Hacker News Reader

> Sometimes it feels like software development has devolved into a sea of posturing and marketing oneself.

I've been saying it for a long time, but the reason that this and other problems (like high developer burnout) seem like especially bad problems that the world of "software development" is facing is primarily because they're especially bad in the GitHub culture (and as a consequence of that culture), and the developers who are experiencing the worst of it are part of that community. Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.

Much like follower counts on other social media sites, GitHub's contribution graph and profile timeline should have never been public. They should have been neat features of your personal dashboard that you alone are able to see when you're signed in—providing some form of encouragement à la the Seinfeld hack and to help you manage your work—but not for others' eyes. The gamification of "social" leads to degenerative behavioral patterns.

> Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.

This sounds like "Without GitHub you will get less spam", which is probably true, but I think the reason is not "github is bad", it's: Less people will find your project.

Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off, but it's very different from "all will be better without Github"

Less people finding your project could be an improvement if the people you loose are the onse that just create the kind of spam contributions mentioned in the article. You don't need GitHib for useful software to become popular, it is just one channel. And you definitely don't need the gamified bullshit like total stars on your profile.

The spam problem was caused by the gamification. It probably would occur with any platform.

> Less people will find your project

That is false. Firstly, even if your project is not hosted on github, clones of it will appear on github anyway.

Secondly, planting yourself in the middle of a vast ocean of garbage is not a good strategy for being found. You might be thinking of the Github of twelve years ago.

> Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off, but it's very different from "all will be better without Github"

Making up quotes is not cool; those aren't my words, and that's not my position, so I'm not going to be gulled into defending it or kept from calling attention to what amounts to a sleight of hand here, even if it wasn't intentional.

(And this really chafes, because after I wrote what I meant, I even revised it to pre-empt[1] getting sucked into a discussion where someone responds to the wrong reading—specifically trying to avoid things like this. But when people don't even respect the constraint of sticking to others' actual words and instead conjure up other words that make for a more convenient world[2] to operate in, then there's almost nothing that can be done.)

> This sounds like "Without GitHub you will get less spam"

Well, it shouldn't; that's reductive.

If the bad stuff that arises from GitHub, its culture, and its practices were proportionate to its size, that would be one thing. (But also not itself a good reason not to consider ditching it—just like it's not obviously true that it would be a good idea to use Windows because the risk of malware is rational given its size as a target.) What's bad about GitHub, though, might in fact be disproportionate to its size—and in some cases, especially with respect to the practices that get promoted in that world, are things that are bad irrespective of GitHub's size.

1. https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.htm...

2. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Least_convenient_possible_wo...

I have no skin in this game, but I find that "all will be better without Github" is a reasonable short approximation of your "Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.".

You have explained your criticism of GitHub, and I agree that it should have done things differently from the beginning. Still, your proposed solution for users is literally to "Ditch the 'Hub", promising that "many of these problems get dialed back a lot". It's really not a far stretch to "all will be better without Github".

> Still, your proposed solution for users is literally to "Ditch the 'Hub", promising that "many of these problems get dialed back a lot".

This is accurate. Let's let that be the place we stay.

> I find that "all will be better without Github" is a reasonable short approximation [...]

Well I don't, and it's my position, isn't it? It's not accurate. I don't think that "all will be better without GitHub"—and what's more is that I practice the "without GitHub" part; I have the firsthand experience to be able to say it's not true, so I wouldn't try to tell anyone that it is—and I didn't. I'm responsible for my own ideas, not ones imagined upon me.

Moreover, if I argue that A and B are not equivalent and that I prefer deal with A in its original form and not B, and you argue that they are equivalent, it's not rational for either party to insist that we deal with B in place of A. So let's not.

The effect of those things on github are minuscule comparing to that of medium and twitter. I never even looked at anyone else's github profile. Most of the time it's medium and twitter that take me to their projects and I only evaluate the project with the context of who they are on twitter or what they've written on medium.

I've seen quite a few people market themselves by saying how many stars they have on github, and some even started putting something like "If you find this useful, please star it" in their documentation. It's not quite "like, share & subscribe" yet, but it's on the way. Any public metric will be optimized for, I guess.

Starring a project increases visibility because anyone who follows the person who started it will see it too. It is a question of marketing.

Why should malware writers be the only ones who's code goes viral, huh? /s

> Most of the time it's medium and twitter that take me to their projects and I only evaluate the project with the context of who they are on twitter or what they've written on medium.

Please revisit my original comment. When I wrote it, I put some effort into qualifying things to make it clear that I'm not talking about just what happens on GitHub on the site. I referred to its culture. The things you just described are part of that culture, and very notable elements of it.

I agree but calling that "github culture" is unfair. It's a culture that emerged independently from github and like I said those metrics on github should not be the target for criticism. I found them pretty useless but some metrics can be good in a team context. I don't think they are a major part of the problem, let alone part of the cause.

