Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/23/github_for_you/

by croes • 4 years ago

172 150 4 years ago

theregister.com

dmitriid2• 4 years ago

Why do developer companies keep thinking they are aocial twitter-facebook-like things?

It goes from small things like hiding exact timestamps behind meaningless "2d ago" to this bullshit

pizza234• 4 years ago

Why do developer companies keep thinking they are aocial twitter-facebook-like things?

Because open source is significantly social in nature; it's not just an available blob of code. I don't necessarily agree with their direction, but the social aspect is certainly a foundational component.

cassianoleal3• 4 years ago

I think the issue is not with it being social in general, but rather with it becoming a similar flavour of social to the likes of Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Github has always been a social tool without the need for a newsfeed-type thing.

charcircuit3• 4 years ago

Because "2d ago" provides a better user experience even for developers.

AlexandrB3• 4 years ago

Depends on what you're doing. If you're just browsing a repo, it's fine. If you're debugging something and need a timestamp for when a change went in, it's abysmal.

prepend2• 4 years ago

I prefer a time stamp since there’s less ambiguity.

I became less annoyed with GitHub when I learned that they put the timestamp in the mouse over hovertext.

chockchocschoir9• 4 years ago

Why do developer companies keep thinking they are aocial twitter-facebook-like things?

Because that's been their main selling point since day one. Git hosting + social coding platform. I guess because they became the leading code hosting platform in the world, they think that that's because of their social features. What you're seeing today is just a continuation of what they always have been doing.

corobo• 4 years ago

GitHub has finally gone full SoLoMo

(ref https://youtu.be/J-GVd_HLlps?t=50 )

0des• 4 years ago

Social local mobile?

everdrive• 4 years ago

Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user. They limit what a user sees, and slowly infantilizes them by teaching them to passively consume rather actively seek information.

I've never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better. At best, they make things more addictive.

charcircuit3• 4 years ago

They limit what a user sees

No, a screen has limited real estate. There is only so many things that can be shown to you at once. So on youtube for example there maybe only be room to show 8 videos. Ideally I should find all 8 videos interesting. If I don't, that's a waste of space and a waste of my time. Algorithmic feeds serve to improve the results such that I am more likely to watch a video that is put in one of those 8 spots compared to if I was just shown trending videos or videos from my subscription box. It is not hostile to me because it saves me time in finding something to watch. You are not being turned into a baby just because you no longer have to search for stuff manually. There is a difference between wanting to find something specific and just wanting to find something interesting.

I've never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better.

One of the best algorithmic feeds is TikTok. After that YouTube's is pretty good to. I suggest trying one of those sites out to just see how effective they are in finding content that interests you. I have found algorithmic feeds have at least made things net better. There is too much information in the world to have to search through all of it ourselves. These algorithms solve the problem of dealing with this large scale of data.

epicide2• 4 years ago

Algorithmic feeds serve to improve the results such that I am more likely to watch a video that is put in one of those 8 spots compared to if I was just shown trending videos or videos from my subscription box.

Right, that's the promise from algorithmic feeds. Sometimes, for some time, it's even the reality!

I think there's some middle ground and nuance to be had here, though. I agree that just because there's "an algorithm" doesn't mean it's bad or a worse user experience. Finding interesting videos is a great example.

However, I think it's fair to also say that video recommendation algorithms have gotten out of hand. We have a lot of content creators who are influenced in how to make their videos by what is popular. After all, if I make a video that is obviously more successful than another one, that means my audience likes it more, right? What did that video do differently that made it so much more successful?

After a long enough time, you end up inadvertently (or intentionally) catering to the whims of the algorithm and not just your audience.

So the issue I have with algorithmic feeds isn't that they are outright a bad idea for users. The problem is that it is not just a feature for users. It starts to shape the content on the platform. This can be used to subtly influence content creators to make better content, but without any idea of what goes into these algorithms, we are left to make wild religious guesses.

