Hacker News Reader

Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

If you are right and nobody cares about it, that's a good reason to remove it. If you are wrong and people care about it, maybe the poster has a point.

Nevertheless, I think there is a point in having a coarse activity indicator in order to assess how likely somebody is going to respond to issues or pull requests.

View on HN

I don't care about my own contribution graph, but I still find the feature useful when looking at other profiles. It's informative and it even looks nice. I do 95% of my work on Github in private repos at work, and 5% on open source projects, so my contribution graph is pretty abysmal. I don't mind, because it's what I actually do. It represents me in a fair way. It lets others looking at my profile know "hey, this dude does some open source" and I'm fine with that. When looking at other profiles, I'll know if this person is full-time open source or only does some contributions on the side infrequently, or it's an inactive profile. It serves a purpose right now.

Some people would not prefer that this information about them is easily publicly available like that, as I mentioned in my other comment about how this has come up in job interviews in a negative way.

If you contribute open source, your contribution will be out in the open. That's the whole point of it. If you remove it from Github, any website will be able to pull the same info and display it since it's all public information.

But few employers will navigate to a site other than your actual GitHub profile. If a third-party scrapes that data from commit logs, the employer has to trust the third party and also do the extra work of going to their site in addition to your provided profile, and that's far less likely.

Hosting the stats directly on someone's profile landing page at GitHub is incredibly, hugely different and more problematic than if someone else aggregates it later and hosts it elsewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com