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Ask HN: Why aren't [private] GitHub contributions (in aggregate) public?
I've investigated this and it looks like Github has it's own endpoint just for serving the green yearly contribution data that appears on your profile in the form of date:count_contributions ("2015-06-08" : 2 for example).
I only contribute to private repos so it looks to everyone else like I do nothing, when really i'm on a 10 day streak.
Does anyone know why they privatize this data? Seems to me like it's overkill...
- partisan 11y agoPerhaps an option to make this public would be useful, but how helpful is the metric without context?
- athesyn 11y agoThey've known about this for years, don't think it's a high priority for them to ever change it. What I suggest is moving non-commercial personal projects over to github so there's at least some activity showing.
- wmil 11y agoTwo reasons. First, they want to push people to open source small personal projects and contribute to large OSS projects. Doing anything with an open project, even just filing bug reports, counts towards your streak. Second, it's more of a novelty thing since your contrib count is very easy to hack. Just generate a local repo with commits on the days you want and upload it.
- wodenokoto 11y agobecause you can make useless private commits and look like you are super active and no one can check up on you.
- zck 11y agoBecause it's private data? Now, they could make it -- on an opt-in basis -- work the way you want, but I'm going to applaud a company that is erring on the side of keeping private data private.
- davidhariri 11y agoAgreed. To close the discussion, I think it should be an option in settings.