> I don't think

it all started when people blogged about their programming tricks way back, and hacker news should be part of the problem before github is. Github at least has functions other than a social hub.

I’d argue getting a shirt for some PRs is better than the status quo, where you get nothing for a PR.

Which just goes to show how bad the status quo is.

> where you get nothing for a PR

You already got payment up front: software that the author(s) have made available to you for free.

You get payment by the author spending time to review your changes.

You also get payment afterward: free maintenance for your pet feature. (Not guaranteed of course but generally the case.)

“But we obtain the puzzling result that, when rewarded, volunteers work less. These findings are in line with a large literature in social psychology emphasizing that external rewards can undermine the intrinsic motivation for an activity.”

Be very careful assuming that a payment motivates open source developers. If you offered to help me do something for an hour for whatever internal motivation you might have, and afterwards I offer you $5 for your time, you would likely be demotivated.

If you offered to help me do something for an hour for whatever internal motivation you might have, and afterwards I offer you $5 for your time, you would likely be demotivated.

On the other hand if you offered to buy them a beer or a coffee it would probably be very motivating. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe cash just feels lazy and impersonal, so the amount being offered has to be big enough to counter that feeling.

It's the implicit conversation with the beer-buyer that matters. You are offering your time (which is atleast valuable to you) along with the beer. If you just buy a beer and left instantly, it's gonna be worse than $5

It's the implicit conversation with the beer-buyer that matters.

That is certainly a plus, but I don't think that's all of it. If I was working on something for a friend, that they had no idea how to help with. Then at some point they dropped off a snack or drink as a thank you, I would be happy about that. If they offered me a $100 bill I would be offended because they're not my boss, and my time is worth more than that.

I want to say that a small token of appreciation feels better than having my value quantified to an insulting amount. However, it may be even more basic than that. Food is a powerful reward, there is a reason it is used to train animals. It also could be that introducing money makes something feel like an obligation.

Offering $5 dollars feels like it's ascribing a low value to the time/effort to help. Offering a coffee or beer feels like a better gesture/token of appreciation. It's not about the value then but about the gesture.

For anyone who is working, people are "giving" them $5 all the time. But they probably don't have people buying them coffee/beer/lunch all the time.

That quote might be misleading:

"Volunteer work is an increasingly large, yet ill-understood sector of the economy. We show that monetary rewards undermine the intrinsic motivation of volunteers."

-- https://ideas.repec.org/p/zur/iewwpx/007.html

The earlier sentence make it clear they are talking about monetary rewards specifically, not any kind of reward. A t-shirt might notionally have a $ value, but it is not a monetary reward. Plus, the nature of a branded t-shirt has an obvious team-participation / prestige value.

If rewards demotivate people, we should also avoid positive recognition, or praise, which is a form of reward; of course this is unintuitive, so I assume monetary rewards are a special case.

It is tricky.

We all hear the stories of the person who saves a company a million dollars, and then gets giving a coffee cup (or an attaboy) for recognition.

It gets even trickier when the giver and the receiver have wildly different incomes.

Generally I find money to be a terrible proxy for what I actually value, but other options are worse proxies!

I actually would be very motivated. From the perspective of a contributor the worst thing that can happen is that their patch gets rejected or ignored. If you get paid for something it means someone actually wants your contribution. It's less likely to be ignored or rejected outright.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.511....

here is the work that you cited if i am not wrong.

That's missing the point a bit.

Good PRs are valuable, but require lots of work. Spam is not valuable, but it also does not require basically any work.

Hacktoberfest equally rewards both good PRs and spam equally. With those incentives, what are people logically going to produce?

On the other hand, what kind of people are going to logically participate in an event where the reward is a Hacktober branded T-shirt? What are their likely motivations?

> what kind of people are going to logically participate in an event where the reward is a Hacktober branded T-shirt?

Well, the answer is clearly "a lot of people," unless you can think of an alternate explanation for the increase is spam during Hacktober.

Why they want a damn T-Shirt so much is a totally valid question, though. I don't understand that either.

I submitted very few PRs to open source projects. I usually submit bug reports.

In both cases I get that what I care about gets into the project. It's enough for me.

My pet theory is that 'marketing oneself' trend is a sign of oversaturation (and forthcoming commoditisation).

This happen a few years back in UI design when designers started to put more work into presentation of projects than projects themselves.

> When seeming is taken for being, being becomes seeming

This quote can be applied to organizations on the wane.

> devolved into a sea of posturing and marketing oneself

Don't think it's devolved at all this has been the norm from the 80's onwards (perhaps earlier).

Look at how fractured open source is today and the sort of egos that come with it everywhere you look. While the points made in this article are valid, it's great that someone is incentivising people to interact with various projects rather than do their own thing rather than climb blindly up the same treacherous mountains others have done long ago.

Hey, also why not rewrite it in rust :)

Being a contrarian is easy, fixing these well acknowledged problems is hard.