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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

GitHub could never quite decide whether they want to be a social network or not. The "Trending" page (which has been useless for a long time due to the ranking algorithm rewrite several years ago) is just one example of this indecision. The way users can vote on issues with "thumbs up", "heart", "rocket", and "fanfare" emojis (instead of simply "up" and "down") is another, and the ridiculous "achievements" on user pages is yet another. They've also added and removed the "Social Coding" label several times from their front page if memory serves correctly. It's like the whole company is having a neverending identity crisis.

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I mean it is worth playing around in that space to see if it sticks. Maybe there is an alternate universe where they stuff became really popular?

You wouldn’t know unless you tried! Hopefully they didn’t invest too much into their MVP…

Agreed. I think all of these features/additions have been useless, but I'm not going to criticize them for trying out something new.

I think criticizing them is fair. GitHub is a well established code repository which does something and does it well.

Microsoft endlessly tinkering with the product shows a lack of stability in it's lifespan, what if you adopt a new feature they add only for it to be removed in the next cycle. But they paid 7.5 billion dollars for the website, and need to justify the salaries of dozens of VPs of marketing and PMs, so here we are.

I must say that the "following" timeline with who starred what on the main view is mildly interesting.

That is helpful at times. There are some developers whose opinions I know and respect, and it's helpful to see what projects are catching their attention.

The social network aspect was a means to an end ("get enterprise customers"), but the needs of enterprise customers differ from the needs of open source communities. Hence the "indecision"

ironic, as a person who was very warm to GitHub previously and after attempting to coldly assess their offering for enterprise: I found it to be quite lacking compared to Gitlab.

I can't imagine choosing GitHub except for cool points or if you're working very closely with code that isn't yours primarily.

For example: Things like SAML and SCIM are very important to enterprise customers and it feels extremely jank on GitHub.

We're on Azure DevOps (despite deploying to AWS) and it's been weirdly good. I'm a little sad that Microsoft's focus is shifting to GitHub. We're evaluating GitLab as another possible all-in-one solution.

Sometimes microsoft really hits.

Excel, MSSQL, vscode, c#.

Then you get turds like Teams..

> the needs of enterprise customers differ from the needs of open source communities

Indeed, but GitHub's "social" features cater neither to enterprise customers nor to open source communities, but to a (hypothetical?) group of people that want a blend of software engineering and Instagram-style popularity chasing, with a bit of cartoon cuteness sprinkled on top.

I honestly found the introduction of the "achievements" section on user pages to be borderline insulting. I'm building cool stuff, not playing an RPG. Who does GitHub think their userbase is?

Stars at some point served as "social proof" of something (eyeballs, users, interest), but Goodhart's law struck.

At least three investor groups are explicitly looking at lists of the most starred / forked projects and throwing money at those with "Instagram-style popularity", so we've reached the stage where people can trade in the "internet points" for real money.

..."enterprise customers" want a "social network"? (I feel like I'm not parsing what you are saying correctly.)

The worst thing on GitHub are those “rating” badges in profiles that always say A+ regardless of the profile quality. Just having one of those is a decent screening filter itself.

> The way users can vote on issues with "thumbs up", "heart", "rocket", and "fanfare" emojis (instead of simply "up" and "down") is another

Those emoji votes reduced a significant amount of the "+1" and similar low content comments which could take up significant space on a regular repo.

We could look at other issue tracking systems such as Redmine. Pulling up a feature that's in the next release https://www.redmine.org/issues/3088

> +1 It would be very good to get this, as we have to hide our estimations from some roles :(

> +1 on this one!

> +1

> +1 It would be great to have estimated times integrated in the allover times permissions system.

If you look at the comments on GitHub issues from before the expansion of emoji votes to what they are, there are fewer "fluff" comments.

The reasoning for this is in https://github.blog/2016-03-10-add-reactions-to-pull-request...

> While people have been able to include emoji in responses for a long time, using them as reactions resulted in a lot of noise. In many cases, especially on popular projects, the result is a long thread full of emoji and not much content, which makes it difficult to have a discussion. With reactions, you can now reduce the noise in these threads.

I'm well aware of why reactions were added, but the way it was done is asinine. Instead of adding two, unambiguous ways to express support or opposition ("+1"/"-1"), GitHub chose to add three or four variations of each ("heart", "hooray", "rocket" etc.).

Now some people, to express support, react with "+1". Others react with "heart" or "rocket". How do you find the issues with the most popular support behind them? Do you sort by "+1" or by "heart"? On some issue trackers, one reaction type is preferred over another. On other trackers, reactions are mixed, and you find issues with 5 "+1" reactions and 40 "heart" reactions, and issues where it's the other way round. This is so hilariously bad that it almost feels like deliberate sabotage for laughs.

Imagine if HN, instead of upvotes and downvotes, had eight different ways to "react" to posts and comments, each with their own subtly different connotations. That's what GitHub implemented. It's something I would expect from a social network where people share photos of their cats, not from a system where software deficiencies are being discussed.

I think the social networking aspect of GitHub is one of its worst features. It carries with it all the negatives while also being required to use at work.

https://bower.sh/github-as-social-network

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