Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelanckaert | Hacker News Reader

Can we please stop turning everything into a social media experience? Why the constant need for personal validation / ego gratification?

It seems like almost every tool or platform these days needs a friends feature, bragging badges or other form of social validation.

View on HN

To be fair, GitHub's original slogan was "Social Coding".

True, but why do people think they need validation to collaborate?

Maybe this is a hot take, but… I like being validated? It feels good to receive positive feedback, and a ton of my life is structured to ensure positive feedback loops for things I want to incentivize myself to do.

I’ve definitely contributed more PRs during Hacktoberfest to get a t-shirt. I’ve done Strava runs when I might have otherwise skipped a day and been excited to see a new achievement.

I was really desperate to contribute to an open-source project in high school, specifically an iOS or frontend web one, and it was hard to find projects that I could make a substantial contribution to. Many with `good first issue` tags were not very active, and the ones that were active were hard to get my foot in the door.

I was able to do a variety of "good first" things: readme updates, typo fixes, adding small features -- but it was hard to feel really _validated_ that my work was valuable, or that contributing to open-source was an impressive thing to do, because I (felt like I was) was surrounded by engineers, and nobody ever told me that OSS was "cool", until I met a company 3 years into college who valued OSS (more than just "wow, great job, you fixed a typo!")

Just an FYI, readme updates, typo fixes, etc are "good first" things, but also very important, so while you may not have contributed to the code, you contributions are very important still.

Here's my hot take. I work for a small company, I'm the solo programmer. Our company's code is important, so it's all private. I work full-time and it is stressful enough, and don't have interest in working longer. Because I'm solo, I don't need Pull Requests for my own work, among other things that a team needs.

Under this system, I get no badges. I appear as though I have nothing to show. Even though I have arguably done more and been responsible for more than many people with badges have. That's irritating.

The way they are named and designed is rather juvenile, so just think of it like not being handed Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck badges at the fair because you are an adult.

Except it's also a professional forum, so it's more like you showed up at the office one day and it's full of kids and the project managers are spending their time handing out Disney badges and replacing the Kanban wall with memes instead of, y'know, managing the projects.

Isn’t this true on a private repo, or any non GitHub repo, solo or not? It’s been this way for a long time; if you cared about showcasing your contributions you would work on public projects, blog, or make a bunch of noise in some other way.

It's because people often need validation to collaborate.

Stackoverflow also has badges and it motivated me a lot to answer questions on the early days.

I like how this is the most upvoted comment

Upvotes are for letting "good" posts be more visible than "bad" posts, not validation for the poster

Maybe in theory, but they've become "I agree"/"I disagree"

Those ain't as mutually exclusive as you assert.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news_website

Edit:

I actually can't think of any such site _without_ comment voting today. Really that's because virtually every social media site now has a one-click way of engaging with comments (notably excluding 4chan). The difference between sites is in whether sorting by score is lacking, available, or part of an inscrutable algorithm; and what other ranking methods are available.

I can't find a single result relevant to the history of voting or user moderation in any search engine. Was Slashdot the first? It and Fark lacked this at launch in 1997;

- Slashdot handpicked 400 users to be moderators in 1999-03[0], and began randomly assigning moderation duty some time between then and the addition of moderation reasons in 1999-05[1]. Metamoderation was added in 1999-09.[2]

- Fark only added comment voting, with separate 'smart' and 'funny' votes, in 2011,[3] making it the only social news site AFAIK without negative votes.

</rabbithole>

[0] https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/03/23/1058204/slashdot-mo...

[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/05/24/1848220/slashdot-no...

[2] https://slashdot.org/story/99/09/07/155233/slashdots-meta-mo...

[3] https://www.fark.com/comments/blog256/New-feature-Favoriting...

Everything needs to be gamified now.

I'm taking the fact that I agree with this comment as confirmation that I'm officially old and cranky. For some reason, the push to turn everything into A Journey really annoys me.

>social media experience

*videogames

And the term for introducing in non-game areas game elements such as achievements is gamification.

Why? Coding (by using repos) is by definition is a social experience.

I agree with the sentiment, but that ship has sailed a long time ago. The TikTok-fication of the world is inevitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com