33 ms·

GitHub isn't fun anymore

• duxup 6y ago
  For me stars on GitHub were me sort of bookmarking things I didn't use and.... probably wouldn't look at ever again? Thus I always felt a little weird about the hype around the number of stars.
  • kstenerud 6y ago
    For me, stars are a rough measure of traction. If I can get a project above 1000 or so, my project begins to take on a life of its own, and I can concentrate less on marketing and awareness.
    • hobofan 6y ago
      I would say that stars are mostly a measure of interest/coolness. The difference to actual people using it can be absurd. The biggest project I maintained had 5k+ stars (which it got by landing on the HN frontpage a few times), but the actual amount of people that tried to use it is in the 10-20 range. On the flipside one of my other projects has a lot more users than it has stars. With all that, stars have basically lost all meaning to me if I'm looking at it as a project outsider, and only have limited meaning as a maintainer.
• cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  >I’d also be interested to see more social network-like features on GitHub.I wouldn’t be opposed to a GitHub NewsFeed This would genuinely make me migrate off github permanently, both for personal projects and work. >project chat IRC/Slack/Discord already exist >or even DMs A new avenue for recruiter spam? No thank you.
  • lwheelock 6y ago
    > This would genuinely make me migrate off github permanently, both for personal projects and work. A-men.
    • caymanjim 6y ago
      I recently set up a LinkedIn profile after avoiding them for many years, and was horrified to discover that there's now a "Facebook wall" feature, replete with all the horrible political conversations that made me abandon Facebook. It's totally in-your-face, too; it's the default home page and the default Android app page. I don't want to see what people I've connected on LinkedIn have to say about, well, anything. I only maintain social connections there to help me network with potential employers. I'm deleting my LinkedIn profile as soon as I connect with my next employer.
      • cmdshiftf4 6y ago
        Unless recruiting or sales is part of your job, the best approach to LinkedIn is to set your profile up well, connect with the people you know and then go to Settings & Privacy -> Communications and switch on email notifications for direct messages you receive. Then you'll only ever have to login should you get an email about a message you might be interested in replying to. There is absolutely nothing of value on LinkedIn for the average person beyond being a place to host your resume for discovery.
        • olcor 6y ago
          You don’t even need to log in for replying to messages. IIRC you can just reply to the email and that would get relayed.
      • fuckyah 6y ago
        f it
      • Animats 6y ago
        Did not know that. Glad I dumped LinkedIn two years ago.
      • rileyt 6y ago
        I wanted an online resume and refused to sign up for LinkedIn, so I built https://standardresume.co https://standardresume.co. It's free to use the web version and can automatically import the data from your LinkedIn profile. I'm curious to hear your thoughts if you have a few minutes to check it out.
  • save_ferris 6y ago
    Agreed. HN and reddit are way better at helping me find repos that are relevant to my skill set and interest. It’s like the author doesn’t even try to utilize these other social spaces that have already largely solved this problem. Sometimes I come across people whose idea of a perfect world is an app that knows exactly what to show them and when without any curiosity or effort, and it blows my mind. That is my hell.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      I've spent a few hours on Github trying to find projects. The explore feature is absolutely useless.
    • pydry 6y ago
      I find HN and Reddit largely useless for finding new and interesting code. The Reddit python subreddit is truly awful - it's just beginners sharing their first projects. Whereas HN is largely biased to what's extremely popular and/or "cool".
      • save_ferris 6y ago
        Have you tried r/coolgithubprojects? There are a ton of great projects in that sub and you can filter by language, and they’re not all trendy.
        • pydry 6y ago
          I have. I like it but it's a shame it's not a bit more active.
  • smichel17 6y ago
    > > project chat > IRC/Slack/Discord already exist Or even closer: gitter! Or just set up an irc/matrix room for your project.
    • RMPR 6y ago
      > Or even closer: gitter! I don't like their (electron) desktop app, I always end up using the IRC bridge if any
  • asicsp 6y ago
    >IRC/Slack/Discord already exist There's a discussion feature on beta (see https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/discussions https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/discussions for example) I'd definitely like this to become public soon
    • johnisgood 6y ago
      This would make GitHub Issues a bit more clean for sure. Lots of people use it for asking questions/for help instead of reporting actual issues/bugs.
      • darkwater 6y ago
        As somebody who is guilty of this, my rationale is this: I went to slack/discord/IRC channels, asked for help and... almost no answer. Ask the same question in a comment of a popular issue or a new issue, and you get your answer (with some delay). The thing is that GH issues have replaces mailing lists/usenet for this kind of questions since the friction is way lower, it's async and the question goes to the right people.
        • RMPR 6y ago
          >The thing is that GH issues have replaces mailing lists/usenet for this kind of questions Laughing in LKML
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  I am happy with GitHub just being a repository for code. For cool project discovery I generally use HN or reddit. My stars mostly acts as bookmarks for projects I found interesting at some time in the past. I want a reliable, boring GitHub. I will look somewhere else for fun.
  • kyriakos 6y ago
    /r/coolgithubprojects has some interesting links
• atonse 6y ago
  I don't think I've ever used the trending page in my 12 years of using GitHub.
  • Aperocky 6y ago
    It's the first time I heard of it.
  • tvalentius 6y ago
    Same, it's my first time of hearing this feature/product
  • huhtenberg 6y ago
    Apparently that's where all the fun was. Live and learn.
  • globular-toast 6y ago
    I've also used Github for 12 years and only recently started to use it. I've discovered a lot of really cool stuff! It's worth it. (Not sure if I ever used it before the algorithm change, though).
• krisjointz 6y ago
  its alright
• bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  Probably it's because of not actually caring that much for things that are fun anyway, but why would I want my version control system to be fun? Does this guy complain that his hammer fails to entertain him when pounding nails?
  • ivanhoe 6y ago
    Well, if we're going with tool analogies, you probably would complain if your tool box is such that you have no idea what tools are crammed inside. Github has grown huge and it's getting increasingly hard to keep track of repos. You see something useful, but in a few months when you need it you just can't find it anymore. Stars are completely useless way of bookmarking interesting code once you star more than a few dozens repos.
    • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      yeah, although bookmarking urls with tags in whatever bookmarking tool you're using is pretty good, or forking a repository that you're interested in. I suppose if I had an aversion to doing either of those things I would be upset at GitHub for not giving me a better way to keep track of things. But I have no such aversion.
  • fredoliveira 6y ago
    > my version control system You're very clearly confusing the version control system git with the platform for code collaboration github. The first doesn't have to be fun (and I'd argue shouldn't be fun). The latter, however, can be (maybe even should be). OP can see fun in exploring new technologies, new solutions to problems, new libraries to use - and who are we to judge that? The trending page was an interesting way to see what was cropping up around the platform. I didn't check it often, but I did check it from time to time.
    • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      >You're very clearly confusing the version control system git with the platform for code collaboration github. sorry for expressing myself badly, but I do realize they are different things as I use bitbucket and gitlab as well. that said I use them all as dumb, quick views for the current state of the project, with a couple of on/off switches to automate common tasks in a git project. I would like to keep my informational panels as low distraction as possible, and fun, at least as it is stereotyped in popular culture through the ages, tends to be distracting.
