[HN Gopher] New GitHub Profile Badges Beta
___________________________________________________________________
New GitHub Profile Badges Beta
Author : akrifari
Score : 94 points
Date : 2022-06-09 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| Liquidor wrote:
| I like this feature.
|
| I understand that it's not for everyone, but I also feel like
| people here tend to forget that GitHub is a social
| coding/collaboration platform as well. If you didn't like these
| features, why are your projects on GitHub then? Plenty of other
| git solutions.
|
| I see some comments worried about this feature being abused or
| misused in regards to "bad contributions" however those
| contributions would either just be rejected, as they should, or
| accepted by the maintainers which means the badges worked to
| begin with, promoting more open-source collaboration.
| prepend wrote:
| > If you didn't like these features, why are your projects on
| GitHub then
|
| Because it also works really well for solo projects or private
| projects.
|
| I chose GitHub many years ago not because they were social but
| because they were free and accessible. The competitors at the
| time were sourceforge and Google code and neither of them were
| as easy to use or simple.
|
| I use GitHub in spite of its dumb social features, not because
| of it.
|
| This reminds me of the "if you don't love guns, why do you live
| in America, gtfo" people are complicated and have multiple,
| sometimes conflicting, motivations.
| xigoi wrote:
| Moving to another Git host is much easier than moving out of
| the USA.
| oefrha wrote:
| I thought the Arctic vault and Mars badges were pretty cool, but
| these new ones are really cringe. Unfortunately they can only be
| disabled together.
| [deleted]
| david_allison wrote:
| One of the achievements is 'YOLO': 'merged without a review'.
|
| We really shouldn't be encouraging this.
| crazysim wrote:
| It's like one of those anti-achievements. Like the infamous
| "The exact opposite of your job" achievement.
| joshmanders wrote:
| It's not exactly as bad as it sounds, there's been a few times
| I have merged a PR from someone where I reviewed it, I just
| never went through the "Review this PR" -> "Approve PR"
| workflow that adds the meta data "joshmanders has approved this
| PR"
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I don't generally do reviews when I merge a PR into a branch of
| my own projects
| ep103 wrote:
| Where is this list of github achievements? The only place I see
| this mentioned is here
| mshockwave wrote:
| yeah this achievement is really immature, maybe same as the one
| who came up with this in GH :-P
| datavirtue wrote:
| Gets hired because he has 4k YOLO badges. Agile.
| O__________O wrote:
| More than likely, this is a red flag, not an achievement; or at
| least one would hope it is.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| I almost never "review" PRs people send on my repos through
| the GitHub UI. I "review" them in the sense that I look at
| them, and comment when needed of course.
|
| This "achievement" is not indicative of anything at all.
| drakonka wrote:
| I don't know how it could serve as any meaningful flag. It's
| normal to merge to main without any review in your own solo
| hobby projects, and I kind of doubt this badge goes so far as
| to exclude those kinds of repos.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Only if you can't imagine working on a project by yourself...
| throwaway3neu94 wrote:
| Depends on the criteria. Do automated reviews count?
|
| I set up build+test via GH actions and have GitHub run them
| on PR's. And make all changes through PR's.
|
| This not only prevents "forgot to run tests" type accidents
| during regular development, it also helps me when I come
| back to a hobby project months later, and it lets me
| confidently do small changes (think version bumps) directly
| through GitHub's editor, which saves a bunch of time.
|
| And when, against the odds, I actually do get a
| contribution, the infra is already there and it really cuts
| down my turnaround time to get it merged, bump the version
| and deploy the release.
|
| Of course if a single direct push yields you the badge then
| I guess pretty much every solo dev gets it sooner or later.
| But that indirectly turns it back into a good badge, right?
| "Independent enough to have a life outside a standardized
| corporate process"?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Actions can still provide the feedback even without a PR
| if you trigger on push, you just don't have a gate like
| PR for contribution. I do similar to what you're
| describing and would recommend a feedback loop for
| build/test 100% of the time.
