I look forward to the quasi-spam slurry of infiniscroll feed crap once growth hackers start trying to game the algorithm to get more traction for their project.
I don’t think you can introduce a recommendation algorithm without it having a negative effect on the content it’s supposed to aid discovery of. Pre-recsys, the content is made for human consumption, but once you add the recsys, the AI itself becomes part of the audience and its opinion matters. Unfortunately its opinion matters more than the humans’, but its taste is abysmal. So content gets optimized for a brain dead AI and humans get garbage.
I hate it because GitHub was one product I really loved, but since MS bought them it seems like they are doing all this random stuff to solve problems that aren’t even a problem. How about getting back to the basics, like reliable uptime, and less glitchy JS soup?
> I don’t think you can introduce a recommendation algorithm without it having a negative effect on the content it’s supposed to aid discovery of.
This feels like it ought to be a corollary to Goodhart's Law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"), or perhaps a specialized application thereof.
This is sorta true. But it turns out there that there are always targets, even if they aren't explicit (is there a name for this law?).
So whether you have a recommendation system or a chronological feed or whatever other way you want to display info—there is always that implicit Goodhartish: measure → target → behavior change.
You can't escape it.
The only question is how you want to harness it—how you can bring out the best in people (with their consent ideally!) and mitigate the negative impacts of Goodharting.
It's just not always true though, like in the case of "proper scoring rules". So it would seem at least theoretically possible to create a recommendation algorithm such that trying to "gamify it" would only increase the utility of its output.
> I hate it because GitHub was one product I really loved, but since MS bought them it seems like they are doing all this random stuff to solve problems that aren’t even a problem. How about getting back to the basics, like reliable uptime, and less glitchy JS soup?
I'm not a fan of this recommendation engine either, but I also don't think that's a fair assessment of what has happened since MS bought them. I've seen a ton of valuable features added since they acquired GitHub, primarily things like GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages.
That said, I agree with your last sentence. Even before this week's nasty database issues that have caused outages every day, GitHub was struggling more and more with reliability.
I know in a large company that it doesn't work to just "throw more bodies" at reliability/quality issues, but GitHub must do some org retooling to get their reliability problems under control. Despite being a big fan of GitHub features, I can't have a critical service go down with the frequency that it does.
You’re right, I shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Actions is a great addition, and I haven’t really used Discussions yet, but I’ glad to see that there is some thing to improve what was breaking at the seems trying to do that job before (Issues).
I don’t think GH has gone straight downhill after joining MS. There’s been a lot of good. But I do get the sense that it doesn’t have the unified vision that it had 10 years ago, and that they are doing a lot of things for no clear reason.
I’ve worked in a large company before, and a lot of product changes and “features” we added were more like “division X has this cool new thing and VP y wants more people to start using it internally. How can we plug in into what we build?” I’m half seriously waiting for the day that GH drops Git support and switches to a proprietary fork that is only accessible with VS Code.
AI usually starts off as a way to serve humans, but mostly benefits the humans who create it, as opposed to the humans who use it. After a while, things seem to slide towards the dystopian, as the AI optimizes(or is optimized by the owners) to keep users present at all costs, to the benefit of the owners.
I relate AI feeds, management, recommendations, etc with Dwarves and the Mines of Moria. At what point will we have dug too greedily and too deep? Those goblins crawling around down there can be representative of the users who get stuck in the system, being fed trash, and being kept discontent.
The incredibly frustrating thing is that the metrics they’re “growth hacking”, engagement mostly, aren’t great proxies for product success in a lot of cases! In a lot of these cases the constant design tweaks probably reduces the overall sentiment users have towards the product overall.
I’m thinking specifically of the Netflix autoplay box, which I’m sure did wonders for their engagement, but also was universally hated. I think its no coincidence that during this time my social group went from “I love Netflix!” to “I can’t cancel Netflix because it has <favorite show>”. I fear GitHub going down the same path with such tweaks.
