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.