Neat! People complaining about 'gamifying github' seem to be greatly over-estimating the author's goal here. Also neat to learn about the free dataset uploaded to https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/.
Yeah it is clearly a showcase for ClickHouse which is worth bragging about since it is quite performant. And it has a very strong community as the following shows:
I am honestly not sure if my solution can handle HackerNews at this point since generating deep insights for ClickHouse (which has a lot of history) is very expensive.
For those curious, I'm running DevBoard on a single 128 GB machine with 6TB of SSD in RAID 0 (I'm willing to take the risk) and the Postgres database has over 1000 partitions (including sub-partitions) that are optimized for my queries. I'm pretty sure ClickHouse can be more performant and if the creator of https://ghe.clickhouse.tech is reading this, I'm open to seeing if I can't get my solution working on ClickHouse.
Thanks. For a CTO, he is extremely active in the community. Only the ClickHouse robot is on par with his engagement. I'll reach out to him to see if ClickHouse is a viable option as my plan is to replace GitHub's insights tab with a useful dashboard (this is why DevBoard has such an minimal look), so I'll need a very performant DB that can work with my queries.
We are lucky to have him. It also helps that he was the founding engineer on the product.
Also, feel free to hit us up in GH (or we have a Slack). ClickHouse is used for a number of dashboarding implementations. It should work...but, as always, proof is in the testing.
Good luck! (and OMG, a better insights tab would make me a happy human)
I strongly prefer an ungamified GitHub, but can appreciate the OP's work (a nice site and some interesting stats). The two ideas are not mutually exclusive.
Not only can you turn the badges off in your profile but you are barely even encouraged to participate. I have absolutely no idea what badges I'm missing and I have never once done anything to achieve a badge that didn't come to me by naturally using github.
I really don't get why some of you think that github would be drastically different without badges.
The "This is fine" achievement is funny but doesn't seem right. The top user ppdemo indeed has a repo where he apparently creates one issue every minute, but there's only a few open issues so he must be deleting them too:
It looks like it reads the number of issues ever created, and subtracts the number of issues tagged as "closed". So "deleted" in that dataset counts as "open".
I did find that suspicious, but that repo has no closed issues either. I wonder if they’re being cleaned up by github in a way that bypasses the issue closed event, because I don’t think there’s a way to do that normally.
Half of these "achievements" are simply highlighting spam/abuse on the platform which goes relatively unchecked since it still equates to usage & drives up metrics.
Someone makes a joke post with parody github achievements. Someone else then uses a public dataset to see how many people have these parody achievement.
Hacker News: "Gamifying everything is terrible"
I think getting angry about everything including parody github achievements is terrible.
Why do tens of millions of video gamers work to get to 100% completion and various goofy achievements in their games? Why does Spotify Rewind get posted every year?
Some of us find it fun and neat to see certain things/statistics we've achieved/ruined over time.
But life is not a game. You cannot get 100% completion of creating open source software. These statistics (as well as the real githu
badges) are bad and not correlated with what the whole point of it all is.
There is no way that you can objectively state that "These statistics are bad."
These badges literally do not affect my life at all. Nor do they affect probably 99% of github users other than being an interesting thing to look at when they accidentally click the profile button.
I posted a screenshot on how to disable them if you'd like to.
What is the "whole point of it all?" Who are you to determine that, anyway? Maybe the point of it for some people is to code and have fun :)
Obligatory reference to Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse [0] as some say, and I think it’s a pretty pleasant way of looking at it, that life is indeed a game.
It's easy for it to devolve into an unhealthy distraction from real life. I know a few people who are out of school and unemployed and spend their days grinding in MMOs or collecting achievements. At least with GitHub you're presumably doing something productive to earn them.
Yeah I honestly find people going for 100% achievements to be absolutely strange to me. Same with New Game+ people. A lot of the time you have to play the game over and over again or do something horribly repetitive to get to 100% and people just do it. There are very few non-strategy games I ever want to play again as much as I enjoyed the first play through.
I feel like the people who don't like "gamifying" github think that that's the similar style of github badges. Someone even mentioned that "you can't 100% life" or some form of that. That is the furthest thing from the point of it in my opinion and experience.
But there are definitely a small portion people who go for that, I'm sure.