> I'm not writing and debugging 10,000 lines of C just to farm Github stars.
And neither would anybody else. That's the problem. (i.e. they'll do something else besides write and debug code to farm stars)
Let's say I determine (or at least believe) that the GitHub algorithm prefers projects with a README with lots of images and emoji, MIT-licensed, and lots of forks.
Obviously, there are already some really great projects out there that have exactly that! The problem is that now I'm incentivized to do those things as well, even if it doesn't always make sense. Sure, I might not create actual spam, but I might choose a license based on partly on that. Or I might inflate my README with an unreadable number of images. After all, my project is pretty important -- if only I could get a few more people interacting with it.
And of course, there's outright abuse. Maybe I'm desperate and build a bot that creates a bunch of forks.
The point is that it doesn't always require the latter scenario when there's also the former. Sure, it's not as bad, but I expect there to be more cases of it, and those cases are harder to determine and retroactively fix.
Create 100 different npm projects that should be one bit of functionality but ship every single method as a different github repo and update all of them continuously with new content in their README.md and such in order to suggest to the AI that you're super busy in maintenance. Then abandon all of them once you land the FAANG job you're looking for.
As soon as there's potential for financial benefit, someone will figure out how to optimize repos for the feed's algorithm. Perhaps this will mean clickbaity README.md files or frequent, trivial code changes to make a repo look more "active". We'll see, I guess.
Here is an example of possible abuse: it is already showing releases, so I can imagine a project would release more often with crappy updates just to show up in your feed more often.
That will really depend on how the algorithm weighs different signals. For example, lets say that projects that have a high issue resolution rate are promoted more -- that will just spur people to create small easily fixed issues to boost their ranking.
Any metric the algorithm uses will be subject to being gamed in some way.
Come on, if you never looked at any of the social stuff in Github I bet any new recommendation system isn't going to bother you either.
Unless they actively undermine their code/repo search functionality to push social stuff, let them do whatever they want for people who actually like browsing GitHub? (Not that I can imagine who actually browses GitHub)
Hey, we've seen this show a dozen times before. They are definitely going to undermine their core functionality to push social stuff, and for exactly the reason you gave: nobody uses it and they want to force you to.
> Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better
I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole bunch of newsclips never get shown…or they are at the end of the queue and 90% of the viewers would never get to them.
Why does one do this ? Because screen real estate is finite. You turn on your tv, you have a finite rectangular canvas - I can show maybe 5 squares on that rectangle without scrolling. Each square has a newsclip with text & picture. Who gets to decide which 5 clips to show ? Well, my algo does. How else would you do it ? There are literally 100s of 1000s of newsclips per day! Can’t show every single one of them - nobody has the time, nobody would watch, most of it is not going to be relevant to the vast majority of the audience. So 10000 newsclips get filtered down to 5 clips that get shown on the screen. You scroll. 5 more. Scroll again. 5 more. So on…you cap at 50 clips…nobody scrolls that much anyways.
That’s why you have an algorithmic feed - because there is too much content, but your brain real estate is finite. Your screen real estate is finite. The amount of time you have to watch news is finite. Your interest in news is finite. All of this has been measured, analyzed, sliced & diced. Your time is finite. But content is infinite. There is just too much news. Take finance news - 100s of companies reporting earnings every given day, associated commentary around buying/selling that stock, how the company is doing…1000s of newsclips! Take political news - so much footage, all the way from local municipal town hall meetings to presidential press conferences. Take entertainment news…man, there is so much music/movie/art/talent related content. Can’t show everything. Hence algorithmic feed.
Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.
> Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.
I think that the common complain is not "it isn't showing what I personally want" VS "it isn't showing what people generally want" but rather that the algorithm is often not tuned to "what X want" at all, but tuned to "what brings company most money". For example, YouTube recommendations are biased towards channels that have monetization activated, as YouTube earns more money that way, while ignoring channels the viewer (at large, or personally) would enjoy more.
