Comment by nsonha

5 years ago

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.

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nsonha

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luckylion  5 years ago

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.

  • jmercouris  5 years ago

    Starring a project increases visibility because anyone who follows the person who started it will see it too. It is a question of marketing.

cxr  5 years ago

> 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.

  • nsonha  5 years ago

    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.