And we have to assume that these algorithms serve the (financial) needs of the companies behind them and their sponsors, first and foremost. If not now, then gradually, by the same feedback loop as happens to the content creators.

lukevp• 4 years ago

The problem with this is that your suggestions are based on past viewing history, which isn’t always related to future needs. Examples: on one youtube account we primarily watch different types of media on, we watched a Labrinth music video. Neither my wife or I like labyrinth, but now our music section in YouTube is completely consumed by labyrinth music videos. One or two viewings isn’t indicative of us being labrinth fans. This is what we mean by the AI is dumb and makes things worse for the user. The music video section on that account is basically useless now. The same thing will happen with anything - one time I watched a restoration video for an old lamp I had, and YouTube assumed I now mostly wanted to watch antique restoration videos for the next 6 months.

version_five2• 4 years ago

Worse, they incentivize "creators" to post "refrigerator door wisdom" type stuff optimized for likes or clicks or whatever (or outrage-bait, but that seems to be more in non-professional forums).

eloisius5• 4 years ago

I look forward to the quasi-spam slurry of infiniscroll feed crap once growth hackers start trying to game the algorithm to get more traction for their project.

I don’t think you can introduce a recommendation algorithm without it having a negative effect on the content it’s supposed to aid discovery of. Pre-recsys, the content is made for human consumption, but once you add the recsys, the AI itself becomes part of the audience and its opinion matters. Unfortunately its opinion matters more than the humans’, but its taste is abysmal. So content gets optimized for a brain dead AI and humans get garbage.

I hate it because GitHub was one product I really loved, but since MS bought them it seems like they are doing all this random stuff to solve problems that aren’t even a problem. How about getting back to the basics, like reliable uptime, and less glitchy JS soup?

MichaelBurge• 4 years ago

What exactly does "optimizing for Github recommendations" mean?

I'm not writing and debugging 10,000 lines of C just to farm Github stars. It seems crazy to think anyone would change how they work for that.

Whereas, people on Youtube/Twitter/Facebook/etc. really do change their videos or writing to spread better.

genocidicbunny• 4 years ago

That will really depend on how the algorithm weighs different signals. For example, lets say that projects that have a high issue resolution rate are promoted more -- that will just spur people to create small easily fixed issues to boost their ranking.

Any metric the algorithm uses will be subject to being gamed in some way.

AlexandrB3• 4 years ago

Commerce finds a way.

As soon as there's potential for financial benefit, someone will figure out how to optimize repos for the feed's algorithm. Perhaps this will mean clickbaity README.md files or frequent, trivial code changes to make a repo look more "active". We'll see, I guess.

epicide2• 4 years ago

I'm not writing and debugging 10,000 lines of C just to farm Github stars.

And neither would anybody else. That's the problem. (i.e. they'll do something else besides write and debug code to farm stars)

Let's say I determine (or at least believe) that the GitHub algorithm prefers projects with a README with lots of images and emoji, MIT-licensed, and lots of forks.

Obviously, there are already some really great projects out there that have exactly that! The problem is that now I'm incentivized to do those things as well, even if it doesn't always make sense. Sure, I might not create actual spam, but I might choose a license based on partly on that. Or I might inflate my README with an unreadable number of images. After all, my project is pretty important -- if only I could get a few more people interacting with it.

And of course, there's outright abuse. Maybe I'm desperate and build a bot that creates a bunch of forks.

The point is that it doesn't always require the latter scenario when there's also the former. Sure, it's not as bad, but I expect there to be more cases of it, and those cases are harder to determine and retroactively fix.

kissgyorgy• 4 years ago

Here is an example of possible abuse: it is already showing releases, so I can imagine a project would release more often with crappy updates just to show up in your feed more often.

ticviking2• 4 years ago

I’m convinced the ai recommendation audience is the origin of the “death of the internet”

smordistan• 4 years ago

It certainly seems like a watershed moment where the primary purpose of our machinery has shifted to serve the machines instead of the people.

gigaflop• 4 years ago

AI usually starts off as a way to serve humans, but mostly benefits the humans who create it, as opposed to the humans who use it. After a while, things seem to slide towards the dystopian, as the AI optimizes(or is optimized by the owners) to keep users present at all costs, to the benefit of the owners.

I relate AI feeds, management, recommendations, etc with Dwarves and the Mines of Moria. At what point will we have dug too greedily and too deep? Those goblins crawling around down there can be representative of the users who get stuck in the system, being fed trash, and being kept discontent.

mostlysimilar• 4 years ago

I agree. How do we fight back?

VWWHFSfQ• 4 years ago

I don't think it will be targeted at growth of a project. It will be optimizing for recruiter spam in the feed.

hedora3• 4 years ago

No, it's not like they're LinkedIn or something!

Oh wait...

api• 4 years ago

See /r/elsagate for what recommendation algorithms do to content:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/

The effect on a population of heavy use of social media platforms run by recommendation algorithms can be seen here:

https://www.navytimes.com/resizer/xESsQM55InJ7pTur3Jd1NncWdS...