Most of the comments here are incredibly dystopian - automation is bad, rehire the editor you've replaced at 75% of the salary, stop pushing engagement, what brings the company most money, megacorporation pushing slushy mass....
Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys invokes such vitriol.
There are dozens of news apps on smart TVs these days. Under the covers, it's pretty much the same deal - in go the raw feeds. Editors always do a first pass. Recsys algos do the 2nd pass. Ranking algos come in next. Personalization is usually last. Out comes the news. Viewers then have their say with thumbs up & downvotes. Those get fed back into personalization. On & on it goes...
Its not magic. Its not perfect. But its how pretty much every smart tv news app works under the hood. There's dozens of them. Pick any one of them that works well on your TV for your temperament, I guess. Recsys is just a standard comp science discipline. We have our textbooks, our journals, our papers. We all read the same stuff, pretty much roll the same code with minor frills.
I don't have to think someone is "out to get me" to believe that the current state of affairs is deeply broken and that you can't fix it with a better mouse trap.
This is just a really easy way for you to dismiss any criticism and avoid cognitive dissonance over your work. I believe you have good intentions. I also believe that those "dozens of news apps" all burn a whole bunch of watt hours on producing nearly identical results and are largely just facades over a handful of media companies.
And that's not speculation or a conspiracy theory, it's plainly true. Media conglomeration has happened at an incredibly fast pace over the last 40 years and local media has been decimated. No one has to be a cackling evildoer with a fancy mustache and a british accent to make this happen, they just have to keep grinding harder and harder at inventing new ways to 'fix it' with more conglomeration.
If anything algorithms that drive engagement are mutually exclusive with what people want to see. Most people don’t usually engage with anything but the odds are a lot higher for someone to reply etc out of anger or disgust than anything else.
Honestly, there's nothing inherently wrong with providing a limited and selective set of information to people. The problem is the tendency towards broader and broader aggregation.
Once upon a time, people got their news from approximately 3 "kinds" of places:
- newspapers, locally managed, locally printed, locally distributed
- radio, somewhere between locally and nationally managed, recorded, broadly distributed
- television, probably regionally or nationally managed, maybe locally recorded, also broadly distributed.
And for these things they had between several and tens of choices to select in to their preferences, interests, and alignments. They got to self-select the 'algorithm' they viewed information through. There was obviously an algorithm here, and in spite of golden-age glasses it was a racist, sexist, deeply problematic algorithm, but it was at least chosen by people in your community.
Now though? Everything gets sucked up into some megacorporation's orbit through a rolling katamari of companies. We have facebook and twitter and things that will eventually be bought by facebook or twitter and approximately 2-3 companies that own every newspaper, radio station, and television station on the planet.
There's no choice here anymore. Your algorithm is chosen by someone else, and if by some chance an upstart comes along to break out of that monotony it's inevitable that they'll be sucked up into the katamari eventually for the sin of being successful at bucking the trend, and then they will be just like everything else within a year.
So you can do your best to provide a fresh, reasonable algorithm that does some good and helps people find something. But in the end, no matter how hard you try, it's gonna end up just like everything else and be a slushy mass of stuff that makes people angry to get money out of them.
> How else would you do it ? There are literally 100s of 1000s of newsclips per day!
No offence, but honestly, that scale doesn't require automation, and probably suffers from it. I'd rehire the full time editor (singular?) that you replaced, probably at 50-75% your salary.
I’m not sure what kind of news app you work on, so maybe this doesn’t fit, but what this makes me think is, you’ve optimized for putting the “best” stuff in limited real estate, but why does there need to be news headlines algorithmically ranked and dumped in front of me in a place that I’m not looking for them (e.g. the “home” screen of my smart TV)? If it’s an app where you are consciously seeking news headlines, maybe there’s a good case for collapsing the raw deluge of news into a recommended front page, but I still feel like we’re losing something.
