1. The Github Follower Problem

    1 June 2011

    Github is awesome. I think most people agree. They have proven the concept of “social coding”. The big flaw in this plan is Github’s relationship system.

    Following people on Github is easy. I see somebody interesting, I click follow. The problem is that now my news feed will get every single commit, message, etc… this person does. After following a few active people my feed turns into noise and becomes useless. I used to follow up to 100 people on Github, and over 200 projects. I have since unfollowed all but a handful and only follow maybe 5 projects. I’m very interested in knowing what is happening in Rails core so my news feed is now very useful.

    So the way I see it there is very little incentive to follow people on Github. In fact, because of the news feed issue I feel almost penalized for following somebody. In return I’m sure others feel the same way. This would not be a problem if it weren’t for Github search.

    Github is becoming a great place to find new talent. If you are a contract developer being found easily if very important. So if I search for all Ruby developers in Boston, MA I get a result that is ordered by number of followers descending.

    Ah ha! Now the number of followers I have becomes very important.

    I’m not suggesting people start gaming Github. But it would be nice if there was more incentive to following people than just cluttering your news feed.

    Searching by the exact city match is also not very useful. A good number of Ruby devs live in Cambridge, MA but I can’t search for “Cambridge, MA” only “Cambridge” which also returns “Cambridge, UK”. It would be nice if I could search for Boston, MA and Github did a proximity search. Maybe 5 miles?

    Update: Apparently if you search by “Cambridge_MA” you’ll get what you want. Strange.

Notes

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