• jdsully 6y ago
  A major reason open source projects use GitHub is the social network features. It really helps you build traction and get noticed. Regardless of what you may think of it the trending page does indeed drive further traffic which drives adoption. Otherwise we'd all still be on SourceForge or migrate to something more OSS pure like Gitlab.
  • ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I don't use it for discovery though: It's just easy to jump in and contribute or open an issue when it's a common platform I am already logged into. There's low friction to jumping in. That doesn't mean I necessarily need social media features.
  • young_unixer 6y ago
    We don't all migrate to gitlab mainly because Github's UI is better and because of network effects. Nothing to do with social features.
    • jdsully 6y ago
      The network effects come from the social features. That was the main innovation over source forge (aside from git support itself).
    • clenneville 6y ago
      Thanks for your feedback on GitLab's UI. We're always working to make it better, so if you have specific feedback, please do share.
• michaelterryio 6y ago
  I used to use the elixir trending page to learn about new popular elixir libraries. It had twice as many repos as it has now. Now it’s garbage. I complained to GitHub when it happened. It’s purely worse.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    I’ve always looked to $LANG community specific websites for suggestions on new and exciting libraries for $LANG. Such federated discovery is much better positioned to handle the needs and quirks for each community.
• alessivs 6y ago
  > (re: project discovery) We went from a flawed meritocracy to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles. This works well in two senses: 1. We went from a flawed meritocracy (GitHub) to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles (Twitter). 2. GitHub went from a flawed meritocracy to a social network that promotes chaos, tribalism, and idea bubbles (CoCs, them-vs-us narratives, a priori victimization, non-universal notions of "inclusiveness", "master branches").
  • vore 6y ago
    How can something a meritocracy if it's flawed? Either you can actually assess something on its merits or you can't, and if you can't, then you can't really call it a meritocracy, can you?
    • sanxiyn 6y ago
      Correlation is not zero or one, it is continuous. Correlation between metric and merit measures how flawed the meritocracy is.
• irjustin 6y ago
  The OP is hitting at a long lived really difficult problem especially for a place like GitHub - how do you display what people care about? - recommendation engine Most stars in 24 hours? That gets the same group of 0.1% consistently at the top leading to a stale page. So Github tried to improve its 'signaling' of what's interesting yet new so you can keep coming back to the trending page? Is it stars the overall account crossed w/ new? Number of issues opened in 24 hours? Forks?
  • randomdude402 6y ago
    Is this especially a problem for GitHub, though? I had never suspected that people would use the site in this way.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    You’re assuming that Github needs to provide a means for recommendations like a typical social network when I doubt it does. I return to github repeatedly to interact with repos I’ve already found based on professional need. I neither want Github to recommend content to me, nor do I need it to; I regularly use services outside of GitHub to find content on it that’s relevant to my needs. Github is a tool, not a social network. I don’t want them to maximize for “engagement”; I want them to fill my professional requirements and charge me a fee for their services.
• root_axis 6y ago
  Hard pass on the suggestion to add more social network features. Such features are only conducive to drama and anxiety, we need less of that not more.
  • randomdude402 6y ago
    I regret only that I have but one upvote to give.
    • marcus_holmes 6y ago
      I had a spare, you can have mine
  • njn 6y ago
    you don't like github drama? (https://github.com/nikolas/github-drama https://github.com/nikolas/github-drama)
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      They never implied there was no drama, only that they didn’t want any more.
      • njn 6y ago
        I live for drama.
  • ybbond 6y ago
    maybe we can just wait until they decided to provide both suggested timeline and linear timeline, like twitter.
    • hirsin 6y ago
      I hate to say that I actually like that idea. I'm swamped in random notifications for weird parts of the repo I don't care about. I'd really like a "high # of comments and reactions/loc changes" feed.
• 0xy 6y ago
  LinkedIn features on Github? Sounds awful. Imagine having to dodge Microsoft's typical dodgy dark patterns to access repositories. LinkedIn is one of the worst social networks, and employs dark patterns that not even Facebook has adopted.
  • durnygbur 6y ago
    I think it's a matter of time as both are owned by MS. Long term the middle management and profits simply prevail in large corporate decision chains. It just make sense for them to integrate GitHub with LinkedIn somehow.
• nikivi 6y ago
  One thing I'd love to see is a flag in GitHub so the news feed won't be filled with repos that I have already starred (so you only get to see new things). This is especially useful as I have starred over 13,000 repos so most repos I will see are starred already. https://github.com/nikitavoloboev?tab=stars https://github.com/nikitavoloboev?tab=stars And before anyone asks 'why star so many repos..', I do it for super fast access of repos I am fond of with https://github.com/lox/alfred-github-jump https://github.com/lox/alfred-github-jump Plus you can sort them nicely into categories later. (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/github-stars https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/github-stars)
• Androider 6y ago
  Huh, TIL that GitHub has a trending page. I have a few projects with a few thousand stars, but have literally never seen this thing. The choices on the trending page do seem weird, and kind of useless.
  • tcbasche 6y ago
    I remember seeing all the spammy garbage during Hacktoberfest, but apart from that it's a pretty random selection of repositories
• ShorsHammer 6y ago
  Have barely looked at explore that often, generally has little that interests me despite being fairly accurate with topics. Following a range of people and checking the main feed from github.com now and then has always worked fine. Apart from some coworkers and collaborators the vast majority is people I've never interacted with, some are wellknown, many are simply folks I've come across over the years in certain fields of interest and seem active on GH. There's a constant stream of interesting repos being worked on or starred with no real social aspect to it. As a discovery mechanism I enjoy the simplicity of it.
• keyle 6y ago
  I'm not sure I can link the title to the body of this post. What does the trending section have to do with taking the "fun" out of maintaining code?
• young_unixer 6y ago
  Does anyone other than the author use these features? I didn't even know they existed. To me, and I'd guess to most people, Github is just a place to host git repositories, nothing else.
• carapace 6y ago
  > I always thought of it as the defacto front page of the open source movement. It's a proprietary site!
• tcbasche 6y ago
  cripes. It's a code repository, it doesn't have to be fun. The reasoning in this blog post is why the web is full of anxiety-inducing anxiety
• jonny383 6y ago
  GitHub has slowly phased away from being a website about the code, to being a website about people. Yes, people are an aspect of the code, however the site is no longer focusing solely on collaboration tools for working with code. Author is correct, the "trending" now rendered on GitHub is a joke. But what is worse is the "Explore" screen they put in. All I get given is a bunch of useless crap in a column that is 580 pixels wide. Half of the projects that appear in here are in chinese so I can't understand anything about them except the project title. The entire UX of this screen feels like a social network. Bonus points: Another, stupid, pointless feature they added a while back: "[emoji] Set status".
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  Was github ever fun? It’s a tool, not a toy. I don’t expect my IDE to be fun either, I expect it to accomplish a task for me.
  • nikivi 6y ago
    Why do something especially do something for majority of your life and not make it fun?
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      I enjoy what I do, I just don’t expect my tools to entertain me. One can enjoy carpentry without expecting their hammer to be “fun”. I would strenuously resist any attempt to make any of my tools more fun at the cost of any ounce of productivity. These tools exist to serve the narrow needs of professionals, focusing on anything other than utility for the core group is counter productive.