Recommendations are never good, and always corrupted by what the business wants to push on me, but even if they were good, the hyper personalized world is just weird. I’ll never be able to ask someone, “did you see the paper today?” Instead I wonder if they’ve been pushed the same stuff that I have and if we live in the same universe.
> So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.
but there's an algo which is simple to implement and has very little biases: just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me. I don't want to see what's best for others, I don't want to see what some algorithm thinks is best for me, I just want to see what's last, with zero additional "reflection" on this.
"Temporal order" is another way of saying "prioritize accounts that post most frequently, while suppressing less-frequent posters." That obviously rewards e.g. unnaturally breaking up content into multiple parts, content-light posting, and other consumer-hostile behaviors. I'm not sure why so many seem to think this is obviously optimal for consumers.
"I'll unfollow the accounts that behave that way" doesn't work because a temporally-ordered system incentivizes all accounts to behave this way. An account that posts highly valuable content, but only posts once weekly, will not thrive in a temporal-only medium.
This viewpoint underestimates a single person's ability to consume the output of a news organization. There are orders of magnitude difference between the number of stories that can appear in one's newsfeed and the number of stories produced bye a news organization in a day.
One could roughly estimate that by the time a news organization grows to need a full floor of office space, its pace of production will outstrip most readers' ability to keep up and not miss important stories. A temporal feed makes "keeping up" important, as relevant stories will quickly drop off the feed due to newer stories having been published more recently. The reverse is also true: a curated feed allows readers to step away and not worry that they will miss something important.
The pacing of news stories is dictated by a combination of the number of salient events occurring as well as the number of staff.
To use a concrete example, the (already-shortened) Yahoo! Finance News for Apple has 11 stories published today. There are thousands of public companies, and relevant news is published every day about many of them. A temporal feed of company news on the Yahoo! Finance homepage would therefore not be very useful. The pacing is essentially outside the control of Yahoo!, since it is driven by events at thousands of companies.
> just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me.
heh heh. In the last 5 minutes, since you typed in your comment, there’s been 100 news clips. Literally. So just show the top 5 after reverse sorting by time….newest to oldest. Temporal order. Now what would be the problem with that ?
Almost always, your newsfeed will end up dominated by the latest weather clip where the guy says “and now the temperature is a sunny 82 degrees”…meanwhile 100s of people die in ukraine but you didn’t see that because it was like an hour ago, and 1 minute ago >>> 1 hour ago.
If you also allow the user to filter results with a search query then this shouldn't be a problem. If he wants to see Ukraine news he will search for that. If there are too many results, the query can always be refined by the user.
> what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.
This is a problem, but from a different point of view. The algorithm is trained not to give me news but to keep me engaged. That should not be the purpose of a news app.
This is where the failure is. Most algos I've experienced show me more of what I already know. Or they show me what I was interested in the past (and I'm done with that).
I want an algo that does the opposite - show me only things completely different - see if maybe I like them.
I'm bored, I don't want more of the same, and I want something new. And there is where every one I've tried fails.
Nobody asked GitHub to become a social media platform. Why not improve search instead? When I want to find something, I will look for it, and know what I’m looking for. There’s no point in pushing a bunch of random repos in my face with an algorithm that can and will be abused.
I second them improving search. If I try to search for a line of code, it doesn't consider special characters, you know the ones like everyone uses in code.
While I cannot trust algorithmic feeds anymore and I expect this to become an issue in the future, I have to say that based on what I've seen in my own "For you" tab, GitHub is doing a good job on showing updates from repositories that I starred and then forgot about, and I actually find that feature nice.
As soon as there's a recommendation system, there is an incentive to game it. The impact will be felt whether you look at the thing or not.
I don't watch YouTube's "recommended" videos. That doesn't stop creators from changing their videos, titles, and thumbnails to be more in line with what the recommendation algorithm "likes".