|
| I just don't think merging without review equates is an
| absolute negative depending on the situation, in this
| case no reviewers exist outside of myself and from my
| perspective this is how a lot projects start, someone
| just goes for it and starts committing! Yolo...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| michaelanckaert wrote:
| 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.
| doliveira wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment, but that ship has sailed a long
| time ago. The TikTok-fication of the world is inevitable.
| __derek__ wrote:
| 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.
| TrueGeek wrote:
| I like how this is the most upvoted comment
| dmonitor wrote:
| Upvotes are for letting "good" posts be more visible than
| "bad" posts, not validation for the poster
| voz_ wrote:
| Maybe in theory, but they've become "I agree"/"I disagree"
| yellowapple wrote:
| Those ain't as mutually exclusive as you assert.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news_website
|
| Edit: Huh, I actually can't think of such a site (excluding
| 4chan, Twitter, and subforums, which sometimes act as such)
| _without_ comment voting today. Though, Slashdot didn't have
| it at first (remind me, were insightful/funny/etc added at
| the same time?),[0] and Fark only since 2011.[1]
|
| [0] https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
|
| [1] https://www.fark.com/comments/blog256/New-feature-
| Favoriting...
| nojito wrote:
| Why? Coding (by using repos) is by definition is a social
| experience.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >social media experience
|
| *videogames
|
| And the term for introducing in non-game areas game elements
| such as achievements is gamification.
| cglong wrote:
| To be fair, GitHub's original slogan was "Social Coding".
| s3tz wrote:
| True, but why do people think they need validation to
| collaborate?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's because people often need validation to collaborate.
| [deleted]
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Stackoverflow also has badges and it motivated me a lot to
| answer questions on the early days.
| peterkos wrote:
| 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!")
| joshmanders wrote:
| 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.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| 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.
| frou_dh wrote:
| 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.
| jwagenet wrote:
| 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.
| akerl_ wrote:
| 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.
| rmdoss wrote:
| Everything needs to be gamified now.
| coryw wrote:
| This is fun.
| take_it_not wrote:
| Can't wait for more ppl making random bullsh*t PR just to earn
| these badges lol
| EscargotCult wrote:
| Reminds me of the Stack Overflow profile badges, which themselves
| were inspired by Xbox achievements.
| kertoip_1 wrote:
| Stack Overflow badges are IMO the best example of how such
| feature should be done. They all make up a great summary of all
| actions that are considered to be useful in community. They are
| encouraging to raise flags, upvote questions, visit website
| regularly. You can quickly learn features that you haven't
| tried yet from "Next badge" section in your profile. They are
| just encouraging learning about how website operates in a fun
| way.
| [deleted]
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Why though?
|
| On one hand, yes it's fun and brings entertainment to the
| platform.
|
| On the other hand, I don't really want a badge showing I
| sometimes "YOLO" merging code like it's an achievement or
| something. It's not the achievement you think it is, even if it's
| a common meme for people new to the industry. It leaves a
| breadcrumb trail of bad practices that are sometimes out of
| necessity.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Why not? You've never had a personal project or repo you've
| committed to without reviewers?
| thenerdhead wrote:
| All the time, but not in public repos. Do look at the
| feature. It is only associated for public/OSS repos.
| agluszak wrote:
| I'm afraid this feature will lead to a proliferation of low
| quality contributions - just like Hacktoberfest.
|
| It's saddening that GH is turning more and more into a gamified
| social network (the new "for you" feed).
| jreynoldsdev wrote:
| I'm surprised how much negative reaction there is to this, what
| gives? I'm a sucker for a good product shtick and love these
| badges.
| [deleted]
| karol wrote:
| Looks woke
| jackomelon wrote:
| Sounds pretty cool. I like the "discovery by surprise" approach.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Meanwhile GitLab 15 just launched with features that actually
| help devs...
| tills13 wrote:
| Such as? And are these features that GH already has in some
| capacity?
