Comment by cxr
5 years ago
> Sometimes it feels like software development has devolved into a sea of posturing and marketing oneself.
I've been saying it for a long time, but the reason that this and other problems (like high developer burnout) seem like especially bad problems that the world of "software development" is facing is primarily because they're especially bad in the GitHub culture (and as a consequence of that culture), and the developers who are experiencing the worst of it are part of that community. Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.
Much like follower counts on other social media sites, GitHub's contribution graph and profile timeline should have never been public. They should have been neat features of your personal dashboard that you alone are able to see when you're signed in—providing some form of encouragement à la the Seinfeld hack and to help you manage your work—but not for others' eyes. The gamification of "social" leads to degenerative behavioral patterns.
> Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.
This sounds like "Without GitHub you will get less spam", which is probably true, but I think the reason is not "github is bad", it's: Less people will find your project.
Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off, but it's very different from "all will be better without Github"
Less people finding your project could be an improvement if the people you loose are the onse that just create the kind of spam contributions mentioned in the article. You don't need GitHib for useful software to become popular, it is just one channel. And you definitely don't need the gamified bullshit like total stars on your profile.
The spam problem was caused by the gamification. It probably would occur with any platform.
> Less people will find your project
That is false. Firstly, even if your project is not hosted on github, clones of it will appear on github anyway.
Secondly, planting yourself in the middle of a vast ocean of garbage is not a good strategy for being found. You might be thinking of the Github of twelve years ago.
> Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off, but it's very different from "all will be better without Github"
Making up quotes is not cool; those aren't my words, and that's not my position, so I'm not going to be gulled into defending it or kept from calling attention to what amounts to a sleight of hand here, even if it wasn't intentional.
(And this really chafes, because after I wrote what I meant, I even revised it to pre-empt[1] getting sucked into a discussion where someone responds to the wrong reading—specifically trying to avoid things like this. But when people don't even respect the constraint of sticking to others' actual words and instead conjure up other words that make for a more convenient world[2] to operate in, then there's almost nothing that can be done.)
> This sounds like "Without GitHub you will get less spam"
Well, it shouldn't; that's reductive.
If the bad stuff that arises from GitHub, its culture, and its practices were proportionate to its size, that would be one thing. (But also not itself a good reason not to consider ditching it—just like it's not obviously true that it would be a good idea to use Windows because the risk of malware is rational given its size as a target.) What's bad about GitHub, though, might in fact be disproportionate to its size—and in some cases, especially with respect to the practices that get promoted in that world, are things that are bad irrespective of GitHub's size.
1. https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.htm...
2. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Least_convenient_possible_wo...
I have no skin in this game, but I find that "all will be better without Github" is a reasonable short approximation of your "Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.".
You have explained your criticism of GitHub, and I agree that it should have done things differently from the beginning. Still, your proposed solution for users is literally to "Ditch the 'Hub", promising that "many of these problems get dialed back a lot". It's really not a far stretch to "all will be better without Github".
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The effect of those things on github are minuscule comparing to that of medium and twitter. I never even looked at anyone else's github profile. Most of the time it's medium and twitter that take me to their projects and I only evaluate the project with the context of who they are on twitter or what they've written on medium.
I've seen quite a few people market themselves by saying how many stars they have on github, and some even started putting something like "If you find this useful, please star it" in their documentation. It's not quite "like, share & subscribe" yet, but it's on the way. Any public metric will be optimized for, I guess.
Starring a project increases visibility because anyone who follows the person who started it will see it too. It is a question of marketing.
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> Most of the time it's medium and twitter that take me to their projects and I only evaluate the project with the context of who they are on twitter or what they've written on medium.
Please revisit my original comment. When I wrote it, I put some effort into qualifying things to make it clear that I'm not talking about just what happens on GitHub on the site. I referred to its culture. The things you just described are part of that culture, and very notable elements of it.
I agree but calling that "github culture" is unfair. It's a culture that emerged independently from github and like I said those metrics on github should not be the target for criticism. I found them pretty useless but some metrics can be good in a team context. I don't think they are a major part of the problem, let alone part of the cause.
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