[HN Gopher] Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithm...
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Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed
Author : croes
Score : 154 points
Date : 2022-03-24 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| shafyy wrote:
| I like that GitHub tries to make a better feed.
|
| I like it because it could help me with my open source repos. 1)
| To reach new people and 2) notify existing stargazers that I've
| released a new update and 3) help me discover new interesting
| repos.
|
| It remains to be seen if the new feed proves useful. But I
| wouldn't say that just because they use an algorithm it needs to
| suck per se. There's algorithm and there's algorithm.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| GitHub has a feed? Who sits down while in the bathroom and
| scrolls their GitHub feed?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I didn't even know that Github had any kind of feed (whatever
| that really means). And I don't care. I visit Github to report a
| bug, read about the progress of fixing it and then close the
| page. I never read anything else on Github, why would I?
| chadlavi wrote:
| Huh, so people actually look at/pay any attention to that feed
| page?
| dmitriid wrote:
| Why do _developer_ companies keep thinking they are aocial
| twitter-facebook-like things?
|
| It goes from small things like hiding exact timestamps behind
| meaningless "2d ago" to this bullshit
| pizza234 wrote:
| > Why do developer companies keep thinking they are aocial
| twitter-facebook-like things?
|
| Because open source is significantly social in nature; it's not
| just an available blob of code. I don't necessarily agree with
| their direction, but the social aspect is certainly a
| foundational component.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| I think the issue is not with it being social in general, but
| rather with it becoming a similar flavour of social to the
| likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
|
| Github has always been a social tool without the need for a
| newsfeed-type thing.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| > Github has always been a social tool without the need for
| a newsfeed-type thing.
|
| GitHub has always had various activity feeds. Here are two
| early screenshots from 2008:
|
| > Project and Developer News Feeds - Keep tabs on your
| favorite projects and the people that work on them.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20081113115832/http://github.co
| m...
|
| > Public Developer Profiles - See what other developers are
| working on and how many commits they've made
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20081113115936/http://github.co
| m...
|
| From https://web.archive.org/web/20081111061111/http://gith
| ub.com...
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Are any of those algorithmically selected? If not, then
| my argument stands.
|
| Sure, the one sentence you picked, taken out of context,
| makes it look like I'm generally against feeds. When you
| put it in the broad context of my comment though, you can
| easily see that it's the AI bit that's the problem.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| The other sentence in your comment was:
|
| > I think the issue is not with it being social in
| general, but rather with it becoming a similar flavour of
| social to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc.
|
| I'm sorry I didn't understand you were using "flavour" to
| indicate AI, I just thought you were referencing social
| features in general, it wasn't that clear to me, sorry
| for that.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Yeah, that's cool. I guess I could have been more precise
| in my phrasing.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Because "2d ago" provides a better user experience even for
| developers.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Depends on what you're doing. If you're just browsing a repo,
| it's fine. If you're debugging something and need a timestamp
| for when a change went in, it's abysmal.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I should have specified on average. I do not often need to
| lookup the exact timestamp of a commit.
| eminence32 wrote:
| Just a note for the audience in general:
|
| In github, if you hover your mouse over a time like "2 days
| ago", the tooltip will give you the exact timestamp.
| However, I can't find any way to easily copy this into your
| clipboard (for that I guess you have to go to your old
| friend "git show" or "git log")
| dmitriid wrote:
| I've seen "but you can hover your mouse" as an excuse by
| CorcleCI, for example. And it doesn't fly. It's an extra
| interaction that is cumbersome and non-persistent.
| prepend wrote:
| I prefer a time stamp since there's less ambiguity.
|
| I became less annoyed with GitHub when I learned that they
| put the timestamp in the mouse over hovertext.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| > Why do developer companies keep thinking they are aocial
| twitter-facebook-like things?
|
| Because that's been their main selling point since day one. Git
| hosting + social coding platform. I guess because they became
| the leading code hosting platform in the world, they think that
| that's because of their social features. What you're seeing
| today is just a continuation of what they always have been
| doing.
| corobo wrote:
| GitHub has finally gone full SoLoMo
|
| (ref https://youtu.be/J-GVd_HLlps?t=50 )
| 0des wrote:
| Social local mobile?
| havkom wrote:
| A tip from recent experience with GitHub: Don't rely _solely_ on
| GitHub for your work.
| everdrive wrote:
| Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user. They limit what
| a user sees, and slowly infantilizes them by teaching them to
| passively consume rather actively seek information.
|
| I've never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made
| things better. At best, they make things more addictive.
