn't hurt that much. We are human. If you prick us we bleed.