>> But why do we care? Does everyone post to Github for the circle jerk of attention? > Ugh, I hate that the term "circle jerk" is being applied to "a place wh

>> But why do we care? Does everyone post to Github for the circle jerk of attention? > Ugh, I hate that the term "circle jerk" is being applied to "a place where people share things they have made." Well, I did not mean to sound superior. I do not think I can code well enough to look down at other people for coding ability. I just feel that people increasingly, like any social network, will work on projects on Github for attention and the content is questionable or strange. Social is transforming to a place to socialize, and the latter I do not like for Github or anywhere else for enthusiast programming. Recently, I had an idea because I got sick of TinyTinyRSS, a PHP-based feed reader with some good mobile app integration. I wrote a small README, uploaded a SVG of the MySQL DB structure to get an idea, and had not written any of the Python I described. I received three stars a week later, and not a single line of code yet. How does that even make sense? My point is people go around look for attention without effort. Yes, I know this describes every social network. I dislike them. You can balk at that ironically, because I am here, ostensibly another social network in different orange wrapper. Nonetheless, the kind of voting and sometimes absurd comment threads in nerd wars, like the whole Node.js commit changing gender and the Joyent employee who lost his job over it, were disgusting. I understood both sides of that issue, but people were declaring there sides with superfluous commentary in the pull request comments, and the hundred or so comments supporting various views on women and IT and superfluous garbage showed it was a hot topic. No one wanted to debate the merits of the commit or how to handle the issue as it pertained to the Node community with that specific issue, of course. It was just an angry Facebookesque flameware on Github. I hoped I would not see Github turn into that. I foolishly assumed it would be a long time before I saw that because, like it or not, computer culture, especially open source stuff, is still fringe. It is this that bothers me. Some people write cutesy meaningless libraries to get attention. I probably write garbage, code far worse than anyone of that ilk. But what I do not like is the stress Github is now turning the celebration of open programming and collaboration into, merely a celebrity contest. I cannot find the talk by one of the Node guys talking about how he started to be really affected by the number of stars he received on projects (and this is a guy that had projects in Node with sometimes three or four digits in his star count! I never broke more than 1, on anything). He said it ruined his focus drive and he had to re-center himself. My point here, whether you disagree or not, is that a social network for coding does not mean a socializing network where it is playground for different cliques, with random bullies and popular kids looking down at you. Github is not that yet, but my point was that prioritizing attention-getting when working in open source projects seems quite contrary to me. Ask Richard Hipp.