> Awards are powerfully gratifying and motivational
I think this is true but only if they're not common and they come from your peers. But I'm no psychologist, so I'm really only asserting what's true for me, not for everyone.
because these achievements are potentially interesting metadata about your work.
no one writes software for metadata. people write software, they push it to GitHub, and GitHub gives them achievements which may provide a fraction of a second of amusement.
They didn't used to because there was no incentive to do anything but a good job.
Now there is an incentive to accumulate metadata. And just like thumbs on Facebook or points on StackOverflow, it will be gamed. It will be trolled.
All you've done is take the incentive of "earn a good reputation by publishing quality work" and open the platform to people who only care about "Ooh, shiny pieces of flair!"
Who cares if 1% of people "game" it? Do you think people are actually looking up lists of achievements outside of gag websites like this and getting jealous that someone else has XYZ achievement to the point that they'll game the system themselves to get that achievement? And if they do, so what?
So maybe 1% of people do that. We should nuke it for the other 99% who literally just push code into a repo, go to their profile randomly and see that they've earned a new badge?
I have maybe 4-5 badges and I have literally no idea what the next one I'm closest to getting is. I don't even know what badges I'm missing. But it's still cool to me to see a new one show up.
I think you are dramatically overestimating the number of people who will do this.
I also think that you are dramatically underestimating the transparency of activity optimized for metrics. Those that do this will reveal this behavior by virtue of the nature of the behavior itself.
Dammit, it's OK for people to like stuff, even if you don't like that stuff. You don't like it! FINE! Others do, so let them live their own life, please.
> They didn't used to because there was no incentive to do anything but a good job.
Whenever I'm leaving a job, I keep a look-out for opportunities to change lines that rarely change. Things like doctype declarations, blank lines, closing braces, stuff like that. If I can change them, my name is memorialized longer in the `git blame` of projects.
People will find ways to gamify everything. It's quite often a release valve for stress or boredom.
I mean, no offense but that's the perfect example of why this sort of thing is annoying.
It encourages people to do things that they wouldn't normally do that has negative (albeit minor). Extra unnessary commits complicate the git log. Intentionally getting your name on git blame makes finding the true commit slightly more annoying.
Sure these are incredibly minor things, but its still encouraging behaviour that is not positive.
Most of the other users on that that list (#2,#3,#4,#5, and #7) all have forks of the cmssw repository from CERN. They must have some workflow that causes a lot of +1 or :thumb:
Most of the toplists are just filled with spambots/automations/etc. Also, at least my pov, could this be a quite funny project if better measurements would have been taken. Autoscraping is always a good idea but why not turn it arround and call it a competition. Make people commit their info via a github app to place them in the different rankings and also a global one.
Alot of people always want to compete and present theirsel so it should drive itself if spread at the right places. Also you cann add monthyl rankings and stats with persisting medals to earn and keep on the profile page kinda linke a trophy shelf.
From here on you can just go the full gamification route with levelling etc.
Also a stale PR is either based on a codebase so old merging makes no sense or the project has been abandonned therefore the maintainer has no need to merge.
a few weeks ago someone merged a small PR i made in 2016. it was pretty surprising. i had not thought about it in years and had completely forgotten about it.
on one hand, this is kinda funny. on the other, it seems to be in a little bit poor taste to be highlighting random non-famous people's negative "accomplishments" on a leaderboard like this.
i'd hate to wake up one day and find that HN was directing thousands of people to my github profile because i had closed more issues as "wontfix" than any other person on github.
I'm #6 on that "wontfix" board and it's OK w/ me :) Most of those are from when I migrated our issues from one repo to another.
We (Brave Software) do all of our company work on GitHub and have over 10k issues in our main repo. Lots of us falling under `Ideas Person` for opening issues tracking bugs/feature requests/etc. No shame in working in the public
Why does every little inconsequential thing have to be gamified to increase engagement? I couldn't care less about how many stars, arctic vault badges etc. do I get in a thing I use to hedge risk of losing my code and collaborate with others.
you're free to not care. most don't care. but achievements are not the goal, achievements are a fraction of a second of amusement or pride about a career of work.
it's not for you, fine. why complain about it? let people enjoy something even though you see no point for crying out loud.
I find comments like these a bit hypocritical. Everything you said could be applied to yourself. Like sure, maybe hating on badges is not for you, fine. why complain about it?
It is not a consistent position to complain about people complaining about things on the internet.