| version_five wrote:
| Worse, they incentivize "creators" to post "refrigerator door
| wisdom" type stuff optimized for likes or clicks or whatever
| (or outrage-bait, but that seems to be more in non-professional
| forums).
| charcircuit wrote:
| >They limit what a user sees
|
| No, a screen has limited real estate. There is only so many
| things that can be shown to you at once. So on youtube for
| example there maybe only be room to show 8 videos. Ideally I
| should find all 8 videos interesting. If I don't, that's a
| waste of space and a waste of my time. Algorithmic feeds serve
| to improve the results such that I am more likely to watch a
| video that is put in one of those 8 spots compared to if I was
| just shown trending videos or videos from my subscription box.
| It is not hostile to me because it saves me time in finding
| something to watch. You are not being turned into a baby just
| because you no longer have to search for stuff manually. There
| is a difference between wanting to find something specific and
| just wanting to find something interesting.
|
| >I've never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed
| made things better.
|
| One of the best algorithmic feeds is TikTok. After that
| YouTube's is pretty good to. I suggest trying one of those
| sites out to just see how effective they are in finding content
| that interests you. I have found algorithmic feeds have at
| least made things net better. There is too much information in
| the world to have to search through all of it ourselves. These
| algorithms solve the problem of dealing with this large scale
| of data.
| epicide wrote:
| > Algorithmic feeds serve to improve the results such that I
| am more likely to watch a video that is put in one of those 8
| spots compared to if I was just shown trending videos or
| videos from my subscription box.
|
| Right, that's the promise from algorithmic feeds. Sometimes,
| for some time, it's even the reality!
|
| I think there's some middle ground and nuance to be had here,
| though. I agree that just because there's "an algorithm"
| doesn't mean it's bad or a worse user experience. Finding
| interesting videos is a great example.
|
| However, I think it's fair to also say that video
| recommendation algorithms have gotten out of hand. We have a
| lot of content creators who are influenced in how to make
| their videos by what is popular. After all, if I make a video
| that is obviously more successful than another one, that
| means my audience likes it more, right? What did that video
| do differently that made it so much more successful?
|
| After a long enough time, you end up inadvertently (or
| intentionally) catering to the whims of the algorithm and not
| _just_ your audience.
|
| So the issue I have with algorithmic feeds isn't that they
| are outright a bad idea for users. The problem is that it is
| not _just_ a feature for users. It starts to shape the
| content on the platform. This _can_ be used to subtly
| influence content creators to make better content, but
| without any idea of what goes into these algorithms, we are
| left to make wild religious guesses.
|
| And we have to assume that these algorithms serve the
| (financial) needs of the companies behind them and their
| sponsors, first and foremost. If not now, then gradually, by
| the same feedback loop as happens to the content creators.
| lukevp wrote:
| The problem with this is that your suggestions are based on
| past viewing history, which isn't always related to future
| needs. Examples: on one youtube account we primarily watch
| different types of media on, we watched a Labrinth music
| video. Neither my wife or I like labyrinth, but now our music
| section in YouTube is completely consumed by labyrinth music
| videos. One or two viewings isn't indicative of us being
| labrinth fans. This is what we mean by the AI is dumb and
| makes things worse for the user. The music video section on
| that account is basically useless now. The same thing will
| happen with anything - one time I watched a restoration video
| for an old lamp I had, and YouTube assumed I now mostly
| wanted to watch antique restoration videos for the next 6
| months.
| eloisius wrote:
| God. You watch one ICP video so that you can laugh at the
| "fucking magnets, how do they work?" line...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Same issue here - if I watch one video from a channel I'm
| not subscribed to, my recommendations will be flooded with
| that and related channels. Even picking "don't recommend
| this channel" only cuts down the spam, doesn't stop it -
| which is annoying because, sometimes, I've enjoyed what
| I've watched and I wouldn't mind the odd recommendation ...
| just not a dashboard full every single day from then on.
|
| Oh and "XYZ viewers also watch... [5 videos by XYZ]" is
| such an egregious failure that I can't help but laugh every
| time I see it.
| eloisius wrote:
| 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?
