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What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "B

by aggronn 14y ago

What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?". Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume must be business purposes. This must be hyperbole. That would make sense.

paulsutter 14y ago
I think the central point of the story is that github is more like a social network than many of us realize. It's interesting, and could indicate some useful future direction for the service. if the story were titled "Github - a major social network" or "Github - more of a social network than you may think", would that change your opinion of the story? It's surprising to me how much of the criticism here on hacker news ignores the central point of the article, and instead focuses in on individual phrases or semantics. I agree with you that they could have chosen a better title. But I found the article interesting and thought provoking.
- aggronn 14y ago
  I don't think the criticism you're refering to is frequently directly at the articles; They're reactions to link-bait. Link-bait depends on sensationalism, which I think is opposite the goals of HN, so people don't respond to it well. Nevermind that its inherently misleading, which isn't a way to endear readers. It hurts credibility, etc..
  - paulsutter 14y ago
    Your criticism of the title would be more credible if you also acknowledged the point he was making. As it stands you came across as dismissing the entire article as stupid. And I wonder if the hyperbole in the title is really link bait, or just the opposite, troll bait. I'm not sure the title helped the article's ranking on HN.
    - aggronn 14y ago
      I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what "troll bait" is in this context. I'm not following.
tuke 14y ago
Guess you should write your own blog post. :-)
- aggronn 14y ago
  "The Most Important Social Network: Real Life"
  - tuke 14y ago
    Good one.
Argorak 14y ago
I think his point is that Github is about actual work artifacts, while all other business networks are basically talk about a more or less specific topic - more flexible, but also less focused. Github is much closer to the topic at hand. There is almost no way around attaching comments to a piece of code.
- jordo37 14y ago
  But Github is about one specific kind of real work. The conversations that happen on Jive and Yammer are also real work, as are the documents made in corporate/public wikis (which are studied extensively) and the work assets made and stored in SharePoint and Google Docs. I don't disagree with the author's premise that GitHub is great and should be studied, but it only covers one small portion of one type of work.
  - Argorak 14y ago
    You missed the tiny little word "artifact". The discussions on Yammer and Jive are work related and are part of the process, but are not rarely directly attached to an artifact. You would talk about the artifact, but its not "there". It is produced somewhere else, in the depths of IT. That doesn't mean that Yammer ain't interesting. SharePoint and Google Docs are not social networks. They are sharing solutions like Dropbox is. Your corporate wiki might qualify, but thats hard to study.
    - jordo37 14y ago
      I did not miss the word, just disagreed with his premise that assets are an important distinction. That being said, wikis are not hard to study, its incredibly common and they are high on the list of the favorite things to discuss among collaboration researchers and have been for years - I've experienced this working with several, but you can also look at research such as http://www.citeulike.org/group/1136/article/114322 http://www.citeulike.org/group/1136/article/114322 to see more.
dochtman 14y ago
He uses a metric for importance other than just size. That said, his points that there were 600000 software developers in the US 10 years ago and more than a million GitHub members now, SO there must be significant developer mindshare seems nonsensical unless maybe if you assume GitHub is completely dominated by Americans, which anecdotally doesn't seem the case to me (I spent a few minutes looking for a breakdown of users by country, but didn't see any). Also, confirmation bias.
- tuke 14y ago
  For sure about the confirmation bias, but I would propose that the post is meant to encourage scholars to come up with their own falsifiables and prove it one way or another. The 600,000 vs 1,000,000 means: A lot of Americans, and the excess are people who are not from the USA or have multiple accounts. But the main point is that in gross numbers many of those 600,000 have accounts.
eevilspock 14y ago
Because the thing that overthrows Facebook could very well be collaboratively created on GitHub. The conflict between Facebook's business interests and its user's interests is the biggest painpoint and thus most ripe for disruption.
- Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
  > Note also that Linux powers Facebook, Google and much of the rest of the web, and Linux itself relies on GitHub for collaborative developement. Now that is not even hyperbole, but just plain incorrect. Linux does have an official git mirror on github. None of the development of Linux is done via GitHub.
  - eevilspock 14y ago
    Thanks. I removed the false statement as it was ancillary anyway. That said, in import it was not false. Linux is collaboratively developed using Git, and as Torvalds himself said when he did temporarily move Linux kernel dev onto GitHub, "But hey, the whole point (well, one of the points) of distributed development is that no single place is really any different from any other, so since I did a github account for my divelog thing, why not see how well it holds up to me just putting my whole kernel repo there too?" I'd not be surprised if he makes a permanent move once GitHub fixes a few things: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546.... On the other hand, he is a known control freak.
- readme 14y ago
  I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever. It's planted very firmly. Backed by mega corps and huge international banks. Facebook is down right scary in the way it has permeated the life of almost every person on the globe. It's monolithic and we have little insight into what they will actually do with all of our data. A little government + facebook cooperation and we'll really be a dystopia. With that said, I don't use Facebook and hope some more people wake up and smell the coffee too. We need a decentralized network, as that is the only way to avoid corruption.
philwelch 14y ago
100 people creating value >> 1 billion people wasting time.