  • dbuder 6y ago
    Programming should be fun, not a miserable trench warfare slug for inches.
• TedShiller 6y ago
  Well, Microsoft has never made any acquisition look good. It's not something they're known for.
  • MH15 6y ago
    The trending/discover algorithm changed before Microsoft iirc.
• romaniitedomum 6y ago
  Every day now I see one, a comment, a blog post, something that reminds me of the words of Charles Babbage: > I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Babbage was talking specifically about Members of Parliament asking him whether putting wrong figures into his machine would result in the correct answers, but I find the remark generally applicable to so much more.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    That quote fits perfectly for these situations where I find a suggestion so flappergastingly silly that I wonder if the author and I have experienced the same reality.
• s9w 6y ago
  I've discovered some pretty neat projects from the trending page and the "Explore repositories" thing on the main page. So for me that works well unlike most recommendation things.
• radicalriddler 6y ago
  I stronly agree with the trending part. I used to browse it regularly to find cool projects, that may have been on HN or Product Hunt or something that week, but now, most of it is Chinese projects that are meaningless to me or large businesses latest nothing github project they made.
  • sanxiyn 6y ago
    Chinese projects are presumably meaningful to people who can read Chinese, although it is meaningless to you. You are free to learn Chinese. It is a great skill to have. If more people who can read Chinese are using GitHub, why is it a wrong choice for GitHub to surface Chinese projects in the trending page? I detect the racist attitude here. Yes, it is a bad recommendation, but the trending page is not personalized. GitHub does provide personalized pages for discovery. Do you get Chinese projects there too? That would be a bug worth fixing. But it is not a bug to have Chinese projects in the trending page. It is expected feature.
    • Recursing 6y ago
      It would be a nice feature for non Chinese-speaking users to be able to filter by language And actually it seems that Github just implemented this https://github.com/trending https://github.com/trending
      • sanxiyn 6y ago
        Huh, thanks for noticing ("Spoken Language" filter) and letting us know. That's great.
• vsroy 6y ago
  I see a lot of disagreement with this post but I think it makes good points. It's hard for small developers who make useful things to get noticed on GitHub. The only hope is to get retweeted by some established user. This seems silly, we need better ways of making sure people can find/discover good software.
  • nexuist 6y ago
    The problem is that open source software is inherently trust-driven. I wouldn't blindly execute any random code on my machine, but I execute code from people or companies I trust all the time. Of course I could review the whole repo, but that always takes time (and even then you're not guaranteed to not be hit by an intentional/unintentional vulnerability), and it comes down to "well, would me spending time vetting this be more valuable than just finding a more popular, more trusted alternative?" So it's hard to spotlight anonymous devs on their own, because you can't establish trust with someone who isn't known for anything yet.
    • pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Seems like the openness of software is orthogonal to trust. Would you no longer trust an app only because its license became Open? Closed source seems to require more trust to me. I think trust is very difficult to manage and do some checking of owners of PPAs before using them -- containerisation can help, but doesn't prevent information gathering and other trust-breaking activities (backdoors, etc.).
  • onion2k 6y ago
    For many people Github is a tool to use for work and nothing more. For others it's almost a social network. Making something that happily straddles both those use cases must be really difficult.
  • mytailorisrich 6y ago
    GitHub offers a managed Git repo with project/bug tracking features. Although they've added plenty of trendy social network-y features that's what it is as its core. There's no silver bullet for "getting noticed" whether on Github or outside of Github.
• floatingatoll 6y ago
  GitHub's time as the "cool" option has ended. It has matured and moved beyond the early adopter community, and presence on it is no longer a social signal of any significant relevance. I use GitHub to get work done, either on my projects or on others. I do not expect GitHub to innately provide me a degree of fun. That's the job of the projects, not of GitHub itself. Zoom exited the early adopter phase this past pandemic. It promptly was given significant attention, reasons were found to declare it "uncool", and Jitsi was elevated as the next "cool" replacement. This article confirms that GitHub is now exiting the early adopter phase. Significant attention is being paid to it, reasons are being found to declare it "uncool" — but, no replacement has yet been elevated as the next "cool" replacement for it. What will GitHub's replacement "cool" service be?
  • zatkin 6y ago
    GitLab? :)
  • Normal_gaussian 6y ago
    Me and the rest of the cool gang have been using GitLab for a while now.
    • kwistzhaderach 6y ago
      What’s the difference for a personal user? Is gitlab better?
      • 0x0 6y ago
        Free unlimited CI minutes for private repos if you bring your own gitlab-runner is one great benefit I enjoy.
        • Kovah 6y ago
          To be fair, you can also have your own runners for Github Actions, which will not affect your CI minutes. https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/about-self-hosted-runners https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...
• _pmf_ 6y ago
  Social coding is cancer.
• jansan 6y ago
  So what are the alternatives to GitHub? Of course there is GitLab. How about Google Cloud Repositories? HAs anybody tried it? Any other suggestions?
• Animats 6y ago
  I believe the turning point was when they changed how the ranking system on the Trending page worked. I had no idea Github had a "trending" mechanism. I just use it as a free place to store code repositories, of which I have about 20. About the only social feature of Github I use is "Issues", to report or deal with bugs. In fact, I rarely visit the site with a browser. Most usage is from "git". Which is what it's supposed to be for.
  • power78 6y ago
    >I had no idea Github had a "trending" mechanism. Sounds like this article doesn't apply to you then. >Which is what it's supposed to be for. That's just your opinion. Clearly people have been using github for discovering new software and more. I have found plenty of cool projects through the sites features.
    • lucideer 6y ago
      I use Github for discovering new software, and more. And a trending algorithm is of no use to me. I use search and filter based on practically applicable keywords and other facets that are relevant to my need at the time. The author uses the phrase `the new JavaScript “hotness”` in the context of this somehow being a positive. Engineers going after libraries because of their "hotness" instead of because of their utility is exactly the problem with the Javascript (and other "cool" / "trending") ecosystems.
• mirekrusin 6y ago
  So what is the scoring based on for trending now?
• draugadrotten 6y ago
  Recommending github projects based on the github projects you already are interested in could be a problem that can be solved by a recommender engine like the ones from https://movielens.org/ https://movielens.org/
  • sanxiyn 6y ago
    It doesn't work well, because people use GitHub's starring feature in many different ways. Star rating of movies is pretty comparable between users once you standardize it. Not for GitHub stars.
• MintelIE 6y ago
  Microsoft sucks the life out of everything they touch.
• efiecho 6y ago
  Please don't ruin something that works fine by adding unnecessary crap. The only thing Microsoft has to do, is to take a good look at GitLab so they know what they absolutely NOT should do.
  • tinco 6y ago
    What, make good money building loads of features people actually need? To me it feels like GitHub has stood nearly still the past 5 years. I didn't even consider GitHub when choosing a solution for our business and 5 years ago I thought GitHub was the greatest open core business in the world. Whatever they did with that huge investment, it wasn't building value. The investors probably got their money back and then some when Microsoft bought it though..
  • btasovac 6y ago
    Hey efiecho, Community Advocate from GitLab here! I'm sorry to hear that you are not a fan of our actions and/or decisions. Can you please dive into specifics a little bit and explain what parts of GitLab could be improved and what are some high-level things that you don't particularly like?
