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Gamification affects software developers: Cautionary evidence from GitHub
- DerekBickerton 4y agoI've always maintained: if you put a number next to someone's name, then that person will try everything to try and increase that number. GitHub is no different than any other social media platform, and has various metrics (Stars, Followers, Contributions, etc) that people relentlessly try to game.
- meken 4y agoYeah, I didn’t see any mention of status in the abstract, which seems like an important driver.
- no_butterscotch 4y agoYup I always cringe a little bit when I see developers on their repos or social media asking for follows or stars to their repo. If it's good people will do that anyways. It seems like it can be a resume builder for some people though. I've seen resumes where people list their open-source repos and display "Over 500 stars on github" as one of the line-items.
- chillfox 4y ago"If it's good people will do that anyways." No, most people wont without being "invited" unless it's exceptional. Good just ain't good enough by itself. People ask because it works.
- juunpp 4y agoDo you mean like how HN puts a number next to your name?
- fleischhauf 4y agoyes
- DerekBickerton 4y agoYeah but Hackernews' karma score doesn't really mean anything to me. I mean it's great if one of my posts gets to the frontpage and all, but for me it's a useless metric. The only purpose it serves is optics into how well a post performs, but that's about it.
- whoooooo123 4y agoDoes it? How much karma do I need before I can see it?
- spockz 4y agoYou can see your karma next to your name in the top bar when logged in. Or on your profile.
- BoorishBears 4y agoActually that's something that annoys me. I used to not be able to: I set my bar to #000000, which is the same color as the text. And unless I'm imagining things, somewhere along the way it changed to #222222 I can set the topbar to #222222, but then everything else shows up in an annoying low-contrast shadow
- tpxl 4y agoI removed the top bar in uBlock origin. Sure, I can't directly click on my profile and some of the links are missing, but number don't go up anymore.
- whoooooo123 4y agoOh, I thought GP meant I could see the amount of upvotes/downvotes that another person's post has received. I can't see that (yet?)
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> I can't see that (yet?) You can't, period. There used to be a comment-level counter years ago, but it was removed as part of an experiment to see if not having it improves overall discussion quality. Apparently the experiment concluded positively, since the counter hasn't been brought back.
- theteapot 4y agoI liked HN much more before I knew karma existed. Seriously first 6m on here didn't know about it. Now I know everything seems tainted.
- c7DJTLrn 4y agoI really don't like how GitHub has turned into a social network of sorts. The gamified elements are encouraging people to work for free and MS probably knows this. GitHub should just be a place to host and build code, not to flex your follower or star count. Some examples of gamified elements I find quite toxic: * Achievements on profiles * Highlights on profiles * "Activity overview" which shows an extremely flawed gauge of the work you're doing (Code review, Issues, etc)
- MisterTea 4y agoUse https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ then. It is against such gamification elements and Drew has been quite vocal abut this issue.
- kixiQu 4y agoIf you are also down with requiring that your would-be contributors conform to his preference for email patches. https://man.sr.ht/git.sr.ht/send-email.md https://man.sr.ht/git.sr.ht/send-email.md "SourceHut is not GitHub/GitLab/Gitea, and you would be ill-advised to treat it as such." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23038520 (And therefore, perhaps, ill-advised to recommend it as such)
- lupire 4y agoDoes Drew prefer email, or prefer not doing more work than he already does?
- smaudet 4y agoHmm - review is not a part of git, in fact it is antithetical to git (concept from cvs/svn with centralized systems). A pull request, literally, need only be moving code from one repo to another. The signaling mechanism etc. are not and shouldn't be specified by git. How code moves around should be dictated by your organism, copyright, access levels, not some guy's interpretation of what "pull request" means. That means, yes in some instances there is no 'master' version of the software, there are multiple flavors with different release characteristics. E-mail I suppose is an adequate communication medium, if people want a specific review mechanism and triggers adding one to source hut (assuming FOSS) shouldn't be hard, perhaps the authors intention is to make it difficult to regress to a centralized model.
- juunpp 4y ago"Focusing on a set of software developers that were publicly pursuing a goal to make contributions for 100 days in a row" Clearly not contributions of very high quality. Must have been Hacktoberfest-quality commits.
- wwilim 4y agoIf someone told me they're striving to achieve 100 days in a row of contributing, my first thoughts would be "egocentrism" and "dishonesty". Helping isn't about you helping. And if you're aiming for 100 days in a row, I'm pretty sure you're pushing changes you could've pushed during the week on Saturday and Sunday to keep up the streak. Somebody could've reviewed it two days earlier, but you kept them waiting until Monday, just for style points.
