5 ms·

there's various reasons webs-of-trust don't takeoff, but I can imagine a system where the metrics I see are only aggregated from friends-of-friends, and any oth

there's various reasons webs-of-trust don't takeoff, but I can imagine a system where the metrics I see are only aggregated from friends-of-friends, and any other signal is just considered untrustworthy and therefor not worth observing

drusepth 2y ago
Do you still trust that system when your friends-of-friends are the ones gaming the system? Given the inherent network effects of manipulating webs of trust, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone had at least one friend-of-a-friend they shouldn't necessarily trust.
- morkalork 2y ago
  Given all the obvious bots and sketchy recruiters that try to connect with me on LinkedIn, who all appear to have at least one mutual connection, it probably won't work.
  - jagged-chisel 2y ago
    Do we have a similar issue on GH? I think the nature of the service and its target audience affect this problem in a big way. You can follow anyone on GH, but there's no mutual connection option at all. LI has following and mutual connections. LI also has a much wider audience. How might a 'connection' look on GH? Will people freely connect, or will they appraise requests more closely?
wruza 2y ago
I can imagine access to raw data instead of some stupid come-on-game-me-able predefined indicator, and that I can run some private statistical analysis over it. People would use (and share) different algorithms and gamers will at least wander through this collectively created mud without any understanding except for the defaultest measures. But of course this is too complex and “no one will use it” (tm). So we’ll better have a screwed up recommendation system that doesn’t work at all, cause that’s simpler!
codetrotter 2y ago
I can only speak for me personally. For me the way that I use GitHub I don’t think the concept of “friends of friends” would be all that useful on GitHub. There are a handful of people that I know IRL that I follow on GitHub. And a few hundred that I follow in total. Out of the handful of people I know IRL, and who I follow on GitHub, only two or three of them are active there any given week. All of the other people I follow I have very little idea who they are. Usually I follow people I don’t know if I come across their profile and either the profile itself or their projects make me follow them. But I star way more different repos than the number of people I click follow on. For me, the main way of discovering new repos are: - Frontpage of HN, and comments in posts on HN. - Specific search results on Google when I have searched for libraries or programs that do specific things. - Libraries on crates.io that I think might be interesting to look into in the future. Maybe once or twice a month I happen to click on the main page of GitHub itself and see mentions of repos that have been committed to or starred or created by people I follow. So for me I don’t think “friends of friends” is a particularly great signal for things to look at. Most of the people I follow, I don’t know much about them. Likewise, for anyone that follows me it’s not necessarily any strong signal that I follow someone else in order to determine if activity from that someone else should be shown or weighted as more significant to my follower just because I happen to follow that other person. If you do want a strong signal for who to boost for my followers based on my own activity, go and look at the dependencies that I am using in my own projects. That’s a pretty good indicator that I put some amount of effort and interest into looking at something. This could be done by GitHub itself, parsing the Cargo.toml files of my projects and extracting the dependencies section and looking up which of those dependencies are hosted on GitHub.
kube-system 2y ago
Maybe so, but in this case, I don't think 'stars' is a good candidate for one of those metrics. I think the people worried about 'fake stars' are doing it wrong, and should just ignore the metric entirely.
yencabulator 2y ago
For my account, only count stars by the top 50% of the contributors to the projects I have starred?

drusepth 2y ago

Do you still trust that system when your friends-of-friends are the ones gaming the system? Given the inherent network effects of manipulating webs of trust, I wouldn't be surprised if everyone had at least one friend-of-a-friend they shouldn't necessarily trust.

morkalork 2y ago
Given all the obvious bots and sketchy recruiters that try to connect with me on LinkedIn, who all appear to have at least one mutual connection, it probably won't work.
- jagged-chisel 2y ago
  Do we have a similar issue on GH? I think the nature of the service and its target audience affect this problem in a big way. You can follow anyone on GH, but there's no mutual connection option at all. LI has following and mutual connections. LI also has a much wider audience. How might a 'connection' look on GH? Will people freely connect, or will they appraise requests more closely?

wruza 2y ago

I can imagine access to raw data instead of some stupid come-on-game-me-able predefined indicator, and that I can run some private statistical analysis over it. People would use (and share) different algorithms and gamers will at least wander through this collectively created mud without any understanding except for the defaultest measures. But of course this is too complex and “no one will use it” (tm). So we’ll better have a screwed up recommendation system that doesn’t work at all, cause that’s simpler!

codetrotter 2y ago

I can only speak for me personally. For me the way that I use GitHub I don’t think the concept of “friends of friends” would be all that useful on GitHub. There are a handful of people that I know IRL that I follow on GitHub. And a few hundred that I follow in total. Out of the handful of people I know IRL, and who I follow on GitHub, only two or three of them are active there any given week. All of the other people I follow I have very little idea who they are. Usually I follow people I don’t know if I come across their profile and either the profile itself or their projects make me follow them. But I star way more different repos than the number of people I click follow on. For me, the main way of discovering new repos are: - Frontpage of HN, and comments in posts on HN. - Specific search results on Google when I have searched for libraries or programs that do specific things. - Libraries on crates.io that I think might be interesting to look into in the future. Maybe once or twice a month I happen to click on the main page of GitHub itself and see mentions of repos that have been committed to or starred or created by people I follow. So for me I don’t think “friends of friends” is a particularly great signal for things to look at. Most of the people I follow, I don’t know much about them. Likewise, for anyone that follows me it’s not necessarily any strong signal that I follow someone else in order to determine if activity from that someone else should be shown or weighted as more significant to my follower just because I happen to follow that other person. If you do want a strong signal for who to boost for my followers based on my own activity, go and look at the dependencies that I am using in my own projects. That’s a pretty good indicator that I put some amount of effort and interest into looking at something. This could be done by GitHub itself, parsing the Cargo.toml files of my projects and extracting the dependencies section and looking up which of those dependencies are hosted on GitHub.

kube-system 2y ago

Maybe so, but in this case, I don't think 'stars' is a good candidate for one of those metrics. I think the people worried about 'fake stars' are doing it wrong, and should just ignore the metric entirely.

yencabulator 2y ago

For my account, only count stars by the top 50% of the contributors to the projects I have starred?