    • efiecho 6y ago
      I should probably have been more specific in my critique, as it sounds like I think GitLab has major problems. It's just regarding the web interface. On every other Git repository manager, we can browse source code, view replies to both issues and merge requests without Javascript enabled. But not on GitLab. I don't expect anything advanced to work without Javascript, but these simple operations definitely should and I think it's very bad design to have this requirement. The result of this Javascript overuse is that GitLab is both slower and a bigger pain to use than the alternatives. Use Javascript in small amounts were it make sense for functionality, not just for showing text, pictures or other simple things. There, my two cents. So, what I meant was that Microsoft should look at GitLab and NOT copy the web interface. GitHub has a nice web interface, with Javascript in acceptable amounts and where it make sense, even the language details bar works without.
• ilitirit 6y ago
  I've always just used github as a source control repo. It's also useful that Google links open source projects when I search for things. If the trending page disappeared today I wouldn't notice. In fact, the only time I ever read about it is when I stumble across blog posts that mention it.
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  Funnily enough, I recently deleted my account there. Mostly because I don't trust MS and don't want to be in their ecosystems in any way.
• imagetic 6y ago
  Communication of the open source community feels like it's down. Social media eventually killed forums and chat rooms. Social media if anything, made learning and discovering a more isolated experience. RSS isn't what it used to be either, that compounded with blog posts being down, and the sheer volume of bad tutorials, bad code, and bad ideas, it's hard to sift through it all and discover things of value. Early Twitter were the golden years in my eyes. You could ask a question or post an idea and get responses from random developers. Now it's just echoes into the ether.
• boredpudding 6y ago
  Ending a blog post with "What do you think?" but not having any comment option. While the post wants more social features on another website.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I’ve never considered GitHub to be “fun.” It’s a great tool, though. Most of my GH interaction is through my desktop system, not a browser (pushing and pulling checkouts). I’ve been using some form of source control for nearly 30 years (since Projector, in the 1990s). It’s a tool. A very, very important tool. I appreciate many of the “glossy” features of GH, like hero images and GH Pages, but this shows how “out of touch” I must be, because I have never considered it to be a social venue or competitive arena. It’s just a place I keep my code. I’m quite grateful for it.
  • 0x402DF854 6y ago
    Never had any "fun" with github either. I have had my account since 2013 and I've just learned about this "trending page" thing. Can anyone explain what's it useful for?
    • Insanity 6y ago
      YMMV, but for me it does tend to show interesting projects that I otherwise would not have learned about.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
        This may also highlight one of the contrasts between my approach, and that of many of today’s engineers. I am almost exclusively a Principal author of my work; with dozens of repos, and six figures of LoC (probably seven figures, if we include the code not available in public repos). I think I may have one forked repo; an embedded Web server library that I needed to tweak a bit to make work for my ffmpeg wrapper project. This is not necessarily a good thing. By authoring my own code, I limit my scope. People who rely heavily on dependencies can have awesome results. But they need to be very careful about the provenance and quality of these dependencies. Dependency discovery is an important part of the vetting process. If we have choices, we don’t need to settle for second-best. Also, I know that, for many folks, learning is a driver for repo discovery. A lot of forks can indicate an inquisitive and open-minded approach to software development. I do support it; but it is not how I work.
• teekert 6y ago
  Yeah, you grow, a platform grows, sometimes you grow into different directions. Move on. And indeed, I don't need a social aspect, I need to make a branch from an issue, like I can with bitbucket.
• BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  Good, let the people using github for fun leave. Github is not meant to be fun, it's meant to be like a pen. A good pen can be enjoyable. Beautiful. You can feel attachement to it. But it is not built to be played with. By that I mean it's not its primary function, even if a creative or bored mind can use it for that. A good pen fullfills its intended purpose when it disapears from your mind while you use it, yielding to the writting that should be the center of your attention. I don't think about github when I code. I just use it.
  • iotxnz 6y ago
    So do I, and I dread every second I have to interact with that horrible site. A pen does not spam you with "trending" stuff, rearranges its interface regularly or track your activity for the whole world to see. Before the usual "just leave" comments: GH is a monopoly and one can be forced to use it, unless leaving includes leaving projects or even jobs.
  • Carpetsmoker 6y ago
    A lot of people (who may not even be professional programmers) are using GitHub for their hobby, i.e. "for fun". I don't think this is an invalid use case.
    • BiteCode_dev 6y ago
      If you write for your hobby, the writing is your hobby, not the pen. Nobody said, "I can't wait to click on githubs buttons!" But they might have said, "I can't wait to make this code available".
      • farazzz 6y ago
        Sure, but Github is not only the pen, but also the publisher. People create things for others to use, not to be ignored
• aljgz 6y ago
  For me, the question is not whether or not GH was fun and if I checked trending before (I did not, I'm the type of person who does not jump into projects in early stages). If the trending page has been an essential way for projects to gain traction, then we all have been benefiting from it. If this change disrupts that flow, then we should all oppose it, no matter if we used it directly or not.
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  tl;dr: trending page algo changed
  • mulle_nat 6y ago
    Github has a trending page ? I never noticed.
• thinkingemote 6y ago
  > I wouldn’t be opposed to ... DMs. They actually had these! I used it occasionally. It was useful. They obviously removed it. Imagine being able to message anyone on the platform about their repo or code. Imagine it being easy to find how to contact someone. Now you have to rely on the user adding public contact information on their profile which is a) not required and b) not validated.
• progx 6y ago
  I guess i never viewed the trending page on github.
• tasubotadas 6y ago
  If anybody ever thought of fun while using git, I would probably think that that person is a masochist. It's a tool for work. It's actually a shame that git won over all the other DVS, because I used to find mercurial much more approachable and a lot easier to use. Mercurial maybe could be called fun, but definitely not git.
  • jiofih 6y ago
    It’s about GitHub, the platform, not git the VCS.
    • tasubotadas 6y ago
      I thought you mainly interface with github via git but apparently most people go there to chat.
      • jiofih 6y ago
        I don’t get the sarcasm. GitHub, the website, where you make pull requests, issues, discuss them, explore forks and other projects, see their activity and connect to other developers. All very tangential to git. If you never used any of that it’s fine, though you missed out on a very nice side of OSS.
• yunusabd 6y ago
  This [1] was posted here some time ago. It's been pretty useful for me for discovering projects, and it seems to be good at bringing actually trending projects to the top. E.g. at the beginning of the covid situation, you could see a bunch of dashboards, news trackers, or scripts to buy face masks etc. at the top. [1] https://trends.now.sh/ https://trends.now.sh/
• Tomte 6y ago
  GitHub was never fun. They don't care about spamming, maybe they even endorse it. I'm not active on GitHub. I have an account, sometimes I file a bug or so. Every now and then I get "invited" to some GitHub project I've never heard of. One contributor, zero stars, pure spam. I always block those and report them as spammers. GitHub, without fail, gets back to me saying that "oh, you can block him". That's it. Maybe you could just stop people from spam-inviting hundreds of others? Maybe you could not allow invitations of people who never interacted with the person or his repo in any way? But I hope they at least fixed their also very annoying notification bug where they sent me a mail that I was mentioned in a commit: Someone had committed a binary file (image or whatever), and in there was actually a two byte sequence fitting my GitHub user name (two character name). That's just idiotic. A few bytes in a binary do not "mention" anyone.