- tomrod 4y agoThe article discusses gamification, but really a lot of the general incentives for open source are to bolster the resume of the developer by showing they work on important, credible things. Gamification transforms that generally open-ended benefit into KPIs of various sorts -- rather than present overall value as a contributor, you get badges for _how_ you develop. Dark times.
- noodlesUK 4y agoI’m not really sure that that’s true for most FOSS contributions. I think (anecdotally) most maintainers of even smaller FOSS projects are driven by solving a particular problem they’re facing, not because it generates status. I think most developers who are contributing to FOSS projects because it makes them seem credible are not usually contributing much to those projects (as they’re rarely core maintainers).
- tomrod 4y agoTo clarify, and not by way of disagreement: you're speaking to what motivates folks and claiming it is altruism. I agree. I was talking about the incentive structure as it is, which is much less about altruism and more "what is the benefit folks involved."
- saagarjha 4y ago
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- walrus01 4y agoRanking output of a task by bulk quantity without any measurement is not a good idea. Maybe some people didn't get the memo that taking software development advice from Josef Stalin isn't the greatest concept. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/795954-quantity-has-a-quality-all-its-own https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/795954-quantity-has-a-quali... “Quantity has a quality all its own.” ― Joseph Stalin
- aabaker99 4y agoI never understand people chasing daily commits to GitHub. You can push whatever git history you want to GitHub. I can rewrite all my commits so they are evenly distributed across however days I want to show up green on GitHub.
- ehnto 4y agoWhen I see a blank history, I just assume someone has a job and all their contributions are private.
- clarkmcc 4y agoIf the contributions to private repos are through Github, they’ll still show up if configured https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/managing-contribution-settings-on-your-profile/showing-your-private-contributions-and-achievements-on-your-profile# https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
- umutcankus 4y agoThere are projects making this fun. https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
- toimtoimtoim 4y agoAs a maintainer for quite popular Go repo (20k+ stars) I find really annoyed by the amount of trivial PRs (started at start of 2022 or some time like that). Especially then some random dude starts to "improve" tests by checking errors etc and submit multiple different PRs where each PR "fixes" only one file. this crap makes my life harder as I do this stuff from my spare time. Doing comprehensive review takes me 30min to 1h sometime more couple of hours to provide alternatives with examples etc. I have not seen almost no rise of useful PRs that add features or fix bugs since that change in early 2022. Only rise of trivial nononse PRs.
- maximilianroos 4y agoAs a maintainer for two less popular repos (3K & 5K stars), I'm very happy to get small PRs with incremental changes. Many of our large contributors have started this way. We have a robust test and linting suite on both, so we often don't need much human engagement for reviews — code looks reasonable, tests pass, smash "Merge". Out of interest — do you find they're not actually improving the code? Or it's just not worth the time to review it?
- toimtoimtoim 4y agoFor example: In Go you have `x.Close()` / `err := x.Close()` that returns an error and if someone starts to check/assert those usages in tests which you have ignored in test code. I think they are pushing the limits. No - these do not add value. No new use-cases are being checked, no improvement to coverage etc. or typo check tests. I do not reject these PRs. I review these and merge but I feel annoyed. This non-sense started somewhere around start of 2022. Before that I rarely ever see PRs like that.
- robswc 4y agoCould it be people using CoPilot trying to score brownie points? lol
- maximilianroos 4y agoThem doing it and you getting annoyed sounds like a bad equilibrium! I'd echo the sibling comment re adding what is / isn't appreciated into a CONTRIBUTING.md. My guess is people are doing it to get their feet wet with the repo, being helpful on the margin, and would not do it if they thought it was unhelpful on the margin. Here's PRQL's: https://github.com/prql/prql/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/prql/prql/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
- k__ 4y agoSomehow, I never cared about GitHubs social media features. It's just a cheap way to host code. On the other hand, I generally don' tend to get addicted easily.
- chillfox 4y agoSame, that said, we should want the people with addictive tendencies to be protected, because it's the right ting to do. There is also a selfish argument to be had for why you should be against features targeting addictive behaviour even if your are immune yourself. Take games as an example, modern AAA games have been completely ruined by design chasing addicts for money.
- martinwoodward 4y agoMartin from GitHub here. I think we’d consider this very much ‘by design’ in removing the streak counter so I’m glad it had the desired affect. Coding 100 days straight with no breaks isn’t good for anyone.