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I don't think it will be targeted at growth of a project. It
| will be optimizing for recruiter spam in the feed.
| hedora wrote:
| No, it's not like they're LinkedIn or something!
|
| Oh wait...
| ashtonkem wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| 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...
| CornCobs wrote:
| 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)
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 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.
| djbusby wrote:
| I gotta juke my stats for my KPIs so my manager authorize
| my bonus.
| edgyquant wrote:
| 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.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| 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.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| When you can put a care emoji on a bug.
| MichaelBurge wrote:
| 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.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| 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.
| epicide wrote:
| > 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.
| lamontcg wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| ticviking wrote:
| I'm convinced the ai recommendation audience is the origin of
| the "death of the internet"
| gigaflop wrote:
| 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.
| smordistan wrote:
| It certainly seems like a watershed moment where the primary
| purpose of our machinery has shifted to serve the machines
| instead of the people.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| management ownership of algorithmically-generated profits,
| the machines dont care
| Jaruzel wrote:
| In tens years time, the internet will be purely services
| and content created by machines, for consumption by other
| machines.
| dividuum wrote:
| There is a conspiracy theory named "dead-internet theory"
| that postulates that this has already happened.
| Lammy wrote:
| the money*
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| I agree. How do we fight back?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > 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.
| eloisius wrote:
| 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.
| dgritsko wrote:
| > 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
| tunesmith wrote:
| 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.
| avivo wrote:
| 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... )
| mfontani wrote:
| I'm happy seeing random/algorithmically picked stuff shown on the
| homepage RHS ("Explore repositories") - it doesn't hurt me, and I
| might find something useful there.
|
| I don't want algorithmic stuff on the _main_ part of the page,
| which instead contains repositories and people I follow. I'd draw
| the line at this.
| V1ndaar wrote:
| The best part is when GitHub recommends me my own repositories
| in the right bar! Love that, always wanted to learn about
| those.
| naoqj wrote:
| Can't you just... not look at it? github is not a social website;
| I see no reason to ever visit the home page.
| pram wrote:
| Huh now that you mention it, I don't think I've ever gone to
| just 'github.com'
| AlexandrB wrote:
| As soon as there's a recommendation system, there is an
| incentive to game it. The impact will be felt whether you look
| at the thing or not.
|
| I don't watch YouTube's "recommended" videos. That doesn't stop
| creators from changing their videos, titles, and thumbnails to
| be more in line with what the recommendation algorithm "likes".
| EsperHugh wrote:
| >github is not a social website
|
| you may not like it, but Github has always been a social
| website, and now more than ever, just like LinkedIn.
| e2le wrote:
| Hopefully in the near future, we'll see them launch "GitHub
| Dating". I've always wanted to filter my potential partners
| by their stars and choice of language.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| 100% needs a checkbox for tabs vs spaces..
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Also interesting that MS owns both of those networks. Both
| pretty smart investments.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Nonsense. GitHub is for working with git repositories. It
| might have some weird social feed stuff tacked on, but I've
| never used it in 13 years and to say it's not the main point
| is an understatement. OTOH social interactions is very
| obviously the main point of LinkedIn?
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| You might not have used it as such, but GitHub always aimed
| to be a social platform and launched as such.
|
| Here is their landing page when they first launched: https:
| //web.archive.org/web/20081111061111/http://github.com...
|
| Notice how the entire page is making you believe they are
| building a social coding platform? That's no accident,
| "Social code hosting" tagline in the logo included.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| Their aims from 15 years ago notwithstanding, it is not a
| social platform, and does not get used for social
| networking topics.
|
| Yes, we know git repos get used by clusters of people.
| That is not the accepted meaning of "social network."
|
| Nobody is posting the news, their kids, or joining film
| groups on Github.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Social simply means activity that occurs amongst a
| population of people.
|
| A pull request with the requisite commentary/discussion
| is absolutely a social phenomenon. Even simply pressing
| the approve button or the star button is a social act as
| it is a transaction involving more than one person.
|
| And if you've never encountered the toxicity commonly
| thought of as only belonging to "social networks" in a PR
| or issue, then lucky you.
| naoqj wrote:
| I bet almost all users of the platform don't consider it
| a social platform and don't use it as such.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| Not sure how that matters. If I build a platform
| explicitly for social coding, but people use it to host
| images, would you get mad if I continue to optimize for
| making it better for social coding rather than hosting
| images?
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| If you're not sure how it matters that none of the users
| use it as a social platform, then I'm not sure what you
| think a social platform is.
|
| .
|
| > explicitly for social coding
|
| Using source control is not "social coding." You're
| stretching that word far past its actual meaning, in the
| effort to make a point.
| vinnymac wrote:
| If I go to a taco shop but order fries instead, and
| eventually they focus more on tacos and change the recipe
| for their fries, I would certainly be mad about it. If
| you are doing a good job for a domain, folks are going to
| inevitably be bothered when you do worse by that domain,
| for whatever reason.