| bearjaws wrote:
| Advanced Search is compatible with OpenSearch (GH did add
| this recently)
|
| Plan and schedule issues with automated iteration cadences
| (great for recurring annual tasks)
|
| Container Scanning available in all tiers (already very easy
| to add container scanning in enterprise, but now available
| for free everywhere, have to use a third party action in
| github)
|
| Project-level Secure Files in open beta (missing from github)
|
| Semgrep-based SAST (in addition to their existing SAST &
| DAST, something github lacks natively)
|
| Approve deployments from the Environments page (GitHubs
| approval flows are _enterprise only_ )
|
| Improvements to Terraform registry
|
| --
|
| _GitLab is already well beyond the feature set of GitHub,
| you should give it a look sometime._
|
| Things that immediately jump out to me:
|
| 1. Security Dashboards
|
| 2. Kubernetes Integration (automated test environments)
|
| 3. SAST / DAST / OSS license checks / compliance frameworks
|
| 4. Feature Toggles using unleash (hosted by Gitlab)
|
| 5. More robust project planning, way beyond 'issues'.
|
| 6. Can read in results from unit testing / cypress without
| adding additional plugins
|
| 7. Can send alarms from your observability platform of choice
| to indicate release health
|
| 8. OpenFaaS support
| hk1337 wrote:
| Badges? We don't need no stinking' badges.
| evanmoran wrote:
| I know this is supposed to be fun, but I'm also mixed on it as so
| much of my work is in private repositories. This means that these
| badges are like "privacy leaks" from my closed source work to my
| public GitHub profile. I suspect this is why this discussion is
| getting so negative as GitHub is not a social fun place for us
| anymore, it's the place we work everyday with coworkers and
| managers. So in general please GitHub be less gamified and social
| as I don't want to have to constantly monitor privacy settings
| (like at FB) and instead focus on what we all want: replacing
| Jira and streamlining containers / CI :)
| jaywalk wrote:
| It sounds like these badges will only come from public commits,
| and you can also turn them off. So I don't think your concern
| is warranted.
| sodality2 wrote:
| It _has_ given me badges for PR 's in private repositories,
| it just doesn't display what repo or any additional
| information (listed as "inaccessible")
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Gamification. Lovely. I get the usefulness to people trying to
| build profile, but sheesh. When we getting those GitHub Stories?
| Zababa wrote:
| I currently have "Pull Shark" for having made pull requests that
| have been merged. This works on my own repos, I'm not sure if
| this is intended.
| tills13 wrote:
| This is noise at best. I appreciate them trying -- how much can
| you actually change github to be a better product? This just
| feels like a manager or team creating work for themselves.
| nvr219 wrote:
| What a totally useless focus from GitHub.
| [deleted]
| no_wizard wrote:
| I don't mind this, in a sense its cool because some OSS projects
| can use this as a way to honor key contributors publicly in ways
| that are "obvious". I'm thinking also its a way to earn yourself
| some credibility on your resume beyond just showing your
| contribution graph in a way that is easily digested (re:
| quickly).
|
| With that said, and I know GitHub is big and lots of people are
| working on lots of things, however I feel like whatever energy
| went into this could have possibly been spent on making the UI
| more responsive and less wonky. For instance, I still continue to
| run into issues when opening PR links from the Slack integration
| where it won't load the CI status correctly, I have to refresh
| the page _every_ time.
|
| I love GitHub, and I'm not someone who is trying to harsh anyone,
| and I think this is kind of cool for what it is, however there
| are many long standing UI / UX issues make this landing a little
| less exciting.
| dancemethis wrote:
| There should be a badge with a very... on-point graphic, for
| people who contribute to software used in ICE, the US-based
| concentration camps.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I have lukewarm feelings about this.
|
| On one hand, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong
| with additional badges -- I thought the first two (the Mars Rover
| and "code vault" ones) were pretty interesting, and told an
| interesting story. On the other hand, these feel much more
| gamified: I don't know what "YOLO" or "Pull Shark" is supposed to
| mean to me when I see it on someone's profile. And this is coming
| from someone who _really likes_ the other social aspects of
| GitHub: I like seeing people 's commit timeline, pull histories,
| &c.