- aliqot 4y agoMartin thanks for jumping in, the thing I'd love most is when I'm logged in and go to github.com, just take me to my repository list. I'd pay money for that.
- ivanjermakov 4y agoForce your browser to open https://github.com/USERNAME?tab=repositories https://github.com/USERNAME?tab=repositories instead of the homepage by default by altering autocomplete priority (in Chrome[1], in Firefox[2]). [1]: https://superuser.com/a/1402013/1109910 https://superuser.com/a/1402013/1109910 [2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_how-can-i-control-what-results-the-address-bar-shows-me https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
- aliqot 4y agoThank you
- pferde 4y agoExactly - don't pay money, make your user agent work for you, the user.
- drexlspivey 4y agoor use a bookmark?
- Kiro 4y agoI want to code every single day for the rest of my life. I have no interest in vacations, traveling or any of that nonsense.
- mistrial9 4y ago(gamification) an expression of paternalism from the C_suite, who believe coders are basically ungrown children, and encouraging that for their own benefit IMHO
- teptoria 4y agoI think you’d find that young or old, dumb or smart, we all respond fairly attentively to gamification whether we like it or not
- einpoklum 4y ago"GitHub removed two counters from developer profiles that tracked their current and all-time longest streaks of uninterrupted daily contributions" Those the least significant aspect of gamification on GitHub. Stars, visits, downloads and maybe forks are what developers are interested in. And - strangely - the article seems to ignore them. "GitHub has gamification elements in the form of badges for projects." What, that stupid shark and cat icons? They're just embarrassing and I don't even remember what they mean. I found out I can turn them off and they were gone for good.
- youainti 4y agoBut those were the interventions removed so they could measure the impact.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- niels_bom 4y ago"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law?wprov=sfti1
- TomK32 4y ago'Goodhart's Law' – That every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure. -- Keith Hoskins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- niels_bom 4y agoWho’s Keith Hoskins? Goodhart’s Law was made by Charles Goodhart :-)
- maximilianroos 4y agoThis paper is cheerless — gamification for good should be celebrated! If we can make contributing to open source projects as exciting as playing Factorio or watching TikTok, that's a huge benefit to society. And even if we don't care about the benefits to society, it's also much better for the developers — they can be part of a community, know they're making an impact on the world, potentially get a better job through their passion. Is there a potential downside, that people build fewer human connections, spend less time with their family, delay finding a partner — sure. But is it more of a risk than with video games or their job? I can't see how we can draw that conclusion. So let's give contributors more status, and if that means more badges on GitHub, great.
- _c3ag 4y agocoding, specially for open-source projects does not even gets close on how much cognition you have to burn vs. watching TikTok… i would have someone coding with me excited by seeking knowledge rather than trying to reach level 75 on Github… not even mentioning what is gamification? are levels based on dark patterns on video-games, created with the intention of making players waste more time or get more addicted? and then what is the end point of having someone full of badges and trophies on their profile? to compare oneself with others and feel bad? have benefits over others that a hierarchical system has? append: i am not typing levels were created specifically for a dark-pattern introduction but nowadays, even if the game is not free, these practices are done to make players addicted. and i can not feel how someone really interested into get better at coding, would care
- porcoda 4y ago> If we can make contributing to open source projects as exciting as playing Factorio or watching TikTok, that's a huge benefit to society. If you suck at Factorio or waste time on TikTok, it doesn't really affect anyone else other than yourself and your direct friends/family. If you're contributing to OSS to earn points based solely on participation and not quality/value, you're having a negative effect on the signal-to-noise ratio and quality of the OSS community. That is NOT a huge benefit to society. Simple participation isn't inherently beneficial if that participation is just a source of noise. I speak as someone who has had to sift through and reject pull requests and issues from incompetent developers. I'd rather they not be encouraged to waste my time.
- dleslie 4y agoI'm going to buck the comment trend thus far and state that I enjoy the gamified experience. Getting an achievement in recognition of the open source work that I've done feels great, and honestly it's more positive recognition then I would normally receive for that same effort. I also appreciate the activity chart and graph, since they double as a way to monitor my productivity and therefore my energy. If I've felt that I had a bad week and the charts contradict this, then it's easier to stop myself from feeling down on myself. I am just a social mammal, after all; and a life long gamer. This works for me, but maybe not everyone.
- CapsAdmin 4y agoI also enjoyed it, but I was only coding on my own stuff back then for fun to pass time without having or thinking about a job. I can't imagine doing this on non-solo projects with other people's opinions involved. At the same time I'm glad it's gone as it seemed to cause more harm than good for other developers.