| croes wrote:
| Yet this is so, but who knows the future.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| No wonder why microsoft bought them, they wanted to kill github
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Why would MS want to kill github? It's huge, it serves a vital
| need, and if MS does manage to strangle it in some way, someone
| else will fork a similar service and everyone will flock to
| that, similarly to how everyone left Sourceforge for Github, as
| I understand it.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| that kind of features turn off many developers, including me
|
| reason why i abandoned MSN messenger back in the days was
| because they started to mimic facebook features, same thing
| as skype, as people pointed in the github discussion
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Agreed but it seems some bean counter types at Microsoft
| are interested in monetizing Github beyond its current
| subscription plans. Perhaps they didn't ask developers
| whether they want to be algorithmically influenced or
| whatever.
| prepend wrote:
| Microsoft sells MSDN subscriptions for enterprise users. And
| that's more than the GitHub revenue.
|
| It's weird in that I recently discovered a few hundred
| programmers who may $500-2n/year/person to Microsoft for
| visual Studio and more for a devops/teams foundation
| server/vsts and two full time admin contractors to administer
| the source server. There's a lot of money in this space that
| Microsoft is probably losing as orgs migrate to GitHub.
| [deleted]
| eminence32 wrote:
| I feel like I'm in the minority here: when I saw this new
| feature, I thought it could be useful and a better replacement
| for what's currently there. I don't follow many people, so the
| "old" feed was pretty boring and stale. However, the "new" feed
| is showing me things that I find interesting, like a new release
| of openzfs, even though I'm not watching that repo.
|
| I understand why might be worse for other people, but I disagree
| in general with the idea that this is categorically the wrong
| thing for github to do.
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| nah, most of us like it, we just don't want to get into the
| fracas with the people talking about always-bad and inherently-
| evil
| andrew_ wrote:
| Lots of speculation in the replies here with one common theme: No
| one seems to know, or has yet to define, what "social coding"
| actually means. Not even Github.
| zerkten wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? It seems to leave the door open for a lot
| of explorations. It seems like it doesn't affect critical
| functionality that much.
| justinhj wrote:
| Github isn't TikTok
| e2le wrote:
| You say that but GitHub is an expensive platform to run, how
| else are they going to boost engagement and increase it's
| profitably?
|
| Wont somebody please think of the shareholders?
|
| /s
| throwaway889900 wrote:
| Isn't that what gists are for?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| You're correct. It isn't. It doesn't push random 30 second
| videos.
| viswd wrote:
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I've used GitHub intensively for 13 years. I've never looked at
| the front page or "feed". Why would you? GitHub is for working
| with git repositories, it's not a social website.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| That's great, if you never look at the front page nor the feed,
| you're not even affected by this change. Leave the "outrage"
| for people who are affected by it.
| namose wrote:
| If a sufficient number of gh users do look at the page,
| you'll be affected by SEO on the repos you follow if they
| care about growth.
| eloisius wrote:
| No one is worried about a page you can ignore. We're worried
| about the second-order effects that trying to game that page
| will have on the rest of the site.
| toto444 wrote:
| I am interested in Japanese learning and Emoji and I am
| actually happy that Github recommends me repos related to these
| topics.
| bfdm wrote:
| GitHub has a feed?
| version_five wrote:
| Exactly what I was scrolling though here looking for a
| discussion of. I'm assuming (I'm on my phone and not going to
| check) that if you go to github.com there is a landing page
| with a feed?
|
| I use github 90% of the time for interacting with my / my
| companies repos, and the rest to peruse a repo I've been
| directed to for whatever reason. I have never been to the
| homepage (except maybe to sign in), and I have never used it to
| get news or find new repos or whatever a feed is for.
|
| I can see the potential to turn it into social media, that's
| fine as long as it doesn't bleed in to the actual repository
| management functionality.
| vivegi wrote:
| How long before GH starts pushing email spam with digests of
| "Projects that might interest you"? It would be great if they
| could instead redirect efforts to tie their recommendation engine
| to their search results. User intent is clearer and serendipitous
| recommendations surfacing in the results would actually be of
| value.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| https://cs.github.com and until that's publicly available:
| https://sourcegraph.com.
| danirod wrote:
| While I cannot trust algorithmic feeds anymore and I expect this
| to become an issue in the future, I have to say that based on
| what I've seen in my own "For you" tab, GitHub is doing a good
| job on showing updates from repositories that I starred and then
| forgot about, and I actually find that feature nice.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| > as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into
| something distressingly like a social media platform.
|
| Really users? This is news? I'll echo what I've said in another
| comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30769570) regarding
| GitHub being a social platform:
|
| > GitHub has always branded itself as a "social collaboration
| platform" rather than anything else (well, first "git hosting"
| but secondly the social stuff).