• irrational 6y ago
  TIL. GitHub has/had a trending page.
• jedberg 6y ago
  The old trending algorithm was too easy to game. Just get a bunch of friends to Star your repo and you star theirs and you both show up. The current method is worse but seems less gameable.
  • jiofih 6y ago
    “A bunch of friends” being about a thousand. Not that easy.
    • jedberg 6y ago
      Well back in the day it didn’t take nearly that many. Nowadays you’d have to do a mailing list.
• peteforde 6y ago
  I had no idea that GitHub was supposed to (or trying to be) fun. If you're going to non-curated "trending" feeds looking for things that are already popular to pay attention to, you're not only wasting your finite free time but you're training yourself to be a follower. Stop this nonsense immediately. Use your talents and build something great. If you never check the "trending" page on GitHub again, you will have a better life.
  • pickpuck 6y ago
    The point of the “trending” page wasn’t that it always showed you React. It showed you tiny repositories that had exploded in popularity that day.
    • peteforde 6y ago
      So what? Why would you drop what you're doing to check out something you don't need to know exists? I'm not trying to be an asshole: focus is both incredibly hard and the only way to build great things. There are a countless number of things you're better off doing than checking out new random shit. Those people have already had their success. What are you bringing?
      • malwrar 6y ago
        I haven’t participated in this trend-hunting behavior the author describes, but it sounds like it has the main appeal of HN—see new ideas that other people with a similar mindset are talking about. There’s educational and entertainment value to that, and while you’re right time is better spent grinding on projects it certainly sounds appealing to have a window into stuff other people are working on that is also mildly curated.
        • peteforde 6y ago
          Fair enough. I'll accept this. :)
• alkonaut 6y ago
  I have used github for years and I have never even realized there was a system of trends/top lists. To me, Github is Amazon S3 for source code and issues!
• _tk_ 6y ago
  I would love to see an argument in what way the "old Trending algorithm" constituted a meritocracy.
• axegon_ 6y ago
  I'll be honest I scroll through the trending page once a day. I am not sure about javascript because I couldn't care less about it, but I have to admit for many other languages, I do end up wondering how some projects get to trending...
• xgenecloud 6y ago
  >> No offense to Stripe, but the notion that stripe-samples/subscriptions, which has 13 total stars with exactly zero new stars today is the new JavaScript “hotness” is a joke. This is totally useless to everyone. THIS. The new algorithm is not only horrendous but SUPER FLAWED! Here is what happened. After receiving 900+ stars within a week of launch - we never make it to 'Trending' weekly or monthly!! We were their trending for 3 days. Then all of a sudden we are gone. The rest of the repos which were trending with us with as little as 50 stars are in weekly/monthly trending!!! Can you please help explain this @Github ? When contacted Github support about this flaw - the reply was short (they dont wanna reveal their buggy algorithm! I was asking to look at the problem not to defend their solution) Stars not only tell how cool a open source project is but also makes the new open source developers produce valuable work without next to nothing in return. Just taking out this small dopamine rush translates to this - a good company (Github) was acquired by an old-enterprise.
  • austincheney 6y ago
    > Stars not only tell how cool a open source project is but also makes the new open source developers produce valuable work without next to nothing in return. Stars aren’t payment. If that is the primary currency for your development I am curious what happens when there are no new stars? Do you kill the repo?
    • xgenecloud 6y ago
      Stars are a way to bookmark and discover repos in the open source world. No stars doesn't mean no development - I am not denying that and appreciate your concern on how much vanity is in it. (I guess it is better than vanity of likes for a photo on instagram).
  • jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    > Stars tell how cool a open source project is Strange measure of coolness.
• eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  GitHub was never fun: it killed the decentralized aspect of git. It also killed git-based bug trackers and wikis.
• unsigner 6y ago
  This reads like satire on the culture of trend-chasing, framework-of-the-week young developers that dominate in certain circles. Life imitates The Onion, Poe's law and all that. If you're not one of them, and feel alone and outdated - don't. There's enough graybeards toiling away at the boring software that supports the world, oblivious of what killed last week's React killer. This too shall pass.
  • chiefsucker 6y ago
    It’s really fascinating how humanity can twist almost everything around and start seeing it from a bad perspective. Maybe the author is a very engaged developer who already knows a huge part of the “boring software that supports the world”? Maybe he is so engaged that he wants to follow new developments in his professional area to get even better? Maybe he hopes that he will discover new and interesting algorithms that can help him improve his skills? I think there is a point that simple algorithms are a better user interface, because of their predictability (although they show their flaws, like he specifically mentions with JS). Just try to remember how much discussion there was about Twitter’s feed and their move away from a classic timeline. They still haven’t abandoned the latter one. But who knows in the end? Maybe your comment was just an attempt of satire a la The Onion? Personally I try not to prematurely judge and stay positive. To each his own I guess.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
      I see it exactly as the opposite. Github is a boring and effective tool for professionals, and the author has twisted it around to be a bad thing since it’s not “fun”.
• amelius 6y ago
  They should build a product that runs in a terminal instead of a browser.
• craigds 6y ago
  Github's a work tool, not somewhere you go to have fun. This is a weird article because its main point is about the 'Trending page', which is something I've never heard of in the last 10 years of using github heavily. I'm vaguely aware there are some social features of github (you can apparently star repos, for instance) but I'd assume hardly anyone uses that stuff...
  • dreamer_soul 6y ago
    To be honest, a few years ago I used the trending page to discover useful web tools. Du to my lack of experience the trending page offered a glimpse of what people were working on/with (I used to read the code to learn new techniques) but now I old go there to check on my open source project and answer issues. So I can get the author saying it's not fun anymore, however I find hacker news the new fun place to go to learn and enjoy my time.
  • petepete 6y ago
    The beauty of Github is that it does a really good job of both. Yes, we use it for work and it's excellent, but there are loads of fun, throwaway, educational, ridiculous and interesting projects on there. The trending page was great because it offered a glimpse of what's out there and what people are talking about. If you don't care, that's fine - it won't ever affect you. I find it interesting for the same reasons I find HN interesting. Github has had social features for a decade or more; I've been able to follow colleagues and friends, react to issues and conversations with emojis and upload photos of my dog. What else do I need? What does Facebook have that Github doesn't in this regard?
  • ensiferum 6y ago
    It just seems that the author is basically just whining about not being on the "trending" page any more.
• firebacon 6y ago
  I also feel like the project recommendations on Github have become really... stale. At some point, the sidebar would display a new set of projects almost every time you hit refresh. Now, there hardly seems to be any rotation at all; I've been seeing the same projects for weeks. Somebody should check if the cron job for updating the list has crashed :)
• unnouinceput 6y ago
  Quote: "After a lot of reflection, I believe the turning point was when they changed how the ranking system on the Trending page worked." The turning point was the second it was sold to Microsoft. People fail to realize GitHub is Microsoft now and Microsoft is a corporation. And what corporations do best? Earn money for their shareholders. Everything else is just dust in eyes.
