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This paper is about how gamification affects behavior, not about it being some sort of social platform. Every platform was "social X" around the time github sta
by Supermancho 4y ago
This paper is about how gamification affects behavior, not about it being some sort of social platform. Every platform was "social X" around the time github started up. Lots of sites have social elements and it never amounted to them being called social X either. Sure you can use those features in some sort of gamesmanship, but generally it's not used that way and so few people care that it's laughable.
> "social coding"
Social coding is not Github's primary function and it's hasn't been promoted in earnest, this way because it's secondary at best. Ostensibly, it's hosted git. That's the naming, the function, and most developers think of it as such. The vast majority of users are either corporate developers who work for some company and can't care less about the "social" aspects of it or insular developers with projects that never see the light of day.
Notably, this paper only sourced public repositories, where many people use it as an element of their work portfolio. This doesn't speak to "all of github".
- lupire 4y agoIt's GitHub, not GitHost. hub /həb/ noun 1. the central part of a wheel, rotating on or with the axle, and from which the spokes radiate. 2. the effective center of an activity, region, or network. "the city has always been the financial hub of the country"
- matheusmoreira 4y agoMaybe it should become GitHost then. The only thing I want from GitHub is a pretty web page where I can browse git repositories.
- scrollaway 4y agoSo a website used by millions should become what you want it to become, not what others use it for?
- matheusmoreira 4y agoIf this thread is any indication, yes. GitHub only gets ever more toxic with this gamified social media stuff.
- scrollaway 4y agoYou're under the impression that the few people in this thread complaining about the social aspects on Github is a greater force than the massive amount of people USING their social aspects?
- matheusmoreira 4y agoActually yeah. The stuff we're discussing here matters. The behavior of developers is being shaped by these designs in absolutely harmful ways. I would know, I've been down that rabbit hole myself with video games and other "gamefied" apps. Look at the article: > We find that the unannounced removal of daily activity streak counters from the user interface (from user profile pages) was followed by significant changes in behavior. > Long-running streaks of activity were abandoned and became less common. > Weekend activity decreased and days in which developers made a single contribution became less common. > Focusing on a set of software developers that were publicly pursuing a goal to make contributions for 100 days in a row, we find that some of these developers abandon this quest following the removal of the public streak counter. Look at this bullshit. People doing work just to maintain their streaks. People making literally one contribution just to keep it up. That's fucked up and needs to be fixed. Nobody deserves this operant conditioning stuff.
- scrollaway 4y agoThere's fixes that can be made (and Github is aware of), without turning Github into cgit. I don't want that and pretty much nobody wants that - those who do, already use cgit.
- nuc1e0n 4y agoConceptually, I like that Github has social aspects to it. But Github needs to be more careful about what they emphasise. IMHO the existing mechanisms they have reward rather toxic behaviour.
- lanstin 4y agohttps://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb Git is absolutely trivial to use in a fully decentralized fashion. GitHub and GitLabs success shows how much people don't want to run their own servers.
- replygirl 4y agosocial networks are hub-and-spoke? which of us is the hub? financial hubs don't _host_ financial institutions and their assets?