Hopefully in the near future, we'll see them launch "GitHub Dating". I've always wanted to filter my potential partners by their stars and choice of language.
Nonsense. GitHub is for working with git repositories. It might have some weird social feed stuff tacked on, but I've never used it in 13 years and to say it's not the main point is an understatement. OTOH social interactions is very obviously the main point of LinkedIn?
Notice how the entire page is making you believe they are building a social coding platform? That's no accident, "Social code hosting" tagline in the logo included.
Social simply means activity that occurs amongst a population of people.
A pull request with the requisite commentary/discussion is absolutely a social phenomenon. Even simply pressing the approve button or the star button is a social act as it is a transaction involving more than one person.
And if you’ve never encountered the toxicity commonly thought of as only belonging to “social networks” in a PR or issue, then lucky you.
Not sure how that matters. If I build a platform explicitly for social coding, but people use it to host images, would you get mad if I continue to optimize for making it better for social coding rather than hosting images?
If I go to a taco shop but order fries instead, and eventually they focus more on tacos and change the recipe for their fries, I would certainly be mad about it. If you are doing a good job for a domain, folks are going to inevitably be bothered when you do worse by that domain, for whatever reason.
I'm happy seeing random/algorithmically picked stuff shown on the homepage RHS ("Explore repositories") - it doesn't hurt me, and I might find something useful there.
I don't want algorithmic stuff on the _main_ part of the page, which instead contains repositories and people I follow. I'd draw the line at this.
I feel like I'm in the minority here: when I saw this new feature, I thought it could be useful and a better replacement for what's currently there. I don't follow many people, so the "old" feed was pretty boring and stale. However, the "new" feed is showing me things that I find interesting, like a new release of openzfs, even though I'm not watching that repo.
I understand why might be worse for other people, but I disagree in general with the idea that this is categorically the wrong thing for github to do.
I've used GitHub intensively for 13 years. I've never looked at the front page or "feed". Why would you? GitHub is for working with git repositories, it's not a social website.
That's great, if you never look at the front page nor the feed, you're not even affected by this change. Leave the "outrage" for people who are affected by it.
No one is worried about a page you can ignore. We’re worried about the second-order effects that trying to game that page will have on the rest of the site.
I like it because it could help me with my open source repos. 1) To reach new people and 2) notify existing stargazers that I've released a new update and 3) help me discover new interesting repos.
It remains to be seen if the new feed proves useful. But I wouldn't say that just because they use an algorithm it needs to suck per se. There's algorithm and there's algorithm.
> Why do developer companies keep thinking they are aocial twitter-facebook-like things?
Because open source is significantly social in nature; it's not just an available blob of code. I don't necessarily agree with their direction, but the social aspect is certainly a foundational component.
I think the issue is not with it being social in general, but rather with it becoming a similar flavour of social to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Github has always been a social tool without the need for a newsfeed-type thing.
Are any of those algorithmically selected? If not, then my argument stands.
Sure, the one sentence you picked, taken out of context, makes it look like I'm generally against feeds. When you put it in the broad context of my comment though, you can easily see that it's the AI bit that's the problem.
> I think the issue is not with it being social in general, but rather with it becoming a similar flavour of social to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
I'm sorry I didn't understand you were using "flavour" to indicate AI, I just thought you were referencing social features in general, it wasn't that clear to me, sorry for that.
> Why do developer companies keep thinking they are aocial twitter-facebook-like things?
Because that's been their main selling point since day one. Git hosting + social coding platform. I guess because they became the leading code hosting platform in the world, they think that that's because of their social features. What you're seeing today is just a continuation of what they always have been doing.
Depends on what you're doing. If you're just browsing a repo, it's fine. If you're debugging something and need a timestamp for when a change went in, it's abysmal.