• hoseja 6y ago
  For a little bit of additional discovery and trending, there is also https://git.news/ https://git.news/ , though it tends to be a bit same-y.
• DevKoala 6y ago
  I need GitHub as a tool. If pragmatism and UX is ever affected for the sake of “engaging” me into social aspects, I would move my repos. I hear GitLab is great.
• fhennig 6y ago
  Microsoft says they love open source right? They could just provide an easy API for the data that underlies the trending page, and there could be multiple spin-off projects that rank projects differently. Same for many of the other suggested features. News feed for example. In computers, we can make everything interact with everything, if we wanted to. I also don't want to be at the mercy of MS implementing or removing something. It would be much better if they had many open APIs to integrate with.
• mbeex 6y ago
  > At first I thought it was just me getting older You are still far from it, concluding from your problem. Up to now, I never heard about this 'trending page'. I'm quite aware, that GitHub is also a social platform business including of course the whole associated industry of for example self-marketing as the compulsory 'side' effect (the term 'side' is debatable). For me, it is a tool and as such in the meantime not the best anymore. The missing group feature (even true for bitbucket) alone was reason enough for me to transfer the better part of my projects to GitLab and structuring them there in a sufficiently satisfying way. Some of them are still mirrored on GitHub and thats it. Not to talk about CI integration and other features. As for some other comments here - even for me my repositories are mostly my work. Other contributions are rather short-lived PR's etc. So, this is all fine for me.
• afandian 6y ago
  The idea of trending libraries / code seems almost antithetical to good software development practice. Favouring the shiny and new over the reliable and stable seems classic Goodhart's Law.
• codetiger 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Until I read your post, I didn't realise Github changed the algorithm behind the page. Until last year, I hit the treading page at least 5 times a day whenever, I got a short break at work. This year, I don't know exactly when, but I lost interest in the page and couldn't go back, no matter how many times I tried. At first I thought it was only me, very much like how you mentioned. My opinion: Earlier, we had small problems in the page. Like 5 out of 25 in the list looked useless or wrongly listed. However now, more than half of the list looks wrongly listed and not interesting for me.
• sfgweilr4f 6y ago
  I don't understand this post. Why would I care where my project's ranking is? Its already a useful project to me and others. Is there some prize I'm not aware of?
• fit2rule 6y ago
  I wish I could do all the Github things from the command line somehow - get a lit of all my starred projects, turn watches on and off, etc. The whole thing would be so much more useful if it weren't wrapped up in a web interface, and if I could script my interaction with my repo's better ..
• bhupesh 6y ago
  I occasionally use the Trending page, but I agree with the OP on projects getting attraction because someone who has 12k followers on twitter shared a static page website.
• meerita 6y ago
  I never used the trending page. I'm a find-by-search user. I just want relevant stuff when I need it.
• boraalparat 6y ago
  I learned so many things from the trending page back in early days. A lot of useful stuff was there. Now, it is not.
• tjpnz 6y ago
  I've sworn off Github for my own toy projects. The code I write off the clock is a form of escapism, I don't want to run the risk of having my repos nuked from orbit for any inadvertent profanity, nor do I want to triage issues from people taking issue with how I've named things, or forcing me to adopt an ultimately meaningless boilerplate CoC. I don't want to have to write a novel on why I'm not a racist or a fascist like Antirez recently had to. I'm not implying that I would face all of these issues on Github currently. But I don't want to run the risk of being in that position and getting into a shouting match with someone - and then having to deal with all of the consequences.
  • theSage 6y ago
    What do you use then? Gitlab? Personal servers?
    • tjpnz 6y ago
      A mixture of both actually. I'm a big user of Gitlab private repos which I'll sometimes make public.
    • aerique 6y ago
      There's also sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/ https://git.sr.ht/
      • lugged 6y ago
        I've really been digging sourcehut recently, I really like that its just a dumb git+ssh receptacle with some modern build pipelines attached. Feels like early gitlab but even more craigslisty.
      • maelkum 6y ago
        I can't recommend Sourcehut enough! The git.sr.ht service is just the tip of the iceberg, though. It also provides you with CI, issue tracking, mailing lists... And it works perfectly in Lynx so you don't even have to leave command line to use the browser interface.
    • 6y ago
• lucideer 6y ago
  The javascript ecosystem is great (choice is mostly a good thing) but it has a really bad rep because of all of this nonsense focus on early-adoption of "cool new thing". That kind of problem is only exacerbated by `Trending` features like this. Good riddance.
• bovermyer 6y ago
  I used to follow the latest trends via various blogs and websites. As I've gotten older, though, I've found that I get the most valuable insights into what's new and genuinely interesting from talking to people.
• nirui 6y ago
  Not touching that "Zero star hotness" problem, but > ... lot project discovery has moved to other platforms, and more specifically, to Twitter. This isn’t good for the community. Let me bring out my 2 points here: #1: Hey, please ask your inner self why would you ever want to put out your own free labor out on the Internet in the first place? For common good? World peace? I bet most people will answer: Be cool, be known, receive attention etc. Those GitHub stars&fork you've received will help you in your next job hunt, it will help you when you trying to introduce yourself to the other devs, it will help you to expand your people network. In short, those free labor generates something good for you. But GitHub has it's own limits. On GitHub, your projects are discovered/used by other devs, a bubbles of it's own kind. Further, those devs might not even want to give you stars because they're above your level and/or found your project uninteresting to them. Social medias generate those "good"s better than GitHub simply because it got wider range of people, and greater chance to found somebody who is interested to try out your project. #2 and more important: The GitHub Trending page itself is really poor when it comes to discover new things. Just think: What's on that page? "Most stared today" list. Well yeah, then where are those stars came from? Right? It's a "Trending" page, that's it. Not a "Hey, checkout these exciting repositories recommended just for you" page and certainly not "Hey, come here and checkout my new repo which currently got zero star but it's really cool" page. I personally found ProductHunt, Hacker News and Reddit is a better source if I do want to "Discover" something new. Which I guess is why people are posting their projects there (as well as on Twitter and Facebook and other platforms).
• skohan 6y ago
  I could not identify with this article less. The whole concept of needing a "scoreboard" for open source software at all makes it seem like things have gone very wrong. I write software because I want to manifest real-world value, or at the very least to do something interesting. All the noise and clout chasing just makes it harder to find the quality tools which will actually help me do that.
• ericol 6y ago
  PSA: This is not about GH in general, is about a particular characteristic of it (The "trending repos" page) that is even possible a lot of people haven't heard about. Also, there might be other ways to find out what is "trending" (And you should try to find them).
• cosmodisk 6y ago
  Github is a bit of a social network for developers, and as such, shows all the similarities to other platforms: there are superstars, competition to be on top of some magic list of '10 most beautiful women profiles or 10 most popular JS projects' and etc. And the more people deviate from development towards social interactions,the more Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn it becomes. Oh,look, I have 10 stars on my repo!!! Wait a minute,how come he's got 20??Just look at the way he named variables..Come on,who can vote for this????