CornCobs• 4 years ago

Come on, if you never looked at any of the social stuff in Github I bet any new recommendation system isn't going to bother you either.

Unless they actively undermine their code/repo search functionality to push social stuff, let them do whatever they want for people who actually like browsing GitHub? (Not that I can imagine who actually browses GitHub)

edgyquant2• 4 years ago

Social stuff on GitHub is weird. I have a couple of old colleagues that fill up most of my feed daily with stars to repos.

jjoonathan• 4 years ago

Hey, we've seen this show a dozen times before. They are definitely going to undermine their core functionality to push social stuff, and for exactly the reason you gave: nobody uses it and they want to force you to.

ashtonkem• 4 years ago

The incredibly frustrating thing is that the metrics they’re “growth hacking”, engagement mostly, aren’t great proxies for product success in a lot of cases! In a lot of these cases the constant design tweaks probably reduces the overall sentiment users have towards the product overall.

I’m thinking specifically of the Netflix autoplay box, which I’m sure did wonders for their engagement, but also was universally hated. I think its no coincidence that during this time my social group went from “I love Netflix!” to “I can’t cancel Netflix because it has <favorite show>”. I fear GitHub going down the same path with such tweaks.

dgritsko• 4 years ago

I don’t think you can introduce a recommendation algorithm without it having a negative effect on the content it’s supposed to aid discovery of.

This feels like it ought to be a corollary to Goodhart's Law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"), or perhaps a specialized application thereof.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

tunesmith• 4 years ago

It's just not always true though, like in the case of "proper scoring rules". So it would seem at least theoretically possible to create a recommendation algorithm such that trying to "gamify it" would only increase the utility of its output.

avivo• 4 years ago

This is sorta true. But it turns out there that there are always targets, even if they aren't explicit (is there a name for this law?).

So whether you have a recommendation system or a chronological feed or whatever other way you want to display info—there is always that implicit Goodhartish: measure → target → behavior change.

You can't escape it.

The only question is how you want to harness it—how you can bring out the best in people (with their consent ideally!) and mitigate the negative impacts of Goodharting.

(Shameless plug, I'm working on this, e.g. https://techpolicy.press/can-algorithmic-recommendation-syst... )

daniel-cussen• 4 years ago

There are exceptions to Goodhart's law, which are figures of merit.

The size of transistors was a good target for a very long time, like 60 years.

The height of basketball players.

Muscle mass, profile, or volume.

The profit margins of a company.

Scores on a standardized math test.

hn_throwaway_99• 4 years ago

I hate it because GitHub was one product I really loved, but since MS bought them it seems like they are doing all this random stuff to solve problems that aren’t even a problem. How about getting back to the basics, like reliable uptime, and less glitchy JS soup?

I'm not a fan of this recommendation engine either, but I also don't think that's a fair assessment of what has happened since MS bought them. I've seen a ton of valuable features added since they acquired GitHub, primarily things like GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages.

That said, I agree with your last sentence. Even before this week's nasty database issues that have caused outages every day, GitHub was struggling more and more with reliability.

I know in a large company that it doesn't work to just "throw more bodies" at reliability/quality issues, but GitHub must do some org retooling to get their reliability problems under control. Despite being a big fan of GitHub features, I can't have a critical service go down with the frequency that it does.

eloisius5• 4 years ago

You’re right, I shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Actions is a great addition, and I haven’t really used Discussions yet, but I’ glad to see that there is some thing to improve what was breaking at the seems trying to do that job before (Issues).

I don’t think GH has gone straight downhill after joining MS. There’s been a lot of good. But I do get the sense that it doesn’t have the unified vision that it had 10 years ago, and that they are doing a lot of things for no clear reason.

I’ve worked in a large company before, and a lot of product changes and “features” we added were more like “division X has this cool new thing and VP y wants more people to start using it internally. How can we plug in into what we build?” I’m half seriously waiting for the day that GH drops Git support and switches to a proprietary fork that is only accessible with VS Code.

mfontani• 4 years ago

I'm happy seeing random/algorithmically picked stuff shown on the homepage RHS ("Explore repositories") - it doesn't hurt me, and I might find something useful there.

I don't want algorithmic stuff on the _main_ part of the page, which instead contains repositories and people I follow. I'd draw the line at this.