In github, if you hover your mouse over a time like "2 days ago", the tooltip will give you the exact timestamp. However, I can't find any way to easily copy this into your clipboard (for that I guess you have to go to your old friend "git show" or "git log")
I've seen "but you can hover your mouse" as an excuse by CorcleCI, for example. And it doesn't fly. It's an extra interaction that is cumbersome and non-persistent.
Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user. They limit what a user sees, and slowly infantilizes them by teaching them to passively consume rather actively seek information.
I've never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better. At best, they make things more addictive.
Worse, they incentivize "creators" to post "refrigerator door wisdom" type stuff optimized for likes or clicks or whatever (or outrage-bait, but that seems to be more in non-professional forums).
No, a screen has limited real estate. There is only so many things that can be shown to you at once. So on youtube for example there maybe only be room to show 8 videos. Ideally I should find all 8 videos interesting. If I don't, that's a waste of space and a waste of my time. Algorithmic feeds serve to improve the results such that I am more likely to watch a video that is put in one of those 8 spots compared to if I was just shown trending videos or videos from my subscription box. It is not hostile to me because it saves me time in finding something to watch. You are not being turned into a baby just because you no longer have to search for stuff manually. There is a difference between wanting to find something specific and just wanting to find something interesting.
>I've never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better.
One of the best algorithmic feeds is TikTok. After that YouTube's is pretty good to. I suggest trying one of those sites out to just see how effective they are in finding content that interests you. I have found algorithmic feeds have at least made things net better. There is too much information in the world to have to search through all of it ourselves. These algorithms solve the problem of dealing with this large scale of data.
> Algorithmic feeds serve to improve the results such that I am more likely to watch a video that is put in one of those 8 spots compared to if I was just shown trending videos or videos from my subscription box.
Right, that's the promise from algorithmic feeds. Sometimes, for some time, it's even the reality!
I think there's some middle ground and nuance to be had here, though. I agree that just because there's "an algorithm" doesn't mean it's bad or a worse user experience. Finding interesting videos is a great example.
However, I think it's fair to also say that video recommendation algorithms have gotten out of hand. We have a lot of content creators who are influenced in how to make their videos by what is popular. After all, if I make a video that is obviously more successful than another one, that means my audience likes it more, right? What did that video do differently that made it so much more successful?
After a long enough time, you end up inadvertently (or intentionally) catering to the whims of the algorithm and not just your audience.
So the issue I have with algorithmic feeds isn't that they are outright a bad idea for users. The problem is that it is not just a feature for users. It starts to shape the content on the platform. This can be used to subtly influence content creators to make better content, but without any idea of what goes into these algorithms, we are left to make wild religious guesses.
And we have to assume that these algorithms serve the (financial) needs of the companies behind them and their sponsors, first and foremost. If not now, then gradually, by the same feedback loop as happens to the content creators.
The problem with this is that your suggestions are based on past viewing history, which isn’t always related to future needs. Examples: on one youtube account we primarily watch different types of media on, we watched a Labrinth music video. Neither my wife or I like labyrinth, but now our music section in YouTube is completely consumed by labyrinth music videos. One or two viewings isn’t indicative of us being labrinth fans. This is what we mean by the AI is dumb and makes things worse for the user. The music video section on that account is basically useless now. The same thing will happen with anything - one time I watched a restoration video for an old lamp I had, and YouTube assumed I now mostly wanted to watch antique restoration videos for the next 6 months.
Same issue here - if I watch one video from a channel I'm not subscribed to, my recommendations will be flooded with that and related channels. Even picking "don't recommend this channel" only cuts down the spam, doesn't stop it - which is annoying because, sometimes, I've enjoyed what I've watched and I wouldn't mind the odd recommendation ... just not a dashboard full every single day from then on.
Oh and "XYZ viewers also watch... [5 videos by XYZ]" is such an egregious failure that I can't help but laugh every time I see it.