by aggronn 14y ago

paulsutter 14y ago

I think the central point of the story is that github is more like a social network than many of us realize. It's interesting, and could indicate some useful future direction for the service. if the story were titled "Github - a major social network" or "Github - more of a social network than you may think", would that change your opinion of the story? It's surprising to me how much of the criticism here on hacker news ignores the central point of the article, and instead focuses in on individual phrases or semantics. I agree with you that they could have chosen a better title. But I found the article interesting and thought provoking.

aggronn 14y ago
I don't think the criticism you're refering to is frequently directly at the articles; They're reactions to link-bait. Link-bait depends on sensationalism, which I think is opposite the goals of HN, so people don't respond to it well. Nevermind that its inherently misleading, which isn't a way to endear readers. It hurts credibility, etc..
- paulsutter 14y ago
  Your criticism of the title would be more credible if you also acknowledged the point he was making. As it stands you came across as dismissing the entire article as stupid. And I wonder if the hyperbole in the title is really link bait, or just the opposite, troll bait. I'm not sure the title helped the article's ranking on HN.
  - aggronn 14y ago
    I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what "troll bait" is in this context. I'm not following.

tuke 14y ago

Guess you should write your own blog post. :-)

aggronn 14y ago
"The Most Important Social Network: Real Life"
- tuke 14y ago
  Good one.

Argorak 14y ago

I think his point is that Github is about actual work artifacts, while all other business networks are basically talk about a more or less specific topic - more flexible, but also less focused. Github is much closer to the topic at hand. There is almost no way around attaching comments to a piece of code.

jordo37 14y ago
But Github is about one specific kind of real work. The conversations that happen on Jive and Yammer are also real work, as are the documents made in corporate/public wikis (which are studied extensively) and the work assets made and stored in SharePoint and Google Docs. I don't disagree with the author's premise that GitHub is great and should be studied, but it only covers one small portion of one type of work.
- Argorak 14y ago
  You missed the tiny little word "artifact". The discussions on Yammer and Jive are work related and are part of the process, but are not rarely directly attached to an artifact. You would talk about the artifact, but its not "there". It is produced somewhere else, in the depths of IT. That doesn't mean that Yammer ain't interesting. SharePoint and Google Docs are not social networks. They are sharing solutions like Dropbox is. Your corporate wiki might qualify, but thats hard to study.
  - jordo37 14y ago
    I did not miss the word, just disagreed with his premise that assets are an important distinction. That being said, wikis are not hard to study, its incredibly common and they are high on the list of the favorite things to discuss among collaboration researchers and have been for years - I've experienced this working with several, but you can also look at research such as http://www.citeulike.org/group/1136/article/114322 http://www.citeulike.org/group/1136/article/114322 to see more.

dochtman 14y ago

He uses a metric for importance other than just size. That said, his points that there were 600000 software developers in the US 10 years ago and more than a million GitHub members now, SO there must be significant developer mindshare seems nonsensical unless maybe if you assume GitHub is completely dominated by Americans, which anecdotally doesn't seem the case to me (I spent a few minutes looking for a breakdown of users by country, but didn't see any). Also, confirmation bias.

tuke 14y ago
For sure about the confirmation bias, but I would propose that the post is meant to encourage scholars to come up with their own falsifiables and prove it one way or another. The 600,000 vs 1,000,000 means: A lot of Americans, and the excess are people who are not from the USA or have multiple accounts. But the main point is that in gross numbers many of those 600,000 have accounts.

eevilspock 14y ago

Because the thing that overthrows Facebook could very well be collaboratively created on GitHub. The conflict between Facebook's business interests and its user's interests is the biggest painpoint and thus most ripe for disruption.

Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
> Note also that Linux powers Facebook, Google and much of the rest of the web, and Linux itself relies on GitHub for collaborative developement. Now that is not even hyperbole, but just plain incorrect. Linux does have an official git mirror on github. None of the development of Linux is done via GitHub.
- eevilspock 14y ago
  Thanks. I removed the false statement as it was ancillary anyway. That said, in import it was not false. Linux is collaboratively developed using Git, and as Torvalds himself said when he did temporarily move Linux kernel dev onto GitHub, "But hey, the whole point (well, one of the points) of distributed development is that no single place is really any different from any other, so since I did a github account for my divelog thing, why not see how well it holds up to me just putting my whole kernel repo there too?" I'd not be surprised if he makes a permanent move once GitHub fixes a few things: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546.... On the other hand, he is a known control freak.
readme 14y ago
I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever. It's planted very firmly. Backed by mega corps and huge international banks. Facebook is down right scary in the way it has permeated the life of almost every person on the globe. It's monolithic and we have little insight into what they will actually do with all of our data. A little government + facebook cooperation and we'll really be a dystopia. With that said, I don't use Facebook and hope some more people wake up and smell the coffee too. We need a decentralized network, as that is the only way to avoid corruption.

philwelch 14y ago

100 people creating value >> 1 billion people wasting time.