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I disagree. I don't have a button on Facebook for "bookmarking someone." Facebook's news feed has managed to keep the news feed relevant despite massive socia

I disagree. I don't have a button on Facebook for "bookmarking someone." Facebook's news feed has managed to keep the news feed relevant despite massive social changes in my lifetime Facebook usage (everything from high school, to college, to working as a professional software engineer). A new button will not fix Github's news feed problem. Making the news feed more relevant to users will.

swang 15y ago
Facebook has metrics like, how often you browse that person's page, how often you comment on that person's post and vice versa. But could you apply it to GitHub where all you care about in Project X is Feature Y or Issue Z? I guess the easiest way is if you could somehow figure out that the pages the User was looking and commenting on all related to one thing, such as CSS issues or problems with C pointers and only display those issues. I'm not sure if that is doable but the people at GitHub probably don't have the necessary resources to devote to implementing this (at least in the near future), whereas Facebook has more engineers, resources, data, and time to throw at the problem.
mindcrime 15y ago
Facebook's news feed has managed to keep the news feed relevant despite massive social changes in my lifetime Facebook usage (everything from high school, to college, to working as a professional software engineer). Maybe for you, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I find the Facebook news feed to be just about as useful as the Github news feed... which is to say, totally useless. The problem, as I see it, is that G+, Twitter, Github, etc. all make the same fundamental mistake... assuming that "connecting" to an "entity" means "I want to see every update from/about this entity." So, I "friend" somebody on G+ or "watch" a project on Github, now I'm on the hook to see all their updates. But there's NO particular reason to think that the above assertion holds. At best, "friending" a person or "watching" a project says you're more interested in it/them than a random project/person. These "event stream" implementations really need one or both of two things: The ability to specify more about what it is you're interested in, and smarter ML algorithms to figure out what to show you, based on both declared (or, for that matter, inferred) interests, and social connections, OR the ability to specify filters to exclude "stuff you don't want." If I had to choose, I'd ask for the latter. Better filters would go a long way towards giving us control of our streams / news-feeds. I'd like, for example to be able to say "I don't want any pictures of cats with funny hats, regardless of who posted them, in my stream." Or, in the Github example "I don't want any commits from project $FOO in my stream." If I'd seen much (or any) evidence to suggest that the machine learning stuff was smart enough to give me a truly meaningful feed without manual tweaking, I would care less about filters, but so far I'm just not seeing it. Facebook appear to try, but my feed there is still full of crap because they assume too much based on who I follow, not what I'm interested in. <rant-over />
jerf 15y ago
'I don't have a button on Facebook for "bookmarking someone."' Facebook and GitHub live in different problem spaces and may need different solutions. You probably don't have one friend that literally posts 200 times more posts than your average friend, but GitHub commits can very easily have this sort of pathological distribution. They're going to need to deal with that in a way that Facebook does not. Pathological distributions can really be a pain in general. This sort of spiky, long-tail distribution can wreck up a lot of good plans. For that matter, contra some suggestions about "machine learning" solving the problem I'd lay a few bucks that "commits I'm interested in" is so pathologically distributed that it is effectively unlearnable itself.
rimantas 15y ago
> A new button will not fix Github's news feed problem But it will fix a problem a lot of people have: "I want to remember this project, but I don't care about news from it".
- rsanchez1 15y ago
  This is my problem exactly.
bfirsh 15y ago
Facebook have nailed it. On GitHub, watched projects could show up in your feed by default, but you can hide them if they turn out to be too verbose.

swang 15y ago

Facebook has metrics like, how often you browse that person's page, how often you comment on that person's post and vice versa. But could you apply it to GitHub where all you care about in Project X is Feature Y or Issue Z? I guess the easiest way is if you could somehow figure out that the pages the User was looking and commenting on all related to one thing, such as CSS issues or problems with C pointers and only display those issues. I'm not sure if that is doable but the people at GitHub probably don't have the necessary resources to devote to implementing this (at least in the near future), whereas Facebook has more engineers, resources, data, and time to throw at the problem.

mindcrime 15y ago

Facebook's news feed has managed to keep the news feed relevant despite massive social changes in my lifetime Facebook usage (everything from high school, to college, to working as a professional software engineer). Maybe for you, but my experience is exactly the opposite. I find the Facebook news feed to be just about as useful as the Github news feed... which is to say, totally useless. The problem, as I see it, is that G+, Twitter, Github, etc. all make the same fundamental mistake... assuming that "connecting" to an "entity" means "I want to see every update from/about this entity." So, I "friend" somebody on G+ or "watch" a project on Github, now I'm on the hook to see all their updates. But there's NO particular reason to think that the above assertion holds. At best, "friending" a person or "watching" a project says you're more interested in it/them than a random project/person. These "event stream" implementations really need one or both of two things: The ability to specify more about what it is you're interested in, and smarter ML algorithms to figure out what to show you, based on both declared (or, for that matter, inferred) interests, and social connections, OR the ability to specify filters to exclude "stuff you don't want." If I had to choose, I'd ask for the latter. Better filters would go a long way towards giving us control of our streams / news-feeds. I'd like, for example to be able to say "I don't want any pictures of cats with funny hats, regardless of who posted them, in my stream." Or, in the Github example "I don't want any commits from project $FOO in my stream." If I'd seen much (or any) evidence to suggest that the machine learning stuff was smart enough to give me a truly meaningful feed without manual tweaking, I would care less about filters, but so far I'm just not seeing it. Facebook appear to try, but my feed there is still full of crap because they assume too much based on who I follow, not what I'm interested in. <rant-over />

jerf 15y ago

'I don't have a button on Facebook for "bookmarking someone."' Facebook and GitHub live in different problem spaces and may need different solutions. You probably don't have one friend that literally posts 200 times more posts than your average friend, but GitHub commits can very easily have this sort of pathological distribution. They're going to need to deal with that in a way that Facebook does not. Pathological distributions can really be a pain in general. This sort of spiky, long-tail distribution can wreck up a lot of good plans. For that matter, contra some suggestions about "machine learning" solving the problem I'd lay a few bucks that "commits I'm interested in" is so pathologically distributed that it is effectively unlearnable itself.

rimantas 15y ago

> A new button will not fix Github's news feed problem But it will fix a problem a lot of people have: "I want to remember this project, but I don't care about news from it".

rsanchez1 15y ago
This is my problem exactly.

bfirsh 15y ago

Facebook have nailed it. On GitHub, watched projects could show up in your feed by default, but you can hide them if they turn out to be too verbose.