|
| IMO, the failure here is not in concept, but in execution.
| Rewards and validation are nice; I'd like to see GitHub reach a
| bit higher with them.
| jerryjerryjerry wrote:
| This is a fun project, however, what values can it provide
| besides fancy "social coding"? There are tons of information with
| github, and how to dig out the values behind sounds more
| meaningful to me.
| jerryjerryjerry wrote:
| I'm thinking about a website that exploit insights from the
| github data might be more useful, like this one:
| https://ossinsight.io/ , which can allow project owners,
| developers, or even investors to find out the project trends,
| activities, or even popularity in certain regions/countries.
| substation13 wrote:
| I enjoy StackOverflow badges and I think this could be fun.
| jansan wrote:
| To those of you not in favor of this new feature, you can opt out
| by unchecking Settings -> Public Profile (at the bottom) -> Show
| Achievements on my profile
|
| I just did this.
| dandellion wrote:
| They have a lot of downtime, so I guess it's good they're adding
| features like this that compensate for it.
| smcameron wrote:
| Github has had achievements for a ages I think, they just never
| used them for much. I know I've had "Arctic Code Vault
| Contributor", and "Mars 2020 Contributor" achievements for ages
| (but only incidentally, because I happen to have commits in the
| linux kernel.)
| [deleted]
| chimen wrote:
| Next killer feature: preferred pronouns on profile. /s
| mkl95 wrote:
| Some people are making $300000+ a year working on these features.
| Think about it for a minute.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Power to 'em.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| This is a really dumb feature. Out of everything you could add to
| GitHub, why spend time on this?
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| It feels like the kind of thing that would be a side project.
| I've never worked at GitHub or MS and have no inside info on
| this, but I worked at Google years ago and any similar launch
| from them during (or before) my time there could easily have
| been a 20% project. Badges on Google's internal company
| directory proliferated and were widely enjoyed.
| onion2k wrote:
| It's fun. You remember fun, right?
| Fordec wrote:
| Just because HN is a fun free zone, some evidently believe
| the rest of the world has to be also. The only way I can
| understand some of the reactions in this thread is that many
| are holding a belief the only reason to use Github is your
| anonymous desk job. Like the question of does the "YOLO"
| achievement apply to your automated CI pipeline is itself
| giving away private information by implication.
|
| I'm over here with 80% of my commit history just being recipe
| markdown.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It's a coding social network; these features keep people happy
| with the GitHub brand and they increase the amount of features
| any potential competitor must implement if they want to be
| competitive against GH.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| good thing i moved away from github, what a poorly managed
| company
| damsta wrote:
| There are so many other things they could invest time on and they
| decided to spend it profile badges...
| popcorncowboy wrote:
| This is not stupid. It's not a waste of time. It doesn't matter
| if this leads to a proliferation of shit contributions. It
| doesn't matter if it encourages bad practices. It doesn't matter
| if you don't like it.
|
| It's smart.
|
| This is WHY Microsoft bought Github. Software is eating the world
| and Github is where most of the eating happens. There are many
| career paths that require you to live on Twitter or LinkedIn or
| whatever. If Github pulls off the bigger play here it won't
| matter what Gitlab or Bitbucket or anyone else ever tries because
| you will HAVE to be on Github.
|
| This is how a trillion dollar company gets its return on GH.
| StyloW wrote:
| I'm quite conflicted with this; while I agree that it's a smart
| move in terms of forcing user engagement, I think it sucks that
| Github is and seemingly will continue to be THE Git platform.
| I'd argue that other platforms such as Gitlab and even Azure
| DevOps provide a better overall experience, especially when it
| comes to CI/CD, so it's a little sad that the battle for users
| seems to be going into the 'social features' territory rather
| than improved user experience.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I think the strategy's reasonable from a "right tool for the
| job" standpoint. The key to product differentiation is, you
| know, differentiation; if GitLab wants to differentiate with
| a rich CI/CD experience while GitHub wants to differentiate
| with a rich social/collaboration experience, then great! I
| can push my code to both pretty trivially, so it seems
| reasonable to use both for what they're respectively good at.