|
| > Here is a early version of their landing page from 2008 (the
| year they launched):
| https://web.archive.org/web/20081111061111/http://github.com...
|
| > Notice the logo says "Social code hosting" and the messaging of
| the page is mostly around popular repositories, collaborative
| features and other social elements.
|
| Anyone surprised by a "social code hosting" platform implementing
| new social features are in for a bleak feature, as the platform
| still aims (and always have aimed) to be the social place for
| coders.
| bawolff wrote:
| "Social" is not a synonym for "facebook". Github is a
| collaborative social platform. This still seems pointless and
| offbrand. There is no contradiction here.
| elpakal wrote:
| I kind of feel like this is just another Sherlock move by
| GitHb TBH, nothing more. It seems like they see popular apps
| that tap into GH (I use one that is basically just a feed of
| GH activity which I actually like) and things like Actions in
| their "marketplace" as opportunities to gobble up new product
| functionality into their own platform.
| tremon wrote:
| What's collaborative about github's platform? Were these
| features developed because the users asked for them?
| bawolff wrote:
| Its source tracker + issue tracker. Literally software
| designed to solve the problem of how multiple people
| collaborate writing code.
|
| I think this thread is losing track of what the word
| "collaborate" means. Its not about emoijis and cat memes
| krapp wrote:
| >Github is a collaborative social platform
|
| It shouldn't be. Social has its place, but I don't want to
| see memes and emojis and dramaposting with upvotes and
| downvotes and karma whoring on a project page. The purpose of
| Github should be to distribute and collaboratively _develop
| software_ and _nothing more._ None of the social features
| make developing software easier, they distract from what
| should be the platform 's purpose. Soon, you won't even need
| to deal with Git or push a repo at all, they'll just remove
| all of that "coding" shit and become another Twitter clone.
| That's the inevitable endstate of adding social features,
| they consume everything.
|
| Feh. Feh, I say!
| andrew_ wrote:
| I think it's fair to be surprised by curated _anything_ on
| Github as that 's not been their M.O. since I can remember, and
| I was a first-year adopter.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| How much longer until they release GitHub Stories?
|
| /s but not really
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| Again, you shouldn't be surprised if a company who always
| branded itself as "social" adds any new social features.
| viswd wrote:
| dxbydt wrote:
| > Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user....They limit
| what a user sees...never encountered a situation where an
| algorithmic feed made things better
|
| I don't know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my
| literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv
| news app. That's what I've done - written an algo that decides
| what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole
| bunch of newsclips never get shown...or they are at the end of
| the queue and 90% of the viewers would never get to them.
|
| Why does one do this ? Because screen real estate is finite. You
| turn on your tv, you have a finite rectangular canvas - I can
| show maybe 5 squares on that rectangle without scrolling. Each
| square has a newsclip with text & picture. Who gets to decide
| which 5 clips to show ? Well, my algo does. How else would you do
| it ? There are literally 100s of 1000s of newsclips per day!
| Can't show every single one of them - nobody has the time, nobody
| would watch, most of it is not going to be relevant to the vast
| majority of the audience. So 10000 newsclips get filtered down to
| 5 clips that get shown on the screen. You scroll. 5 more. Scroll
| again. 5 more. So on...you cap at 50 clips...nobody scrolls that
| much anyways.
|
| That's why you have an algorithmic feed - because there is too
| much content, but your brain real estate is finite. Your screen
| real estate is finite. The amount of time you have to watch news
| is finite. Your interest in news is finite. All of this has been
| measured, analyzed, sliced & diced. Your time is finite. But
| content is infinite. There is just too much news. Take finance
| news - 100s of companies reporting earnings every given day,
| associated commentary around buying/selling that stock, how the
| company is doing...1000s of newsclips! Take political news - so
| much footage, all the way from local municipal town hall meetings
| to presidential press conferences. Take entertainment news...man,
| there is so much music/movie/art/talent related content. Can't
| show everything. Hence algorithmic feed.
|
| Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn't showing you what
| you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer
| population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you
| personalize the feed. But without an algo...there's just no hope.
| stormbrew wrote:
| Honestly, there's nothing _inherently_ wrong with providing a
| limited and selective set of information to people. The problem
| is the tendency towards broader and broader aggregation.
|
| Once upon a time, people got their news from approximately 3
| "kinds" of places: - newspapers, locally managed, locally
| printed, locally distributed - radio, somewhere between locally
| and nationally managed, recorded, broadly distributed -
| television, probably regionally or nationally managed, maybe
| locally recorded, also broadly distributed.