Now you can easily clean up the regular feed with uBlock Origin `github.com###dashboard [aria-labelledby="feed-original"] :is(.follow, .watch_started)` will remove "someone followed something" and "someone starred something" which can help you focus on the updates that are critical aspects of updated issues and releases, and can just click over to the social media feed "For You (Beta)" for that kind of stuff if you feel so inclined (or you can ignore it). I have `github.com##aside[aria-label="Explore"]` as well to not get distracted with the recommendations I didn't ask for on the index page either.
I forget sometimes how good it really is at blocking. I had blocked certain things long ago and when I eventually see the original accidentally somewhere else I am shocked by the annoyances.
Literally turned off uBlock for something and hopped over to GitHub and it was full of so much useless nonsense and I don't even follow a lot of people.
I took a look at mine and it might be interesting.
Its in addition to the "following" feed - that's still there.
It had people and projects I might want to check out based on (er, something). Why not? I might find something I like.
It recommended a Rust project but I haven't posted any Rust.
I didn't even know that Github had any kind of feed (whatever that really means). And I don't care. I visit Github to report a bug, read about the progress of fixing it and then close the page. I never read anything else on Github, why would I?
Lots of speculation in the replies here with one common theme: No one seems to know, or has yet to define, what "social coding" actually means. Not even Github.
How long before GH starts pushing email spam with digests of "Projects that might interest you"? It would be great if they could instead redirect efforts to tie their recommendation engine to their search results. User intent is clearer and serendipitous recommendations surfacing in the results would actually be of value.
I don’t mind the new one because I didn’t use the old one. Most of the content before contained changes to code on company projects I don’t contribute to. The new content has been mostly relevant to the code and tech I work with on a daily basis.
Exactly what I was scrolling though here looking for a discussion of. I'm assuming (I'm on my phone and not going to check) that if you go to github.com there is a landing page with a feed?
I use github 90% of the time for interacting with my / my companies repos, and the rest to peruse a repo I've been directed to for whatever reason. I have never been to the homepage (except maybe to sign in), and I have never used it to get news or find new repos or whatever a feed is for.
I can see the potential to turn it into social media, that's fine as long as it doesn't bleed in to the actual repository management functionality.
I posted this to their feedback, but I'll share it here too.
The new algorithmic feed gives me absolutely nothing of value - it's giving me a bunch of information I have no need for or interest in. It's just adding pure noise and no signal.
The following feed might work for people who use the commit as the unit of review, but since there's no way to filter it to a certain subset of repos, it's also way too noisy to be useful. And for those of us who use the Pull Request as the unit of review, it's absolutely useless. Again, all noise and no signal.
I would love the ability to construct an arbitrary number of custom feeds to surface information I actually need.
I want to create new feeds, select whether they contain commits, pull request activity (PRs opened, closed, merged, and reviewed, and commented on), or both. Then I want to be able to filter which repos/organizations that feed is limited to. Ideally, I'd be able to select a set of feeds to show on the homepage as tabs I could click between to quickly scan activity in the subsets of repos I work on.
So for example, I would create one feed to be my "Primary Responsibility area at Work". This would be the subset of repos I am primarily responsible for at my workplace. I'd configure it to show PR activity - new PR opens, new reviews, new comments (on review or on the PR), and PR merges or closes. This would surface the information I need and would allow me to very quickly scan to see whether there were any PRs I needed to look over or PR discussions I wanted to add my voice to. This is not a view I have right now. Notifications doesn't surface this information in a way that's easy to scan, and otherwise I have to go digging through (potentially) multiple boards or issues lists to see it. Instead being able to quickly scan down a feed of comments or reviews and reply right in the feed, I have to click through numerous screens and it's easy to miss stuff.
I would then create a second feed that would be "All of work" which I would configure to be just PR activity for my work organization. This would allow me to quickly scan activity in other repos that I'm not primarily responsible for, and contribute if there are things of value I could add. Right now I can't do this at all, I have to rely on my teammates tagging me in. It's just much too time consuming to try to scan through all the activity - even though, were it presented in feed format of just the new stuff, there's probably not so much that I couldn't easily scan it every day. It's the amount of digging through screens and trying to figure out what's new that's time consuming.