• dave_aiello 6y ago
  GitHub isn't fun or not fun for me because of the presence of a Trending page. I didn't know about the Trending page, so I never considered using it. For my personal developer literacy and understanding of the Open Source Community, it would be great if a global Trending page existed and functioned well. As an indy developer or a developer who usually works on a very small team, I'd like to see the Trending concept implemented on an Open Source platform basis. For instance, a Trending in Angular page, a Trending in Bootstrap 4? Hell yes.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• stblack 6y ago
  The trending pages were increasingly listing repositories from Asia, written in its native languages. On some days, half or more of the top 25 listed repos were Asian language. Today, anectdotally, there are zero repos in Asian languages in the Trending Today page. This might be a factor. Politics? Ethnocentricism?
• stblack 6y ago
  A major regression in Github is in Notifications, which have a new interface. I follow several hundred repos. Only the 25 most active are listed in the sidebar. There is no way to browse the hundereds not listed there for notification tallies. THERFORE Github now hides notifications from small and nascent repos from me, and that's definitely not fun.
• WA 6y ago
  There is a trending page? I use GitHub only to access specific projects.
• habosa 6y ago
  GitHub seems somewhat intentionally not built for discovery. Which is fine, but I'll give some examples anyway: Here's the organization I manage: https://github.com/firebase https://github.com/firebase There is so little customization allowed on that page. It's very hard for me to tell a curious developer what's new or exciting unless I want to constantly adjust pinned repos. Now visit this page on a laptop monitor: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-android-sdk https://github.com/firebase/firebase-android-sdk Notice that you're immediately presented with the folder structure and the README is "below the fold". So the developer's own words about the project are hidden unless you scroll for them. A lot of newbies get really thrown by this, they start clicking blindly into the code without knowing there are instructions below. All that said: I love GitHub. I spent 50%+ of my day on GitHub and manage 100+ repos. But it's not all things.
• AndrewHampton 6y ago
  I never used the old trending page, but it sounds like the Changelog Nightly newsletter [1] is basically the same thing. It goes out every day at 9PM Pacific. It has 3 sections: - most starred repositories that haven't been in the newsletter before - most starred repositories that were created that day - most starred repositories 1: https://changelog.com/nightly https://changelog.com/nightly
• gdgtfiend 6y ago
  > The old Trending algorithm was definitely flawed, but it was simple, objective, and ever so slightly ruthless. It heavily skewed toward JavaScript and web development, but under-indexed a lot of backend and AI stuff. Isn't that super contradictory? How is the old algorithm both objective AND skewed towards Javascript?
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    The author didn't say it was fair, they said it was objective; objectively speaking, JS projects get all the new stars compared to backend and AI stuff, therefore are the most popular. Of course, a more fair algorithm - if your definition of fair is that multiple disciplines and specializations, and / or language get the same exposure - would be to show the top starred / most active repos in certain categories (back-end, AI, specific languages, etc).
• geofft 6y ago
  This complaint makes no sense. (It may still be true - fun is subjective - but the article offers an objective argument for it that doesn't hold up.) > The Trending page used to be a straight-up list of the projects with the most new stars in the last 24 hours across the whole site (and by language). ... > In this era of Developer Relations, VC-backed open source, and the endless developer-content-bullshit machine, the old Trending page was one of the few places left on the web where it seemed like the best ideas still won. I've been seeing corporate projects beg for stars (from either employees or users) for almost a decade now. Meanwhile, I have never asked for stars on my personal repos and I think most people don't. If you don't like companies putting their finger on the scale, stars are the absolute last thing to measure! > The worst side effect of the new Trending page is that a lot project discovery has moved to other platforms, and more specifically, to Twitter. This isn’t good for the community. We went from a flawed meritocracy ... good ideas and good projects are getting lost, especially from newcomers. How, exactly, are newcomers supposed to get stars on their projects without a following?
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  Github has a Trending page??
• Waterluvian 6y ago
  Interesting to find someone using github in an entirely different manner. Not sure I was ever aware of the ranking mechanics that can be so addictive if you take that sort of thing seriously. I think I’ve relied on my projects getting stars as KPI for “are people using this?”
• einpoklum 6y ago
  > The worst side effect of the new Trending page is that a > lot project discovery has moved to ... Twitter. Huh? No. I mean, I don't know what JS people do with their lives; I'm a C++ and CUDA guy (even though I dabble in some JS), and none of my acquaintances discovers projects through Twitter. GitHub has this side-bar with projects I might find interesting and it often recommends ones that I do. Regardless - I would move away from GitHub to someplace else if the exposure wasn't so critical. I would really like a cross-site federation mechanism which would let us try other places.
• moltar 6y ago
  I’ve been using GH for over a about a decade. I didn’t even know that trending feature existed. Maybe the author is evaluating the tool by a wrong metric?
• timvisee 6y ago
  Oh man, I still remember the day I was #1 on the old GitHub trending page with ffsend. That isn't so fun anymore these days.
• rattray 6y ago
  Should the title of this on HN be "The GitHub Trending page isn't fun anymore" ?
• throw_m239339 6y ago
  People here forget that Microsoft had its own code repository app which I forgot the name of, which was a flop then Microsoft just closed it. I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub ended up the exact same way. On the internet, there is no such thing as "too big to fail".
• wink 6y ago
  TIL there is a "trending" page on Github. I think I signed up in 2009.
• lmayliffe 6y ago
  "It heavily skewed toward JavaScript and web development, but under-indexed a lot of backend and AI stuff. And yet, it was cool as hell that everyone was on the EXACT same playing field and scoreboard." .....................
• frankcaron 6y ago
  Imo, Github has only been moving further in the right direction lately — and more social features ain't it, chief. The better value proposition lift from giving folks and teams more free private repos was huge, and the increasingly-prominent integration of Github into enterprise tools is facilitating (if not helping to force) the modernization of enterprise dev outside the software industry. I've never been a bigger fan of Github, personally. Microsoft seems to be doing the same with Github that it did with Minecraft: amplifying what it does well, fixing what it didn't, and making it more accessible to more folks the way they want to consume it — all while not compromising what made it great to begin with.
  • CraftThatBlock 6y ago
    As a Minecraft player, I agree. They let the teams run with more resources, and it has shown in both quality and features in both companies. GitHub recently has been killing in with features IMO
    • moooo99 6y ago
      As a Minecraft player as well I disagree. They split the community into Bedrock and Java Edition players. Even very basic game and redstone mechanics differ between the engines. The Bedrock edition introduced paid resources which would never have been a thing in the Java edition. Instead of considering cross-play to support the amazing work the CraftBukkit/Spigot devs, they opted to create a new protocol and split the player base. I didn't like the direction where Windows 10 Edition was heading, but I'm glad that there are still thousands of players on Java.
      • CraftThatBlock 6y ago
        That's true, I mostly stayed away from Bedrock, so it's hard to say on that front. I understand the split, but Java itself has been very well maintained
      • judge2020 6y ago
        Minecraft already had a mobile app on a separate engine before Microsoft bought it, so this isn't necessarily something Microsoft is at fault for. They just turned it into "bedrock edition" to get it working on Windows and consoles in a cross-platform way, something that likely would have taken a lot longer for the Java edition to achieve.
• shankun 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback on this. We are rebuilding Explore and improving the feeds on it soon, and would love to chat with you if you’re interested. Drop me a line (shankuniyogi at github.com).