|
| And for these things they had between several and tens of
| choices to select in to their preferences, interests, and
| alignments. They got to self-select the 'algorithm' they viewed
| information through. There was obviously an algorithm here, and
| in spite of golden-age glasses it was a racist, sexist, deeply
| problematic algorithm, but it was at least chosen by people in
| your community.
|
| Now though? Everything gets sucked up into some
| megacorporation's orbit through a rolling katamari of
| companies. We have facebook and twitter and things that will
| eventually be bought by facebook or twitter and approximately
| 2-3 companies that own every newspaper, radio station, and
| television station on the planet.
|
| There's no choice here anymore. Your algorithm is chosen by
| someone else, and if by some chance an upstart comes along to
| break out of that monotony it's inevitable that they'll be
| sucked up into the katamari eventually for the sin of being
| successful at bucking the trend, and then they will be just
| like everything else within a year.
|
| So you can do your best to provide a fresh, reasonable
| algorithm that does some good and helps people find something.
| But in the end, no matter how hard you try, it's gonna end up
| just like everything else and be a slushy mass of stuff that
| makes people angry to get money out of them.
| ars wrote:
| > So most algos let you personalize the feed.
|
| This is where the failure is. Most algos I've experienced show
| me more of what I already know. Or they show me what I was
| interested in the past (and I'm done with that).
|
| I want an algo that does the opposite - show me only things
| completely different - see if maybe I like them.
|
| I'm bored, I don't want more of the same, and I want something
| new. And there is where every one I've tried fails.
| jcelerier wrote:
| > So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an
| algo...there's just no hope.
|
| but there's an algo which is simple to implement and has very
| little biases: just show the things in temporal order ?
| Anything else is inferior to me. I don't want to see what's
| best for others, I don't want to see what some algorithm thinks
| is best for me, I just want to see what's last, with zero
| additional "reflection" on this.
| dxbydt wrote:
| > just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is
| inferior to me.
|
| heh heh. In the last 5 minutes, since you typed in your
| comment, there's been 100 news clips. Literally. So just show
| the top 5 after reverse sorting by time....newest to oldest.
| Temporal order. Now what would be the problem with that ?
| Almost always, your newsfeed will end up dominated by the
| latest weather clip where the guy says "and now the
| temperature is a sunny 82 degrees"...meanwhile 100s of people
| die in ukraine but you didn't see that because it was like an
| hour ago, and 1 minute ago >>> 1 hour ago.
| ailef wrote:
| If you also allow the user to filter results with a search
| query then this shouldn't be a problem. If he wants to see
| Ukraine news he will search for that. If there are too many
| results, the query can always be refined by the user.
| runako wrote:
| "Temporal order" is another way of saying "prioritize
| accounts that post most frequently, while suppressing less-
| frequent posters." That obviously rewards e.g. unnaturally
| breaking up content into multiple parts, content-light
| posting, and other consumer-hostile behaviors. I'm not sure
| why so many seem to think this is obviously optimal for
| consumers.
|
| "I'll unfollow the accounts that behave that way" doesn't
| work because a temporally-ordered system incentivizes all
| accounts to behave this way. An account that posts highly
| valuable content, but only posts once weekly, will not thrive
| in a temporal-only medium.
| newswasboring wrote:
| This might be true for social media but for a news app,
| they control their own pace.
| runako wrote:
| This viewpoint underestimates a single person's ability
| to consume the output of a news organization. There are
| orders of magnitude difference between the number of
| stories that can appear in one's newsfeed and the number
| of stories produced bye a news organization in a day.
|
| One could roughly estimate that by the time a news
| organization grows to need a full floor of office space,
| its pace of production will outstrip most readers'
| ability to keep up and not miss important stories. A
| temporal feed makes "keeping up" important, as relevant
| stories will quickly drop off the feed due to newer
| stories having been published more recently. The reverse
| is also true: a curated feed allows readers to step away
| and not worry that they will miss something important.
|
| The pacing of news stories is dictated by a combination
| of the number of salient events occurring as well as the
| number of staff.
|
| To use a concrete example, the (already-shortened) Yahoo!
| Finance News for Apple has 11 stories published today.
| There are thousands of public companies, and relevant
| news is published every day about many of them. A
| temporal feed of company news on the Yahoo! Finance
| homepage would therefore not be very useful. The pacing
| is essentially outside the control of Yahoo!, since it is
| driven by events at thousands of companies.
| chockchocschoir wrote:
| > Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn't showing you
| what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer
| population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you
| personalize the feed. But without an algo...there's just no
| hope.
|
| I think that the common complain is not "it isn't showing what
| I personally want" VS "it isn't showing what people generally
| want" but rather that the algorithm is often not tuned to "what
| X want" at all, but tuned to "what brings company most money".