- ddxv 4y agoAs a very casual coder who wants 'in' to more coding, I really enjoy the gamification. I wish the mobile app had more of it, really has helped me progress and feel like I'm accomplishing something. I know they're just green dots but really helps me stay on track and keep practicing.
- lupire 4y agoThis is going to hurt you in the long run when it's time to actually write software for more than your own learning.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smcin 4y agoThe obvious concern is not that some existing legit users mightn't enjoy it; it's that the gamification will pollute the platform by incentivizing an influx of low-grade users, attention-seeking or annoying behavior, garbage commits, pointless chatter, non-issue issues, profiles stuffed with links to add SEO juice to low-grade profiles on social-media/LI/etc.; (the repo equivalent of "Follow, Like and Subscribe!"). How badly depends on how much github incentivize it. I guess we'll know if/when github has gone the way of FB/YT/IG is if/when people pay for fake/compensated followers to star a repo. I don't think we're there yet. Maybe a more constructive way to have this discussion is to subdivide github's social features into those that are good vs those that are open to be abused.
- giantg2 4y agoMy company constantly tries gamified stuff. It doesn't matter if you turn it into a game if I know the game is rigged.
- teej 4y ago> They urge caution: gamification can steer the behavior of software developers in unexpected and unwanted directions. Adding streak counters steers behavior towards maintaining streaks. That’s unexpected?
- jahsome 4y ago
- hjanssen 4y agoIt's very much interesting how gamification tickles the monkey parts of the brains of me and even the smartest people I know. We even know it's "stupid" or "useless" and still strive to make the number go up. Frankly, thats terrifying, now that I think about it. What a powerful tool.
- contingencies 4y agoFirst rule of HN club. Don't talk about the gamification. (Ssh... I pressed the triangle for you anyway.)
- lm28469 4y agoSame reason why obese people keep eating junk food and smokers have a hard time stopping, we're still monkeys, if you know which buttons you have to press you can make us do really unproductive/negative things We're still competing for food, attention, mates, &c. it's just that technology made it so convoluted and "unnatural" that we somehow don't even make the link anymore
- MrLeap 4y agoGamification affects all humans. This is why I'm making a text editor game, so people write more.
- throwaway0asd 4y agoAs someone completely oblivious to gamification on GitHub what is the primary motivation? Is this some form of social validation, like resume padding, or do people contribute to this behavior for some other quality. What goal does this fulfill?
- chillfox 4y agoRelease endorphins in the brain to make people contribute more to opensource than they otherwise would. It doesn't work on everyone and is extremely effective on a small group of people with most people being somewhere in between. It's basically an attempt at hacking brains to get more work for free.
- jesuscript 4y agoGamification works until it doesn’t. Ask the most addicted gamers that exhausted games they’ve played endlessly. It burns something out in your brain and you can never truly return to said game. Whatever. The burn out from gamification is of no consequence simply because the economy knows there are fresh bodies to take the place of the torched.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoI can't understand how anyone thinks github's commit graph is in any way meaningful. All it does it increase churn.
- bunabhucan 4y agoHas anyone written (or detected) software/scripts to game the gamification? 24/48h delay/scheduled git push so you can have a healthy work life balance while feigning to employers that you are a code machine.
- ivanjermakov 4y agoThere is even a tool[1] to draw images in commit history (so called gitifi). It is possible because git allows to create and push commit with arbitrary date, using GIT_AUTHOR_DATE env variable or --date flag. [1]: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
- gandalfgeek 4y agoSelf plug but in case you don't want to read the full paper here's a short 5 min video summary: https://youtu.be/pwYRVnmnnQc https://youtu.be/pwYRVnmnnQc
- adrianhon 4y agoSelf-link: I wrote about this excellent study in my recent book critiquing gamification, You’ve Been Played: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/adrian-hon/youve-been-played/9781541600171/ https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/adrian-hon/youve-been-play... Gamification is significantly more widespread and influential than commonly thought. We’re aware of it in our own corners of life and work, but less aware of how it’s being used on, e.g., truck drivers, gig economy workers, school students, video game players, and more.
- cgarvis 4y agoRecently read “Working in Public” where the author talks about how GitHub is to open source as the new feed was to Facebook/social networks
- Waterluvian 4y agoI worry just a bit that we will hit a critical mass of recruiters who don’t know any better, and these stupid achievements will begin to matter.