• oxfordmale 6y ago
  Github is a tool like a hammer. It is essential to get certain jobs done, but hardly going to win a price for the most exciting tool. I never looked out for trending repos, however, that might be a professional basis as a data engineer.
• mugsie 6y ago
  I have been on GitHub for years, and had no idea there was a trending page at all ... but then again I don't tend to "discover" new repos as a hobby. (There is a separate rant about using github stars as a metric of, well, anything, but thats a thing for a different day)
• djsumdog 6y ago
  I never even realize GitHub had a project listing page. I miss the old FreshMeat (later FreeCode) back when it was the entire FreshMeat+SlashDot+SourceForge network. FreshMeat was an amazing resource for new and exciting open source tools. Today ... it's pretty much just Hackernews, and we only get a small subset.
• anarsdk 6y ago
  Try changing the "Date range". You have it set to "Today".
• hypewatch 6y ago
  Checking what JavaScript projects on github received the most new stars in the last 24 hours every day doesn’t sound like fun to me. In fact I’ve never thought of GitHub as “fun”.
• TheRealPomax 6y ago
  I thought the fun part was being able to share code with the world and get contributions or even people interested in teaming up out of that? I have literally never looked at trending, and I'm not sure why I ever would.
• milky2028 6y ago
  I really don't need another half-baked social platform built into something that already does one thing very well.
• jswny 6y ago
  I didn't even know that GitHub had a trending page.
• _curious_ 6y ago
  "We went from a flawed meritocracy" What does flawed mean in this context?
• hvis 6y ago
  It's hard for me to see how the "fun" factor of GitHub could be concentrated on the "Trending" page. For me it's a place to do development. And it's been improving steadily on that.
• __chrisconlan__ 6y ago
  This is shocking to me because I have been using GitHub for 5+ years and have literally never seen the "Trending" page.
• dkempner 6y ago
  Better'n SourceForge.
• recursive 6y ago
  I didn't even know there was a trending page on github. > I always thought of it as the defacto front page of the open source movement. It seems more like an auxiliary curiosity at best.
• saadalem 6y ago
  Here are four ideas for what a next generation Github might look like, ready for the next billion programmers: 1. Simplify the Git interface to optimize for daily workflows 2. Assume all code is online, all the time 3. Invest in Github’s people network 4. Invest in Github’s code network What does the toolchain for the next billion programmers look like? I’ve written the above as if I were Github, but I think there’s a fair chance they’ll miss out on a lot of this. And that might just be an opportunity for you. (from Sam Gerstenzang)
• _ZeD_ 6y ago
  >>> The Trending page used to be a straight-up list of the projects with the most new stars in the last 24 hours across the whole site (and by language). honestly, I never ever knew there was a "trending" page on GH... >>> I always thought of it as the defacto front page of the open source movement. and I am old enough to remember freshmeat...
• dhbradshaw 6y ago
  I think, given his content, that this comment is overly broad. Instead, it should probably say that the Github trending page isn't fun any more. And he gives a nice and precise reason for this: the Github trending page used to have all the qualities of a game. There were ranked participants and there was a clear, known score. If you wanted to do well in the game, then you knew exactly what you had to do. As a bonus, the rules happened to be such that the ranked results were actually interesting. Now the trending page has an opaque score. Opaque scores and rules almost never make for a fun game. Perhaps the results are interesting. If so, how do we know that? It's hard to judge whether or not they are because we don't know the scoring mechanism. So the page loses not only its fun but its meaning as well.
• iamaziz 6y ago
  One of my first go-to web pages, when I open a browser, is the github.com/trending page. I find it fun (in general) to explore and discover the latest in OOS. On the contrary to the negative sentiment in the blog, I feel GitHub "now" made it much easier to find the relevant contents and repos that I actually care about.
• emiliosic 6y ago
  Use Gitlab. Better yet, run your own instance of Gitlab
• abimaelmartell 6y ago
  I used to spend a lot of time browsing through the Explore and Trending pages on Github. Now it's just useless.
• danso 6y ago
  The author wrote a whole blog post based on 1 example of 1 snapshot – the top result for the snapshot is indeed from the `stripe-samples` org, but the other 4 examples visible in the author's screenshot – cocos-creator, puppeteer, Fugiman, uxsolutions – are not orgs run by major tech companies? And I'm an avid Github user but I've never read much about how the Trending page works, so I would've appreciated the author linking to even any page talking about its past algorithm, or its alleged recent change. Instead the entire post is just rambling by what the author seems to think is happening. And, IMHO, the author seems to be naive that the past system – "most new stars in the last 24 hours across the whole site" – resembled some sort of objective meritocracy, when such a metric could be trivially manipulated, especially by established tech companies. Looking at the trending page just now [0] for Javascript, I don't see a repo owned by a big company in the top 5. freecodeCamp/freeCodeCamp is #6 and facebook/react is #8. [0] http://archive.is/5FbTv http://archive.is/5FbTv
• kerkeslager 6y ago
  GitHub was never fun for me, it's useful. I'd be happy to see the entirely useless "Trending" page go away, along with a lot of the social features. They take up so much screen space.
• wmij 6y ago
  I'm also in the GitHub as a tool vs. social app camp and have rarely if ever had the inclination to visit the daily trending page (cue Pete Davidson - "my bad"). One feature I do like though is to see what repositories get starred by people I follow. One thing has left me wondering after reading the article, is what the algorithm has changed to if it used to be just most stars in the given time period? Does anyone have any insight in how the trending repos are ranked? For example from the article: > ... the notion that stripe-samples/subscriptions-use-cases, which has 13 total stars with exactly zero new stars today is the new JavaScript “hotness” is a joke. I'm left wondering then how did that get to the top? Views? Clones? API requests? Something else like paid promotion? Or manual curation?
• gitpusher 6y ago
  I was hoping he would discuss Github as a whole, as implied by the headline. Instead he complains about the Trending feature. I did not even know there was a Trending feature, and I've been using Github since 2012.
• HeavyStorm 6y ago
  One thing I can agree with: I've no idea why github never attempted a DM system. I realize it could be abused, but being able to talk to people directly on the platform seems so essential...
• noxer 6y ago
  People really want social media in a SCM++ Tool?
• el_dev_hell 6y ago
  > I wouldn’t be opposed to a GitHub NewsFeed, project chat, or even DMs. Please god no.
• maremp 6y ago
  The changelog-nightly digest will send you a list of trending repos, if you care about that. I used to keep up with the trends, even on the trending page, but it’s often that a big company will release something and it comes on the top. Stars are just a vanity metric, it says little about how popular is the project at the moment, how well it’s maintained, etc. But GitHub as a company is doing so much great things lately. Actions are a nice built-in way to skip setting up a CI. And the little things which improve dealing with PRs, for example, checking the file as reviewed, review suggestions, multi-line review comments, automatically changing the base if the base is merged, and the list goes on. It might not be fun for the trend/hype seeking, but it’s a great experience to work with it as a VCS tool.
• saargrin 6y ago
  thought this was gonna be about master/slave controversy i'm relieved its actually about a real issue
• chrshawkes 6y ago
  If you're looking for the latest projects, I find YouTube to be helpful with these types of lists which used to get curated better by GitHub. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM7XU2acXag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM7XU2acXag