| For example, YouTube recommendations are biased towards
| channels that have monetization activated, as YouTube earns
| more money that way, while ignoring channels the viewer (at
| large, or personally) would enjoy more.
| dxbydt wrote:
| Most of the comments here are incredibly dystopian -
| automation is bad, rehire the editor you've replaced at 75%
| of the salary, stop pushing engagement, what brings the
| company most money, megacorporation pushing slushy mass....
|
| Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys invokes such vitriol.
|
| There are dozens of news apps on smart TVs these days. Under
| the covers, it's pretty much the same deal - in go the raw
| feeds. Editors always do a first pass. Recsys algos do the
| 2nd pass. Ranking algos come in next. Personalization is
| usually last. Out comes the news. Viewers then have their say
| with thumbs up & downvotes. Those get fed back into
| personalization. On & on it goes...
|
| Its not magic. Its not perfect. But its how pretty much every
| smart tv news app works under the hood. There's dozens of
| them. Pick any one of them that works well on your TV for
| your temperament, I guess. Recsys is just a standard comp
| science discipline. We have our textbooks, our journals, our
| papers. We all read the same stuff, pretty much roll the same
| code with minor frills.
|
| Nobody's out to get you.
| tonguez wrote:
| "...what brings the company most money, megacorporation
| pushing slushy mass.... Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys
| invokes such vitriol."
|
| yes, corporations do whatever makes the most money.
| pointing that out has nothing to do with emotions. welcome
| to the real world.
| stormbrew wrote:
| I don't have to think someone is "out to get me" to believe
| that the current state of affairs is deeply broken and that
| you can't fix it with a better mouse trap.
|
| This is just a really easy way for you to dismiss any
| criticism and avoid cognitive dissonance over your work. I
| believe you have good intentions. I also believe that those
| "dozens of news apps" all burn a whole bunch of watt hours
| on producing nearly identical results and are largely just
| facades over a handful of media companies.
|
| And that's not speculation or a conspiracy theory, it's
| plainly true. Media conglomeration has happened at an
| incredibly fast pace over the last 40 years and local media
| has been decimated. No one has to be a cackling evildoer
| with a fancy mustache and a british accent to make this
| happen, they just have to keep grinding harder and harder
| at inventing new ways to 'fix it' with more conglomeration.
| amelius wrote:
| It's also "showing me stuff I may want _when I least want to
| be aware of it_ ". Stop the distractions already.
| edgyquant wrote:
| If anything algorithms that drive engagement are mutually
| exclusive with what people want to see. Most people don't
| usually engage with anything but the odds are a lot higher
| for someone to reply etc out of anger or disgust than
| anything else.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer
| population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you
| personalize the feed. But without an algo...there's just no
| hope.
|
| This is a problem, but from a different point of view. The
| algorithm is trained not to give me news but to keep me
| engaged. That should not be the purpose of a news app.
| hedora wrote:
| > _How else would you do it ? There are literally 100s of 1000s
| of newsclips per day!_
|
| No offence, but honestly, that scale doesn't require
| automation, and probably suffers from it. I'd rehire the full
| time editor (singular?) that you replaced, probably at 50-75%
| your salary.
| eloisius wrote:
| I'm not sure what kind of news app you work on, so maybe this
| doesn't fit, but what this makes me think is, you've optimized
| for putting the "best" stuff in limited real estate, but why
| does there need to be news headlines algorithmically ranked and
| dumped in front of me in a place that I'm not looking for them
| (e.g. the "home" screen of my smart TV)? If it's an app where
| you are consciously seeking news headlines, maybe there's a
| good case for collapsing the raw deluge of news into a
| recommended front page, but I still feel like we're losing
| something.
|
| Recommendations are never good, and always corrupted by what
| the business wants to push on me, but even if they were good,
| the hyper personalized world is just weird. I'll never be able
| to ask someone, "did you see the paper today?" Instead I wonder
| if they've been pushed the same stuff that I have and if we
| live in the same universe.
| dbingham wrote:
| I posted this to their feedback, but I'll share it here too.
|
| The new algorithmic feed gives me absolutely nothing of value -
| it's giving me a bunch of information I have no need for or
| interest in. It's just adding pure noise and no signal.
|
| The following feed might work for people who use the commit as
| the unit of review, but since there's no way to filter it to a
| certain subset of repos, it's also way too noisy to be useful.
| And for those of us who use the Pull Request as the unit of
| review, it's absolutely useless. Again, all noise and no signal.
|
| I would love the ability to construct an arbitrary number of
| custom feeds to surface information I actually need.