V1ndaar• 4 years ago

The best part is when GitHub recommends me my own repositories in the right bar! Love that, always wanted to learn about those.

naoqj2• 4 years ago

Can't you just... not look at it? github is not a social website; I see no reason to ever visit the home page.

EsperHugh• 4 years ago

github is not a social website

you may not like it, but Github has always been a social website, and now more than ever, just like LinkedIn.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

Also interesting that MS owns both of those networks. Both pretty smart investments.

da39a3ee2• 4 years ago

Nonsense. GitHub is for working with git repositories. It might have some weird social feed stuff tacked on, but I've never used it in 13 years and to say it's not the main point is an understatement. OTOH social interactions is very obviously the main point of LinkedIn?

e2le2• 4 years ago

Hopefully in the near future, we'll see them launch "GitHub Dating". I've always wanted to filter my potential partners by their stars and choice of language.

pram• 4 years ago

Huh now that you mention it, I don't think I've ever gone to just 'github.com'

AlexandrB3• 4 years ago

As soon as there's a recommendation system, there is an incentive to game it. The impact will be felt whether you look at the thing or not.

I don't watch YouTube's "recommended" videos. That doesn't stop creators from changing their videos, titles, and thumbnails to be more in line with what the recommendation algorithm "likes".

croes• 4 years ago

Yet this is so, but who knows the future.

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

No wonder why microsoft bought them, they wanted to kill github

blisterpeanuts2• 4 years ago

Why would MS want to kill github? It's huge, it serves a vital need, and if MS does manage to strangle it in some way, someone else will fork a similar service and everyone will flock to that, similarly to how everyone left Sourceforge for Github, as I understand it.

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

that kind of features turn off many developers, including me

reason why i abandoned MSN messenger back in the days was because they started to mimic facebook features, same thing as skype, as people pointed in the github discussion

prepend2• 4 years ago

Microsoft sells MSDN subscriptions for enterprise users. And that’s more than the GitHub revenue.

It’s weird in that I recently discovered a few hundred programmers who may $500-2n/year/person to Microsoft for visual Studio and more for a devops/teams foundation server/vsts and two full time admin contractors to administer the source server. There’s a lot of money in this space that Microsoft is probably losing as orgs migrate to GitHub.

viswd2• 4 years ago

i can live with repo suggestions but if you want to build a social network use a subdomain or new top level

i dont want to see that Bjorn876 has followed Frodo42 in my github feed!

da39a3ee2• 4 years ago

I've used GitHub intensively for 13 years. I've never looked at the front page or "feed". Why would you? GitHub is for working with git repositories, it's not a social website.

chockchocschoir9• 4 years ago

That's great, if you never look at the front page nor the feed, you're not even affected by this change. Leave the "outrage" for people who are affected by it.

namose• 4 years ago

If a sufficient number of gh users do look at the page, you’ll be affected by SEO on the repos you follow if they care about growth.

eloisius5• 4 years ago

No one is worried about a page you can ignore. We’re worried about the second-order effects that trying to game that page will have on the rest of the site.

toto444• 4 years ago

I am interested in Japanese learning and Emoji and I am actually happy that Github recommends me repos related to these topics.

danirod• 4 years ago

While I cannot trust algorithmic feeds anymore and I expect this to become an issue in the future, I have to say that based on what I've seen in my own "For you" tab, GitHub is doing a good job on showing updates from repositories that I starred and then forgot about, and I actually find that feature nice.

toastal2• 4 years ago

Now you can easily clean up the regular feed with uBlock Origin `github.com###dashboard [aria-labelledby="feed-original"] :is(.follow, .watch_started)` will remove "someone followed something" and "someone starred something" which can help you focus on the updates that are critical aspects of updated issues and releases, and can just click over to the social media feed "For You (Beta)" for that kind of stuff if you feel so inclined (or you can ignore it). I have `github.com##aside[aria-label="Explore"]` as well to not get distracted with the recommendations I didn't ask for on the index page either.

makecheck• 4 years ago

I forget sometimes how good it really is at blocking. I had blocked certain things long ago and when I eventually see the original accidentally somewhere else I am shocked by the annoyances.

toastal2• 4 years ago

Literally turned off uBlock for something and hopped over to GitHub and it was full of so much useless nonsense and I don't even follow a lot of people.

chockchocschoir9• 4 years ago

as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into something distressingly like a social media platform.

