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It's already been mentioned but this use case for watching a project is called a bookmark. I watch projects where I actually care about and want to see the cha

It's already been mentioned but this use case for watching a project is called a bookmark. I watch projects where I actually care about and want to see the changes. Because I'm doing actual useful things and the social aspects of github help me do that. I'm not on github to engage in some kind of social network circle jerk popularity contest to collect the most "watchers". I know a lot of people are and it makes them feel really important to follow a bunch of projects and pretend they're "in the know" or part of the project just because they clicked the watch button. But every site doesn't need it's own different kind of bookmarks, that's a stupid waste of time. Other startups do it to drive viral growth or to "increase engagement" or some other BS reason. Github drives growth by being useful to developers and other collaborators. As soon as they start sacrificing power for people collaborating on code projects in order to satisfy the fanboys they risk losing their primary draw, the good projects that use github because it's useful. I doubt this will happen, although I can definitely see why they would add an in-site bookmark to appease this crowd since they apparently don't know how to use client side bookmarks.

stock_toaster 15y ago
My client side bookmarks tend to be a bit of a black hole (or possibly a thunderdome). Many things enter, but very few find their way back out to my eyeballs. Perhaps I have bookmark-itus. I bookmark many things I may find interesting later, or want to remember. I end up searching through my bookmarks more often than not, because there are so many of them. As to watching, I use it to get notified if a project I am interested in has updated, made changes that are meaningful to me, or has come back to life after a long silent period, or if it is something I want to look into later but don't particularly want to have the full update feed for. That last part would be fulfilled handily by an internal github 'star' or 'bookmark' system. There are stars for gists, why not projects? *note: I use pinboard.in, which is great.
- freshhawk 15y ago
  Yeah, I think I might have been too harsh on the star idea. I absolutely have bookmark-itus, but because of that I have a good bookmark system where I can set a date or interval for it to remind me that the bookmark exists. I think I took this idea from the GTD tickler concept. I can see the use case for "tell me if this project has done something interesting (determine that magically) but I don't want to see every commit cluttering my feed" type features on github. Just don't break the feed to do it. It's clearly a secondary use case for the feed. I'm also not sure if this use case is something actually useful rather than just stimulating to users. A site using this idea and github integration along with some Zynga math to optimize the dopamine dispensing combined with twitter, HN and the rest of social news would make sure that I felt like a hacker and never actually produced anything.
  - stock_toaster 15y ago
    I agree that breaking the feed would be wrong. The feed should include everything. I also feel that github would be well served to provide an alternative mechanism to 'remember' projects so users can stop trying to shoehorn the functionality of the feed to suit that need.
mattbriggs 15y ago
I agree with the bits about how coding to gain watchers is silly, but I disagree about how people watching loads of stuff is bad. I follow interesting people, and my number one source of finding cool new things is looking at the stuff they follow. It has nothing to do with fanboyism, and everything to do with discovery
- freshhawk 15y ago
  It's not that watching loads of stuff is bad, but that editing or messing with the feed of changes from those watched projects in a facebook way is bad. I also find the social aspect of github useful for discovery and there could be some new useful features around that use. But certainly not by breaking the watch feature to optimize for passive bulk watching.

stock_toaster 15y ago

My client side bookmarks tend to be a bit of a black hole (or possibly a thunderdome). Many things enter, but very few find their way back out to my eyeballs. Perhaps I have bookmark-itus. I bookmark many things I may find interesting later, or want to remember. I end up searching through my bookmarks more often than not, because there are so many of them. As to watching, I use it to get notified if a project I am interested in has updated, made changes that are meaningful to me, or has come back to life after a long silent period, or if it is something I want to look into later but don't particularly want to have the full update feed for. That last part would be fulfilled handily by an internal github 'star' or 'bookmark' system. There are stars for gists, why not projects? *note: I use pinboard.in, which is great.

freshhawk 15y ago
Yeah, I think I might have been too harsh on the star idea. I absolutely have bookmark-itus, but because of that I have a good bookmark system where I can set a date or interval for it to remind me that the bookmark exists. I think I took this idea from the GTD tickler concept. I can see the use case for "tell me if this project has done something interesting (determine that magically) but I don't want to see every commit cluttering my feed" type features on github. Just don't break the feed to do it. It's clearly a secondary use case for the feed. I'm also not sure if this use case is something actually useful rather than just stimulating to users. A site using this idea and github integration along with some Zynga math to optimize the dopamine dispensing combined with twitter, HN and the rest of social news would make sure that I felt like a hacker and never actually produced anything.
- stock_toaster 15y ago
  I agree that breaking the feed would be wrong. The feed should include everything. I also feel that github would be well served to provide an alternative mechanism to 'remember' projects so users can stop trying to shoehorn the functionality of the feed to suit that need.

mattbriggs 15y ago

I agree with the bits about how coding to gain watchers is silly, but I disagree about how people watching loads of stuff is bad. I follow interesting people, and my number one source of finding cool new things is looking at the stuff they follow. It has nothing to do with fanboyism, and everything to do with discovery

freshhawk 15y ago
It's not that watching loads of stuff is bad, but that editing or messing with the feed of changes from those watched projects in a facebook way is bad. I also find the social aspect of github useful for discovery and there could be some new useful features around that use. But certainly not by breaking the watch feature to optimize for passive bulk watching.