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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Why do you care so much about how many watchers you have? I don't understand the point, certainly not to go as far as bunching commits and pushing at night to keep the watchers happy...

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This is a very real problem, but I'd argue it's a problem from the side of the watcher rather than the watched. As a GitHub user, there are two kinds of repos I care about: projects I'm active in, and projects I'm vaguely interested in and might be interested in keeping an eye on. For the first group, I want constant notifications. Let me know anytime anyone does anything. For the latter, I don't care, and probably actively don't want notifications.

Right now, GitHub groups both of these use cases into the same 'Watch' functionality.

That, I can believe. I don't watch any repos, though, so I don't know. I care about the ones I contribute to, because I forked them and issued pull requests, so I want to know how they're doing. Apart from that, I don't really care about watching other people's development live.

Watchers are (often) the people who use the software you make, and the exact kind of people you want to keep interested in your project. They're the source of useful bug reports and feature requests, and you want to keep them involved in the project as much as possible. I completely understand OP's intent.

Sounds like a brogrammer to me. If I am watching a project I usually give input to the pull requests and bugs. To me watching is being a bit more involved than a simple 'like'. Sometimes I feel like too many projects are based around the idea of "I will only develop it if people are watching it" instead of trying to solve a real problem for the author and going from there.

> Sounds like a brogrammer to me.

Is that necessary? http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry. I just couldn't get over the complaining about loosing "followers" like that was the whole point of the project :/

Well, there's also the responsibility thing: if I have (say), 10K watchers, I would feel responsible to keep mySweetProject running and maintained. Whereas if there were 0 watchers, I'd feel fine about ignoring it.

I totally agree with the other poster in this thread that said the idea of "following" and "hey this is a neat project" is conflated in github. I'd like to favourite projects for further observation/interest, but I have no real desire to watch their progress day by day.

There's that, but "users" and "watchers" are different. I care about actual users more.

Exactly, I never took this "social coding" thing seriously, but this "github fan" counting takes it to a new level.

It serves as a mechanism to gauge interest in your project; watchers correlates to customers.

at least IMO.

I can't buy that. Customers would be more likely to use your project if it were more active, not less.

> Customers would be more likely to use your project if it were more active, not less.

Right, but if I'm a customer of your simple project, and a customer of Node.js and Homebrew, then I will never see your update and issue notifications that might actually have more relevance to me than Node or Homebrew because those two have near constant updates.

On the other hand, If I'm a customer of your project that is just as popular as Node or Homebrew, I'll be receiving hundreds of notifications from your project every day. You'd be effectively spamming me.

To fix this problem, we're asking if we could find a middle ground that lets the simple project with a dozen forks and 40 watchers maintain about the same level of notification real estate as the popular project with 5,000 watchers and just as many forks.

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