Really users? This is news? I'll echo what I've said in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30769570) regarding GitHub being a social platform:

GitHub has always branded itself as a "social collaboration platform" rather than anything else (well, first "git hosting" but secondly the social stuff).
Here is a early version of their landing page from 2008 (the year they launched): https://web.archive.org/web/20081111061111/http://github.com...
Notice the logo says "Social code hosting" and the messaging of the page is mostly around popular repositories, collaborative features and other social elements.

Anyone surprised by a "social code hosting" platform implementing new social features are in for a bleak feature, as the platform still aims (and always have aimed) to be the social place for coders.

typeofhuman• 4 years ago

How much longer until they release GitHub Stories?

/s but not really

chockchocschoir9• 4 years ago

Again, you shouldn't be surprised if a company who always branded itself as "social" adds any new social features.

viswd2• 4 years ago

I think part of the fear is that they will expand it into a larger social network, that was my knee jerk reaction.

andrew_2• 4 years ago

I think it's fair to be surprised by curated anything on Github as that's not been their M.O. since I can remember, and I was a first-year adopter.

bawolff2• 4 years ago

"Social" is not a synonym for "facebook". Github is a collaborative social platform. This still seems pointless and offbrand. There is no contradiction here.

krapp• 4 years ago

Github is a collaborative social platform

It shouldn't be. Social has its place, but I don't want to see memes and emojis and dramaposting with upvotes and downvotes and karma whoring on a project page. The purpose of Github should be to distribute and collaboratively develop software and nothing more. None of the social features make developing software easier, they distract from what should be the platform's purpose. Soon, you won't even need to deal with Git or push a repo at all, they'll just remove all of that "coding" shit and become another Twitter clone. That's the inevitable endstate of adding social features, they consume everything.

Feh. Feh, I say!

elpakal• 4 years ago

I kind of feel like this is just another Sherlock move by GitHb TBH, nothing more. It seems like they see popular apps that tap into GH (I use one that is basically just a feed of GH activity which I actually like) and things like Actions in their "marketplace" as opportunities to gobble up new product functionality into their own platform.

tremon• 4 years ago

What's collaborative about github's platform? Were these features developed because the users asked for them?

eminence322• 4 years ago

I feel like I'm in the minority here: when I saw this new feature, I thought it could be useful and a better replacement for what's currently there. I don't follow many people, so the "old" feed was pretty boring and stale. However, the "new" feed is showing me things that I find interesting, like a new release of openzfs, even though I'm not watching that repo.

I understand why might be worse for other people, but I disagree in general with the idea that this is categorically the wrong thing for github to do.

JohnHaugeland3• 4 years ago

nah, most of us like it, we just don't want to get into the fracas with the people talking about always-bad and inherently-evil

dxbydt3• 4 years ago

Algorithmic feeds are always hostile to the user….They limit what a user sees…never encountered a situation where an algorithmic feed made things better

I don’t know if Github should do algorithmic feeds. That said, my literal job description is to design an algorithmic feed for a tv news app. That’s what I’ve done - written an algo that decides what news gets shown, in what order => implicitly means a whole bunch of newsclips never get shown…or they are at the end of the queue and 90% of the viewers would never get to them.

Why does one do this ? Because screen real estate is finite. You turn on your tv, you have a finite rectangular canvas - I can show maybe 5 squares on that rectangle without scrolling. Each square has a newsclip with text & picture. Who gets to decide which 5 clips to show ? Well, my algo does. How else would you do it ? There are literally 100s of 1000s of newsclips per day! Can’t show every single one of them - nobody has the time, nobody would watch, most of it is not going to be relevant to the vast majority of the audience. So 10000 newsclips get filtered down to 5 clips that get shown on the screen. You scroll. 5 more. Scroll again. 5 more. So on…you cap at 50 clips…nobody scrolls that much anyways.

That’s why you have an algorithmic feed - because there is too much content, but your brain real estate is finite. Your screen real estate is finite. The amount of time you have to watch news is finite. Your interest in news is finite. All of this has been measured, analyzed, sliced & diced. Your time is finite. But content is infinite. There is just too much news. Take finance news - 100s of companies reporting earnings every given day, associated commentary around buying/selling that stock, how the company is doing…1000s of newsclips! Take political news - so much footage, all the way from local municipal town hall meetings to presidential press conferences. Take entertainment news…man, there is so much music/movie/art/talent related content. Can’t show everything. Hence algorithmic feed.

Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

chockchocschoir9• 4 years ago

Now sure, you can complain that the algo isn’t showing you what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

I think that the common complain is not "it isn't showing what I personally want" VS "it isn't showing what people generally want" but rather that the algorithm is often not tuned to "what X want" at all, but tuned to "what brings company most money". For example, YouTube recommendations are biased towards channels that have monetization activated, as YouTube earns more money that way, while ignoring channels the viewer (at large, or personally) would enjoy more.

edgyquant2• 4 years ago

If anything algorithms that drive engagement are mutually exclusive with what people want to see. Most people don’t usually engage with anything but the odds are a lot higher for someone to reply etc out of anger or disgust than anything else.

amelius• 4 years ago

It's also "showing me stuff I may want when I least want to be aware of it". Stop the distractions already.

dxbydt3• 4 years ago

Most of the comments here are incredibly dystopian - automation is bad, rehire the editor you've replaced at 75% of the salary, stop pushing engagement, what brings the company most money, megacorporation pushing slushy mass....

Jesus!! Man, didn't know recsys invokes such vitriol.

There are dozens of news apps on smart TVs these days. Under the covers, it's pretty much the same deal - in go the raw feeds. Editors always do a first pass. Recsys algos do the 2nd pass. Ranking algos come in next. Personalization is usually last. Out comes the news. Viewers then have their say with thumbs up & downvotes. Those get fed back into personalization. On & on it goes...

Its not magic. Its not perfect. But its how pretty much every smart tv news app works under the hood. There's dozens of them. Pick any one of them that works well on your TV for your temperament, I guess. Recsys is just a standard comp science discipline. We have our textbooks, our journals, our papers. We all read the same stuff, pretty much roll the same code with minor frills.

Nobody's out to get you.

newswasboring2• 4 years ago

what you personally want - its trained on the entire viewer population, not on your personal tastes. So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

This is a problem, but from a different point of view. The algorithm is trained not to give me news but to keep me engaged. That should not be the purpose of a news app.

jcelerier• 4 years ago

So most algos let you personalize the feed. But without an algo…there’s just no hope.

but there's an algo which is simple to implement and has very little biases: just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me. I don't want to see what's best for others, I don't want to see what some algorithm thinks is best for me, I just want to see what's last, with zero additional "reflection" on this.

dxbydt3• 4 years ago

just show the things in temporal order ? Anything else is inferior to me.

heh heh. In the last 5 minutes, since you typed in your comment, there’s been 100 news clips. Literally. So just show the top 5 after reverse sorting by time….newest to oldest. Temporal order. Now what would be the problem with that ? Almost always, your newsfeed will end up dominated by the latest weather clip where the guy says “and now the temperature is a sunny 82 degrees”…meanwhile 100s of people die in ukraine but you didn’t see that because it was like an hour ago, and 1 minute ago >>> 1 hour ago.

runako2• 4 years ago

"Temporal order" is another way of saying "prioritize accounts that post most frequently, while suppressing less-frequent posters." That obviously rewards e.g. unnaturally breaking up content into multiple parts, content-light posting, and other consumer-hostile behaviors. I'm not sure why so many seem to think this is obviously optimal for consumers.

"I'll unfollow the accounts that behave that way" doesn't work because a temporally-ordered system incentivizes all accounts to behave this way. An account that posts highly valuable content, but only posts once weekly, will not thrive in a temporal-only medium.

stormbrew2• 4 years ago

Honestly, there's nothing inherently wrong with providing a limited and selective set of information to people. The problem is the tendency towards broader and broader aggregation.

Once upon a time, people got their news from approximately 3 "kinds" of places: - newspapers, locally managed, locally printed, locally distributed - radio, somewhere between locally and nationally managed, recorded, broadly distributed - television, probably regionally or nationally managed, maybe locally recorded, also broadly distributed.

And for these things they had between several and tens of choices to select in to their preferences, interests, and alignments. They got to self-select the 'algorithm' they viewed information through. There was obviously an algorithm here, and in spite of golden-age glasses it was a racist, sexist, deeply problematic algorithm, but it was at least chosen by people in your community.

Now though? Everything gets sucked up into some megacorporation's orbit through a rolling katamari of companies. We have facebook and twitter and things that will eventually be bought by facebook or twitter and approximately 2-3 companies that own every newspaper, radio station, and television station on the planet.

There's no choice here anymore. Your algorithm is chosen by someone else, and if by some chance an upstart comes along to break out of that monotony it's inevitable that they'll be sucked up into the katamari eventually for the sin of being successful at bucking the trend, and then they will be just like everything else within a year.