|
| I want to create new feeds, select whether they contain commits,
| pull request activity (PRs opened, closed, merged, and reviewed,
| and commented on), or both. Then I want to be able to filter
| which repos/organizations that feed is limited to. Ideally, I'd
| be able to select a set of feeds to show on the homepage as tabs
| I could click between to quickly scan activity in the subsets of
| repos I work on.
|
| So for example, I would create one feed to be my "Primary
| Responsibility area at Work". This would be the subset of repos I
| am primarily responsible for at my workplace. I'd configure it to
| show PR activity - new PR opens, new reviews, new comments (on
| review or on the PR), and PR merges or closes. This would surface
| the information I need and would allow me to very quickly scan to
| see whether there were any PRs I needed to look over or PR
| discussions I wanted to add my voice to. This is not a view I
| have right now. Notifications doesn't surface this information in
| a way that's easy to scan, and otherwise I have to go digging
| through (potentially) multiple boards or issues lists to see it.
| Instead being able to quickly scan down a feed of comments or
| reviews and reply right in the feed, I have to click through
| numerous screens and it's easy to miss stuff.
|
| I would then create a second feed that would be "All of work"
| which I would configure to be just PR activity for my work
| organization. This would allow me to quickly scan activity in
| other repos that I'm not primarily responsible for, and
| contribute if there are things of value I could add. Right now I
| can't do this at all, I have to rely on my teammates tagging me
| in. It's just much too time consuming to try to scan through all
| the activity - even though, were it presented in feed format of
| just the new stuff, there's probably not so much that I couldn't
| easily scan it every day. It's the amount of digging through
| screens and trying to figure out what's new that's time
| consuming.
|
| Then I'd create a feed for "My Stuff" which would contain all
| activity on repos I own (PRs and Commits). This would be mostly
| empty since, for the most part, I'm not collaboration with folks
| right now. But someday I'd like to, and this feed would be very
| useful then.
|
| Finally I'd create various feeds for the all the open source I
| follow based on what project is, how interested in it I am, and
| how involved in I am.
|
| Having this ability - the ability to create multiple custom feeds
| to surface this information I want by groups that are meaningful
| to me - has the potential to make collaboration on Github much
| easier and more efficient. One of the problems we face as a team
| is knowing when we need to respond to a pull request. And right
| now we mostly solve that with process (pinging each other,
| standups) and tooling (Jira/Slack). Having a feed we could
| quickly check for new activity would significantly grease those
| wheels and save us time elsewhere.
| thex10 wrote:
| Good reply.
|
| > I would then create a second feed that would be "All of work"
| which I would configure to be just PR activity for my work
| organization. [...] Right now I can't do this at all,
|
| Isn't https://github.com/orgs/[workorgname]/dashboard basically
| this?
| toastal wrote:
| Now you can easily clean up the regular feed with uBlock Origin
| `github.com###dashboard [aria-labelledby="feed-original"]
| :is(.follow, .watch_started)` will remove "someone followed
| something" and "someone starred something" which can help you
| focus on the updates that are critical aspects of updated issues
| and releases, and can just click over to the social media feed
| "For You (Beta)" for that kind of stuff if you feel so inclined
| (or you can ignore it). I have `github.com##aside[aria-
| label="Explore"]` as well to not get distracted with the
| recommendations I didn't ask for on the index page either.
| ape4 wrote:
| I took a look at mine and it might be interesting. Its in
| addition to the "following" feed - that's still there. It had
| people and projects I might want to check out based on (er,
| something). Why not? I might find something I like. It
| recommended a Rust project but I haven't posted any Rust.
| tedivm wrote:
| Yeah I actually like it. Besides, it's an optional new tab- you
| can completely ignore it if you don't like it.
|
| If they remove the existing chronological based feed then I can
| see why people might complain, but that hasn't happened.
| u2077 wrote:
| Nobody asked GitHub to become a social media platform. Why not
| improve search instead? When I want to find something, _I_ will
| look for it, _and know_ what I'm looking for. There's no point in
| pushing a bunch of random repos in my face with an algorithm that
| can and will be abused.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I second them improving search. If I try to search for a line
| of code, it doesn't consider special characters, you know the
| ones like everyone uses in code.
|
| Edit: somehow search autocorrected to support.
| Rendello wrote:
| For searching, https://grep.app/ is one of my favourite tools.
| Destiner wrote:
| Their latest code search thing [1] is pretty powerful already
| imo.
|
| [1] https://cs.github.com
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| u2077 wrote:
| Sweet! Joined the waitlist.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Alternatively, until that becomes available:
| https://sourcegraph.com.
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