Hacker News Reader

Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

It's not inertia, it's gravity.

There is a pull to be the place things are.

You can find things, and your thing can be found.

To be honest, i never really understood this mentality for github. Code contribution isn't really the sort of thing people just randomly start doing because they are already on github. Github is not a social network (no matter how hard they might try to push social features)

I disagree.

My observation: instead of gaming likes, people are gaming contribution metrics. It's a subtle sort of "social credit score" type thing these days.

It may not be Facebook, but the social aspects and impacts are nevertheless strong.

Agree with this. My coworkers often use their personal accounts purely for those sweet sweet contribution dots.

Sure, but i think the real question is do you want those types of people contributing to your project? Like are the people doing it for points really likely to make valuable contributions?

I find that to be irrelevant when employers start looking at your GitHub stats during the hiring process...

I intensely dislike the exposed contribution metrics, personally. Partly because I'm a natural introvert and find it intrusive, but mostly because I feel that it tends to thoroughly emphasize quantity over quality.

[edit: It's GitHub, not GutHub!]

What you say is true and IME the driving feature of GH is discoverability.

Project there gets Stars (cause they have an account already, cause inertia). They show up for lots of Google search, etc.

Right. It’s basically a version of Metcalfe's law isn’t it?

“[it] states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.” (Wikipedia)

Yeah I have to disagree. I even host my own GitLab (because I heavily prefer its CI/CD over GitHub's Actions), but if I wanted to contribute to your project, I'm far more likely to do it on GitHub than to convince myself to create yet another GitLab account on like the sixth instance.

Until alternatives finally implement something like ForgeFed (https://forgefed.org/) which would allow me to simply contribute with something like @user@my.gitlab-instance.com, I'm gonna continue preferring GitHub for my public contributions and still use GitLab privately.

A massive number of developers already have a GitHub account and are used to the tools (how PRs are done, bugs filed, etc). There are also plug-ins for basically any piece of software you want to use with it.

It just removes a ton of friction.

If you go with someone else then anyone who wants to contribute to you has to sign up with them. And learn the tools.

No, it’s not the biggest hurdle in the world. It’s not like they have to pay $100. But it is a hurdle. Existing contributors are likely to follow you anywhere reasonable. But it could make a real difference in getting new people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com