| jreynoldsdev wrote:
| well said
| Etheryte wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head. Most people (at least in my
| social circles) don't like Linkedin, but are on the platform
| all the same. If an external service becomes the go-to
| validation for one metric or another, people will use it to try
| and get an edge, and eventually it means that you need to play
| the game to get your foot in the door. As an anecdotal example,
| I once didn't hear back after applying for a role, and when I
| sent them a followup email they said they didn't think I was a
| real person because I wasn't on Linkedin. Cue me now being on
| Linkedin.
|
| Given that Stack Overflow has shut down their (very popular)
| jobs board along with the relevant developer profiles [0], this
| seems like a great time for Github to try and grab a part of
| the pie.
|
| [0]
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
| solatic wrote:
| Precisely. LinkedIn doesn't specialize in software, it's a
| glorified resume database. We all know that resumes don't
| really tell you whether an engineer is going to do good work
| for you; if they did, the only purpose of engineering
| interviews would be for culture fit. At the same time, even if
| all of an engineer's contributions were fully in the open and
| linked to from their GitHub profile, it's all a bit too much
| for a hiring manager to parse per resume that they receive.
|
| Achievements is a way of distilling contributions down to the
| important questions that hiring managers have: just how senior
| is this person I'm interviewing anyway? If I hire this person
| to do cutting-edge work, are they the kind of person to
| interact with the community on pushing the state-of-the-art, or
| not?
| anarticle wrote:
| I think you are riding a horse that is driven by a cart :D.
|
| Rather than looking at github from the perspective of hiring
| managers, look at it from the perspective of users. If the
| feature does not seem to serve them, it might not be a good
| one.
|
| If github is a tool, then the words hiring manager probably
| shouldn't appear. I don't think of "what will my product
| person think?" when I use grep.
|
| Also, didn't we do this when the award was tshirts for
| commits to open source projects where it unleashed a
| firestorm of junk edits to projects?
|
| If SNR gets low enough, people will migrate. I know some
| people have left github for gitlab, and are having a whale of
| a time with their runners etc. Replacing junky old jenkins
| installs for in the fence CICD.
| solatic wrote:
| > look at it from the perspective of users
|
| It sounds like your perspective is that users don't get any
| value out of social media?
|
| Why do people post photos to Instagram? Why post updates to
| Facebook?
|
| You can take photos for your own benefit (like writing code
| for some non-GitHub-related benefit, e.g. work) and _also_
| share them on social media for your own gratification. You
| can live life for the fun of it and _also_ share it on
| social media for your own gratification. (leave aside that
| social media is net-toxic, it 's still worth it to
| understand the motivations of those who engage with social
| media).
|
| Don't want to engage with the social media aspects of
| GitHub that they're adding (because social media is net-
| toxic)? Fine. Disable the achievements. They (smartly)
| built in that disable switch. But don't presume that there
| isn't a large portion of GitHub's userbase that won't get
| value out of this.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _Rather than looking at github from the perspective of
| hiring managers, look at it from the perspective of users._
|
| Why? Everybody I've talked to who's considered alternatives
| and still uses GitHub for projects that don't _have_ to be
| on GitHub does it _because_ they 're looking at it from the
| perspective of potential employers. (Or because they like
| GitHub's Projects feature enough, but those are rarer.)
| infamouscow wrote:
| People can already showcase and get credit for their
| contributions on GitHub. Badges are noise.
|
| What do you think happens after GitHub earns a reputation for
| alienating OSS project leaders by incentivizing low-quality
| contributions?
|
| This is yet another short-sighted and stupid decision towards
| making GitHub into the next SourceForge.
| ballenf wrote:
| It's either that or it's how a billion dollar company destroys
| its acquisition and has to write it down.
|
| To me, this strategy was the right one 5+ years ago and
| Microsoft is behind the trends.
|
| I see this backfiring if they push it too hard.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| it made me quit github, looks like you guys are visionary ;)
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(page generated 2022-06-09 23:01 UTC)