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Comment by eloisius | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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.

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.

(Shameless plug, I'm working on this, e.g. https://techpolicy.press/can-algorithmic-recommendation-syst... )

There are exceptions to Goodhart's law, which are figures of merit.

The size of transistors was a good target for a very long time, like 60 years.

The height of basketball players.

Muscle mass, profile, or volume.

The profit margins of a company.

Scores on a standardized math test.

> 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.

I’m convinced the ai recommendation audience is the origin of the “death of the internet”

It certainly seems like a watershed moment where the primary purpose of our machinery has shifted to serve the machines instead of the people.

management ownership of algorithmically-generated profits, the machines dont care

In tens years time, the internet will be purely services and content created by machines, for consumption by other machines.

There is a conspiracy theory named "dead-internet theory" that postulates that this has already happened.

the money*

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.

I agree. How do we fight back?

I think the only real way is to self-host, and rebuild a kind of "craftsman movement" of code and system-administration.

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.

What exactly does "optimizing for Github recommendations" mean?

I'm not writing and debugging 10,000 lines of C just to farm Github stars. It seems crazy to think anyone would change how they work for that.

Whereas, people on Youtube/Twitter/Facebook/etc. really do change their videos or writing to spread better.

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.

Commerce finds a way.

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.

> 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.

Jon Schlinkert was ahead of his time in this regard :)

When I was a young child wandering the streets of $EXOTIC_LOCATION, I came across a street stall full of $OBSOLETE_COMPUTER.

I've searched far and wide for a $TRIVIAL_ALGORITHM_IMPLEMENTATION that brings back the nostalgia of that day.

Before running this code, it is important to have a proper computer to do it full justice. I recommend the $AMAZON_AFFILIATE_LINK

... 20 more screens, and 200MiB of JavaScript trackers later:

One line of code that does not compile, copy pasted from stack overflow.

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.

See /r/elsagate for what recommendation algorithms do to content:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/

The effect on a population of heavy use of social media platforms run by recommendation algorithms can be seen here:

https://www.navytimes.com/resizer/xESsQM55InJ7pTur3Jd1NncWdS...

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)

Social stuff on GitHub is weird. I have a couple of old colleagues that fill up most of my feed daily with stars to repos.

I’ve liked how they recently roll these up, like “sixstringtheory starred such-and-such and 5 other repos.”

When they switch from stars to hearts, we’ll know the end is nigh.

When you can put a care emoji on a bug.

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.

I gotta juke my stats for my KPIs so my manager authorize my bonus.

I don't think it will be targeted at growth of a project. It will be optimizing for recruiter spam in the feed.

No, it's not like they're LinkedIn or something!

Oh wait...

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