Then I'd create a feed for "My Stuff" which would contain all activity on repos I own (PRs and Commits). This would be mostly empty since, for the most part, I'm not collaboration with folks right now. But someday I'd like to, and this feed would be very useful then.
Finally I'd create various feeds for the all the open source I follow based on what project is, how interested in it I am, and how involved in I am.
Having this ability - the ability to create multiple custom feeds to surface this information I want by groups that are meaningful to me - has the potential to make collaboration on Github much easier and more efficient. One of the problems we face as a team is knowing when we need to respond to a pull request. And right now we mostly solve that with process (pinging each other, standups) and tooling (Jira/Slack). Having a feed we could quickly check for new activity would significantly grease those wheels and save us time elsewhere.
> I would then create a second feed that would be "All of work" which I would configure to be just PR activity for my work organization. [...] Right now I can't do this at all,
> GitHub has always branded itself as a "social collaboration platform" rather than anything else (well, first "git hosting" but secondly the social stuff).
> Notice the logo says "Social code hosting" and the messaging of the page is mostly around popular repositories, collaborative features and other social elements.
Anyone surprised by a "social code hosting" platform implementing new social features are in for a bleak feature, as the platform still aims (and always have aimed) to be the social place for coders.
"Social" is not a synonym for "facebook". Github is a collaborative social platform. This still seems pointless and offbrand. There is no contradiction here.
It shouldn't be. Social has its place, but I don't want to see memes and emojis and dramaposting with upvotes and downvotes and karma whoring on a project page. The purpose of Github should be to distribute and collaboratively develop software and nothing more. None of the social features make developing software easier, they distract from what should be the platform's purpose. Soon, you won't even need to deal with Git or push a repo at all, they'll just remove all of that "coding" shit and become another Twitter clone. That's the inevitable endstate of adding social features, they consume everything.
I kind of feel like this is just another Sherlock move by GitHb TBH, nothing more. It seems like they see popular apps that tap into GH (I use one that is basically just a feed of GH activity which I actually like) and things like Actions in their "marketplace" as opportunities to gobble up new product functionality into their own platform.
This isn't on my github - this doesn't sound real unless their beta testing on some accounts and not others. So it's a bad idea and they'll turn it off. Storm in a tea cup.
Why would MS want to kill github? It's huge, it serves a vital need, and if MS does manage to strangle it in some way, someone else will fork a similar service and everyone will flock to that, similarly to how everyone left Sourceforge for Github, as I understand it.
Microsoft sells MSDN subscriptions for enterprise users. And that’s more than the GitHub revenue.
It’s weird in that I recently discovered a few hundred programmers who may $500-2n/year/person to Microsoft for visual Studio and more for a devops/teams foundation server/vsts and two full time admin contractors to administer the source server. There’s a lot of money in this space that Microsoft is probably losing as orgs migrate to GitHub.
that kind of features turn off many developers, including me
reason why i abandoned MSN messenger back in the days was because they started to mimic facebook features, same thing as skype, as people pointed in the github discussion
Agreed but it seems some bean counter types at Microsoft are interested in monetizing Github beyond its current subscription plans. Perhaps they didn't ask developers whether they want to be algorithmically influenced or whatever.
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I don’t think you can introduce a recommendation algorithm without it having a negative effect on the content it’s supposed to aid discovery of. Pre-recsys, the content is made for human consumption, but once you add the recsys, the AI itself becomes part of the audience and its opinion matters. Unfortunately its opinion matters more than the humans’, but its taste is abysmal. So content gets optimized for a brain dead AI and humans get garbage.
I hate it because GitHub was one product I really loved, but since MS bought them it seems like they are doing all this random stuff to solve problems that aren’t even a problem. How about getting back to the basics, like reliable uptime, and less glitchy JS soup?