- ehnto 4y agoI try not to go through recruiters, but I also work exclusively at small companies so that's much easier to pull off. A much more human experience.
- andrei_says_ 4y agoGamification is manipulation and thus disrespectful.
- ehnto 4y agoWhenever I see someone with a very limited GitHub presence, what I actually think is "Ah, this person has a job." I've been in the industry for a while now and I even use github, but my profile is blank, because all my work is for private companies.
- FleaFlicker99 4y agoI worked as a contractor/freelancer for ages, and coming back into fulltime employee work I was appalled that this was actually considered to be relevant to my impact on the job site. Some of our clients used gitlab, which to github looked like a long stretch of zero activity. I'm sad that we as an industry use such simplistic and error prone metrics. The closer I get to the hiring side of things, the sadder I get.
- guynamedloren 4y agoThere's an option to include contribution activity from private repos. See the "Contribution settings" dropdown on your profile page.
- ryanjshaw 4y agoThis can easily be manipulated - people are literally writing scripts to do regular but random commits to private repos.
- TDiblik 4y agoI feel like companies don't use Github as much as individuals. I've seen Azure DevOps used a lot, Gitlab right behind that, Bitbucket as a third option, however I've yet to work for company using Github organizations. And I don't blame them tbh, Github for organizations, has less feafures, but costs a ton more than other alternatives. Other thing i've notices is that sometimes, bigger companies have special deals with Microsoft, that for example include some Azure DevOps features for free.
- feoren 4y agoDo the non-programming vice presidents at these companies know that you don't need a 3rd party host to use Git? That literally a networked file share is enough (assuming a decent VPN)? Oh, what am I saying, they're mid-level management. Of course a bloated paid solution involving a 3rd party vendor wins over simplicity. Otherwise they'd be out of jobs!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smcameron 4y agoYeah, I currently have a project on github with 665 stars, and I am anxiously awaiting the moment it receives 666 stars.
- antirez 4y agoThe wall of contributions (with different degrees of green) is also pretty ill conceived, with a 1000 lines of code commit having the same value (one contribution) than opening an issue.
- wink 4y agoI'm not discarding the study or the many anecdotes I heard, but I'm still chuckling because as someone who loves gamification and achievements in game, I was always completely ignoring this on Github. Which would be more apt if I was a 9-to-5 programmer but I only ever had one job that primarily used Github (after they introduced this stuff, I'm pretty sure except that graph there was nothing pre 2013), but the majority of my activity is just fun projects and open source work.
- drdrek 4y ago"They urge caution: gamification can steer the behavior of software developers in unexpected and unwanted directions" What do you mean unexpected and unwanted? It is the stated purpose of gamification to steer the behavior of the user. And I'm sure that in Github they worked very hard to create the incentives for exactly the type of behaviors they found.
- d0mine 4y agoYes, gamification can be great for encouraging the desired behavior. The question is whether the behavior desired by microsoft is aligned with devs interests.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoTIL (actually YIL) that you can turn off the stupid badges. I could have figured it out, anyway, by simply going through the settings, but I didn't. GH is a place that I can store and share my work. It isn't a social media outlet. In fact, this here venue is about the only place I engage folks, nowadays.
- bombolo 4y agoIf you do it also removes all the repos links from your homepage. Including pinned repos.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoNo, my pinned repos are still there: https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff I just don't have the stupid cat with the starry eyes.
- lm28469 4y agoBreaking news: we're still just bald monkeys, show us the banana and we'll jump through the loops
- Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 4y agoI just recently made my github activities private, also blocked part of the github UI (for example achievements, profile avatars), and removed all my stars from repositories and instead made a 'repos' bookmarks folder to put interesting projects in. (I do the same for many platforms, in the sense of bookmarking stuff instead of using platform-built-in features to 'save' something - what an illusionary save as well...). I don't want to be locked in, I also don't want to be manipulated by shiny virtual crap. Activities also is such a poor metric. On many days I have simply one commit, because it's a night of programming followed by one push to the repo... friend of mine wrote a script that makes one-line changes to a file and pushes regularly, so his activity chart looks great... (his first idea was to have it spell something out) The trend with github seems obvious, it'll be a linkedin dev-hiring social media crap-platform people stay on for visibility and many developers eventually won't know how to use git outside of it... (and we hear the cries of "I'd like to contribute but it's not on github..." and some projects will see it as a feature of being not on github to keep those kind of people away). So many things are going to sh*t... and people like it, which is the worst. sourcehut.org is a nice alternative (I have an account). I also wish more people would just host their own gitea instances.