So you can do your best to provide a fresh, reasonable algorithm that does some good and helps people find something. But in the end, no matter how hard you try, it's gonna end up just like everything else and be a slushy mass of stuff that makes people angry to get money out of them.

hedora3• 4 years ago

How else would you do it ? There are literally 100s of 1000s of newsclips per day!

No offence, but honestly, that scale doesn't require automation, and probably suffers from it. I'd rehire the full time editor (singular?) that you replaced, probably at 50-75% your salary.

eloisius5• 4 years ago

I’m not sure what kind of news app you work on, so maybe this doesn’t fit, but what this makes me think is, you’ve optimized for putting the “best” stuff in limited real estate, but why does there need to be news headlines algorithmically ranked and dumped in front of me in a place that I’m not looking for them (e.g. the “home” screen of my smart TV)? If it’s an app where you are consciously seeking news headlines, maybe there’s a good case for collapsing the raw deluge of news into a recommended front page, but I still feel like we’re losing something.

Recommendations are never good, and always corrupted by what the business wants to push on me, but even if they were good, the hyper personalized world is just weird. I’ll never be able to ask someone, “did you see the paper today?” Instead I wonder if they’ve been pushed the same stuff that I have and if we live in the same universe.

ars• 4 years ago

So most algos let you personalize the feed.

This is where the failure is. Most algos I've experienced show me more of what I already know. Or they show me what I was interested in the past (and I'm done with that).

I want an algo that does the opposite - show me only things completely different - see if maybe I like them.

I'm bored, I don't want more of the same, and I want something new. And there is where every one I've tried fails.

shafyy• 4 years ago

I like that GitHub tries to make a better feed.

I like it because it could help me with my open source repos. 1) To reach new people and 2) notify existing stargazers that I've released a new update and 3) help me discover new interesting repos.

It remains to be seen if the new feed proves useful. But I wouldn't say that just because they use an algorithm it needs to suck per se. There's algorithm and there's algorithm.

andrew_2• 4 years ago

Lots of speculation in the replies here with one common theme: No one seems to know, or has yet to define, what "social coding" actually means. Not even Github.

zerkten• 4 years ago

Is that a bad thing? It seems to leave the door open for a lot of explorations. It seems like it doesn't affect critical functionality that much.

chadlavi• 4 years ago

Huh, so people actually look at/pay any attention to that feed page?

kwhitefoot• 4 years ago

I didn't even know that Github had any kind of feed (whatever that really means). And I don't care. I visit Github to report a bug, read about the progress of fixing it and then close the page. I never read anything else on Github, why would I?

ape4• 4 years ago

I took a look at mine and it might be interesting. Its in addition to the "following" feed - that's still there. It had people and projects I might want to check out based on (er, something). Why not? I might find something I like. It recommended a Rust project but I haven't posted any Rust.

tedivm• 4 years ago

Yeah I actually like it. Besides, it's an optional new tab- you can completely ignore it if you don't like it.

If they remove the existing chronological based feed then I can see why people might complain, but that hasn't happened.

justinhj• 4 years ago

Github isn’t TikTok

e2le2• 4 years ago

You say that but GitHub is an expensive platform to run, how else are they going to boost engagement and increase it's profitably?

Wont somebody please think of the shareholders?

rad_gruchalski4• 4 years ago

You're correct. It isn't. It doesn't push random 30 second videos.

throwaway889900• 4 years ago

Isn't that what gists are for?

vivegi• 4 years ago

How long before GH starts pushing email spam with digests of "Projects that might interest you"? It would be great if they could instead redirect efforts to tie their recommendation engine to their search results. User intent is clearer and serendipitous recommendations surfacing in the results would actually be of value.

rad_gruchalski4• 4 years ago

https://cs.github.com and until that's publicly available: https://sourcegraph.com.

u20772• 4 years ago

Nobody asked GitHub to become a social media platform. Why not improve search instead? When I want to find something, I will look for it, and know what I’m looking for. There’s no point in pushing a bunch of random repos in my face with an algorithm that can and will be abused.

dawnerd• 4 years ago

I second them improving search. If I try to search for a line of code, it doesn't consider special characters, you know the ones like everyone uses in code.

Edit: somehow search autocorrected to support.

Destiner• 4 years ago

Their latest code search thing [1] is pretty powerful already imo.

[1] https://cs.github.com

u20772• 4 years ago

Sweet! Joined the waitlist.

