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Comment by Ruud-v-A | Hacker News Reader

It is good to see the streak go. To quote Jeff Atwood, “If I have learned anything from the Internet, it is this: be very, very careful when you put a number next to someone's name. Because people will do whatever it takes to make that number go up.” I hope this move helps focussing a bit more on quality over quantity.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental...

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What about HN karma?

Especially HN karma.

Just upvoted you, you will be happy to know.

HN has changed over the years, too. For example, each comment used to show its point count to every user, but it was eventually changed to be hidden to everyone but the user who made the comment.

HN used to show the average number of votes/post on your profile and it certainly affected my posting habits. It made me less likely to carry on conversations in the comments or post on stories that either had too much activity or had been on the front page for too long.

There were some benefits too (I started writing more substantial comments), but the net effect had some unintended problems, so I'm pretty happy they got rid of that metric.

Karma has some problems too, and could no doubt do with some adjustments, but I think that it's more useful to have it than not.

I mostly agree. The one thing I really miss is a bookmarklet I made that would highlight the top five posts on a comments page. This was especially useful for quickly finding the gems on pages with hundreds of comments. I wish there was an easy way to discover highly voted comments deeper in the threads.

I generally don't find heavily up voted stuff too useful because it represents the HN monoculture / groupthink.

I'd rather highlight comments that are controversial: they have been voted on a large number of times, with nearly 50% up vote and 50% down vote.

Those comments at least usually represent an interesting diff from either what I already think or what is stock monoculture canon on HN.

Yep. I try to work from the bottom up on threads likely to have group-think. The troll stuff is usually grayed out by the time I get to it. The answers with little info are easy to skim over. That gets to the dissenting opinions quickly.

Our team made http://quickmarklets.com at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. It can currently only be used on http websites (until we host it on https) but it lets you do what you say, on mobile phones.

Do you think it's useful btw to have bookmarklets on the mobile web? Until now, you were limited to safari extensions and intents which you had to install through the app store.

Slashdot back in the day (say circa 2000) had the karma problem. First, people would post snarky comments to get points for being funny, so Malda, Bates, et al. stopped counting "funny" towards karma. Then people started posting group think, all just to see their numbers go up. So /. capped karma at 50, which was beyond the point where you actually accrued any benefits for having good karma. Eventually they moved to a labeled five point likert scale. Apparently that stopped the nonsense since there literally was nowhere to go beyond "excellent".

HN could probably do something similar and mitigate karma ranking.

> Karma has some problems too, and could no doubt do with some adjustments, but I think that it's more useful to have it than not.

I agree that it could use adjustments.

Real-life karma is a good thing, but karma points are mostly a bandaid for "no other way of trying to keep trolling and other poor quality communication down".

The serious downside of having karma is providing undeserved power and prestige via a high status and ability to have certain actions to those that don't necessarily deserve it.

But the only way to get rid of it and get similar benefit is to have a community that can elect users into power that deserve it, like StackOverflow's elections. It would be even better if you gave the power to everyone and they were all wise enough and dependable enough to wield that power as needed, but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

I made a custom CSS to remove the Karma next to your profile after getting tired of seeing it and being influenced by it

http://pastebin.com/LhFrUfFa

Every now and then i'll make a post without thinking about my words and it'll come off as rude, ignorant, egotistical, etc. Thankfully it usually gets downvoted to hell. But I always feel bad afterwards and will usually take a week or so off, or spend a week logged off, until I get back to posting again. Sometimes I'll just reset my karma entirely by making a new account. It's an interesting phenomena.

I set my top bar to black for a while, to keep my eye from going to the karma display automatically every time.

I assume HN karma is why people complain when a story they submitted makes it to the front page under someone else's submission.

In the absence of karma you'd expect that would make a person happy: the story they liked is getting attention! But people get mad if they miss out on the karma of getting a story voted up.

I am pretty sad about this, because this is gone due to people getting butthurt about other's contribution numbers or some sort of comparison, rather than what it was good for: A self-motivating tool.

The notion of "cheating" the contribution graph is senseless, because it's not a competition. However, what it was great for was motivation to yourself to write code (however minor) every day.

I used the streak count to help push myself to keep working on a project I would've otherwise quickly set aside. My last streak was 27 days. I found when I broke a streak, my motivation to commit was much lower, and I would let my project lie for several days at a time.

I'm with you. I liked the steak count as a source of personal motivation, but we still have that don't we? Now you need to look at the squares, but an unbroken sequence of colored squares is just as motivating as a number, isn't it?

Then why remove the numbers? Counting squares is a pain. They should at least let you see these numbers on your own profile. Mind you, someone could easily make a browser extension to do this, basically.

The problem with a browser extension is that it wouldn't count commits past 365 days. Would be better to leave the feature in and have a browser extension to opt out of it.

I'm kind of surprised streaks and such, are things people feel so strongly about. This is how it's used in my product.

http://imgur.com/5uy9DSp

The heatmaps are created based on the search results, so if you want to see your contributions, you'll just search for your email. Searches are at the branch level and you can search across multiple branches from different repositories, and so forth.

My intentions for the heatmaps was never to help you visualize commit streaks though. Their purpose was to help you visualize search results, to make it easier for you to drill into certain timelines.

But it only shows up to 1 year...

I wish they made the number available on the page only the account owner could see.

Definitely same here. I started working on some personal projects for Github this winter and ended up getting a long streak of about a month from it. Since then, I've been in the habit of getting long streaks and try to do 2+ commits every day, but as soon as I fall off that streak it takes me 2-3 days to think about contributing again. Not only does it motivate me to write code (almost) every day (which I'd argue is important to developing programming skill), but it also pushes me to share code I was already going to write, which I think is a win-win for everybody.

Yeah, I'm sad about this too. I sort of knew the counter was there, but never paid any attention to it... until very recently. I started to use it as a self-motivating tool to always do even minimum amount of work one of the numerous after-hours projects I have.

So now that I started to use it, they cut it out. sigh

There is an analogous productivity method called "Don't Break the Chain" involving a prominently-placed real calendar, and big red crosses denoting daily successes. It triggers the same (rightly) proud sensation. Anecdotally I preferred it to GitHub streaks (as I rarely look at my profile).

Any habit tracker site/app will also do this for you - I automate mine with GitHub API data, and get a similar effect (the app notifies of streaks daily).

Do you have an example app that will do this for you?

I use dontbreakthechain.com

I like https://chains.cc/, though I'm not aware of any way to automate it.

Commit on iOS is a well made example.

OrgMode also handles this out of the box (or at least what you'd call out of the box on OrgMode...)

I use coach.me - the automation is via their undocumented mobile APIs https://github.com/jmaddi/liftapp-client (Lift is coach.me's previous branding)

I've seen a few applicants who had faked Github profile graph data. I found this a good indicator of the developer personality/ethics, and we happily passed on them.

If you've passed on them how could you know whether or not it was actually a good indicator of personality/ethics?

How do you fake it? And how do you know if someone's faked it? :S

Checking their actual commits. If their activity is menial like adding a letter to a file over and over, they obviously aren't legitimately writing that much code.

https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti and similar are pretty easy to spot. As a user I'd be biased to someone who used that for fun over someone who ('faking' or in all seriousness) has a ton of repos with lots of activity that are ultimately just things like node's left-pad...

By using tools like Rockstar - https://github.com/avinassh/rockstar

(PS: I wrote it)

Agreed, mine was the only streak I ever paid attention to and for the last few months it really kept me going, making at least one little contribution per day.

Non-broken streaks are also how Seinfeld keeps motivated:

http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-se...

That's how I was using the feature. Now I'm sad it's gone.

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