Rendello• 4 years ago

For searching, https://grep.app/ is one of my favourite tools.

havkom• 4 years ago

A tip from recent experience with GitHub: Don’t rely _solely_ on GitHub for your work.

bfdm• 4 years ago

GitHub has a feed?

version_five2• 4 years ago

Exactly what I was scrolling though here looking for a discussion of. I'm assuming (I'm on my phone and not going to check) that if you go to github.com there is a landing page with a feed?

I use github 90% of the time for interacting with my / my companies repos, and the rest to peruse a repo I've been directed to for whatever reason. I have never been to the homepage (except maybe to sign in), and I have never used it to get news or find new repos or whatever a feed is for.

I can see the potential to turn it into social media, that's fine as long as it doesn't bleed in to the actual repository management functionality.

matthewfcarlson• 4 years ago

GitHub has a feed? Who sits down while in the bathroom and scrolls their GitHub feed?

dbingham• 4 years ago

I posted this to their feedback, but I'll share it here too.

The new algorithmic feed gives me absolutely nothing of value - it's giving me a bunch of information I have no need for or interest in. It's just adding pure noise and no signal.

The following feed might work for people who use the commit as the unit of review, but since there's no way to filter it to a certain subset of repos, it's also way too noisy to be useful. And for those of us who use the Pull Request as the unit of review, it's absolutely useless. Again, all noise and no signal.

I would love the ability to construct an arbitrary number of custom feeds to surface information I actually need.

I want to create new feeds, select whether they contain commits, pull request activity (PRs opened, closed, merged, and reviewed, and commented on), or both. Then I want to be able to filter which repos/organizations that feed is limited to. Ideally, I'd be able to select a set of feeds to show on the homepage as tabs I could click between to quickly scan activity in the subsets of repos I work on.

So for example, I would create one feed to be my "Primary Responsibility area at Work". This would be the subset of repos I am primarily responsible for at my workplace. I'd configure it to show PR activity - new PR opens, new reviews, new comments (on review or on the PR), and PR merges or closes. This would surface the information I need and would allow me to very quickly scan to see whether there were any PRs I needed to look over or PR discussions I wanted to add my voice to. This is not a view I have right now. Notifications doesn't surface this information in a way that's easy to scan, and otherwise I have to go digging through (potentially) multiple boards or issues lists to see it. Instead being able to quickly scan down a feed of comments or reviews and reply right in the feed, I have to click through numerous screens and it's easy to miss stuff.

I would then create a second feed that would be "All of work" which I would configure to be just PR activity for my work organization. This would allow me to quickly scan activity in other repos that I'm not primarily responsible for, and contribute if there are things of value I could add. Right now I can't do this at all, I have to rely on my teammates tagging me in. It's just much too time consuming to try to scan through all the activity - even though, were it presented in feed format of just the new stuff, there's probably not so much that I couldn't easily scan it every day. It's the amount of digging through screens and trying to figure out what's new that's time consuming.

Then I'd create a feed for "My Stuff" which would contain all activity on repos I own (PRs and Commits). This would be mostly empty since, for the most part, I'm not collaboration with folks right now. But someday I'd like to, and this feed would be very useful then.

Finally I'd create various feeds for the all the open source I follow based on what project is, how interested in it I am, and how involved in I am.

Having this ability - the ability to create multiple custom feeds to surface this information I want by groups that are meaningful to me - has the potential to make collaboration on Github much easier and more efficient. One of the problems we face as a team is knowing when we need to respond to a pull request. And right now we mostly solve that with process (pinging each other, standups) and tooling (Jira/Slack). Having a feed we could quickly check for new activity would significantly grease those wheels and save us time elsewhere.

thex10• 4 years ago

Good reply.

I would then create a second feed that would be "All of work" which I would configure to be just PR activity for my work organization. [...] Right now I can't do this at all,

Isn't https://github.com/orgs/[workorgname]/dashboard basically this?

pabs3• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who has never really used the GitHub feed? I seem to only ever login on pages other than the front page.

patientplatypus• 4 years ago

This isn't on my github - this doesn't sound real unless their beta testing on some accounts and not others. So it's a bad idea and they'll turn it off. Storm in a tea cup.

eezing• 4 years ago

I don’t mind the new one because I didn’t use the old one. Most of the content before contained changes to code on company projects I don’t contribute to. The new content has been mostly relevant to the code and tech I work with on a daily basis.

Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

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