StackOverflow and Github Visualized As Cities 45
An anonymous reader writes "Ekisto is an interactive network visualization of three online communities: StackOverflow, Github and Friendfeed. Ekisto tries to map our online habitats using graph algorithms and the city as a metaphor. A graph layout algorithm arranges users in 2D space based on their similarity. Cosine similarity is computed based on the users' network (Friendfeed), collaborate, watch, fork and follow relationships (Github), or based on the tags of posts contributed by users (StackOverflow). The height of each user represents the normalized value of the user's Pagerank (Github, Friendfeed) or their reputation points (StackOverflow)."
No one cares about FriendFeed enough (Score:1)
FriendFeed wasn't even mentioned in the headline.
Why is that modded down? He's right... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's sad to see that fellow's comment has been modded down. It's spot-on correct.
GitHub and StackOverflow aren't about programming or software development. They're about egos. They're about hype-driven "community". They're the facilitators of a culture that belongs in a cesspool.
GitHub is very much about so-called hipsters trying to show off their latest JavaScript or Ruby crap. StackOverflow is where they try to boost their egos by accosting anyone who doesn't follow their ever-changing "best practices", m
Re:Why is that modded down? He's right... (Score:4, Insightful)
What? I participate in a couple systems-level code projects at Github and recognize none of your comments. Selection bias, perhaps.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolute crap - just because tools might get used in ways you don't like doesn't make them inherently bad - that goes for languages and websites alike.
Are you honestly trying to suggest that SourceForge has worked out well? Look at it - it's virtually impossible to find your way to anything useful, everything is cluttered, and it doesn't offer the things people want and need. GitHub's social stuff isn't even why people use it - it's useful and fun, so sure, people like it because of that, but people use it
The StackOverflow map is useless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The StackOverflow map is useless (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
"Nerd caste system" is a good way of describing the situation at SO and GH.
I recently had the misfortune of having a six-month contract working with a number of people who fall into the herd portion of this community.
Every lunch break ended up becoming a discussion about Hans Passant, Arun Johny, Jon Skeet, T.J. Crowder, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood and the other 'celebrities' of SO. My co-workers would spend an hour a day mindlessly worshipping these individuals.
As an old-timer, I just didn't get it. I tho
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While that's bad, you know there are worse things they could be group-obsessed over.
Re: (Score:1)
Stackoverflow is a source of clutter in the internet. People that rushes to program usually make dumb questions in stackoverflow, and demand a solution, not an answer. Then they punish those that give answers and explanations. They, an their hoard, demand a working a solution, so they can go on improvising without learning. And that is what stackoverflow grading system represents: an ignorance correlation index. I have to add "-stackoverflow" to every internet query these days. So pervasive is their crap.
Re: (Score:1)
I agree that plenty of the questions are like that, generally, however, the community is very negative towards those kinds of questions, and refuses to answer them, or answers with something in-depth anyway that explains the issue and how to solve it, rather than giving a copy-paste code solution.
Maybe it's different in different tags (I mainly stick to the Python tag), but that's been my experience.
Re: (Score:1)
My personal experience is that there are bullies in stackoverflow that use the points system to extort code. It's like High School. If you don't make my homework, I beat you. But shameless ignorance is the norm these days. The myth of education as a waste of time for programmers, is hurting. Who reads a manual before making a stupid question? That's studiyng, you are loosing money! In the Zuckerberg-Scrooge school.
Re:The StackOverflow map is useless (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess it depends on the subjects you're interested in. Given the size of SO (well, we should probably consider the entire Stack Exchange group, no ?) there's bound to be sub-cultures. Personally I rather occasionally browse the SQL related tags and while there are quite a bit of 'Please do my homework' kind of questions, those often don't get the answer they're looking for (that is: the worked out solution) but rather get pointers into 'the right direction'. Luckily there also are also quite a few of interesting questions that spark discussions and often-times indirectly gives me some insight into something I hadn't ever thought about before. I find that valuable. Feel free to look up my userid and you'll notice that hardly have any reputation points behind my name; in fact I have 'worked' just enough to be able to post/edit comments etc; otherwise I really don't care.
A long, long time ago I used to spend quite a bit of time on ExpertsExchange. Although I enjoyed helping out others at first it became quite frustrating after a while to see how a few people would throw a quick & dirty solution only seconds (?!?!) after it was posted. By the time I had written a fleshed out answer the original poster would already have accepted the (imho) downright terrible advice and there was no way to undo the situation except for adding a comment along the lines: please don' t do it like this for reasons x, y and z. I had no clue why (or how) these quick-posters would do this as their reputation already was sky-high until I noticed that the site had leader-boards that would nominate their 'best' people on a monthly/yearly basis. After that I gave up.
At least on SO you can down-vote a prematurely accepted answer and vote up one that makes a lot more sense. Maybe the original poster won't care to come back, but at least when someone comes around googling for an answer he'll be presented with the 'better' answer first AND the Q&D poster actually gets 'punished' by the down-votes. (As are the people who down-vote, so it's 'harder' to game the system). I'm sure SO has something like 'greatest contributors' too, and yes, there is all the badges and reputation stuff; but it seems to me there is a lot less attention given to it.
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My personal experience is that there are bullies in stackoverflow that use the points system to extort code.
How the heck do you bully someone via SO? You might not always get the reputation rewards that you think you deserve, but if you do good questions and good answers then they will eventually rack up. (Hint: try answering things a bit off the beaten track rather than "competing" in the mega-tags. That's served me very well.)
A good question often shows code, as that makes it easier to see what the asker was really doing. A good answer often shows code as that makes it easier for the respondent to show what the
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Let me explain. Someone writing c++ code declares some variables to be private in a class, and later tries to access them directly. Of course the compiler complains. Then the guy asks why in stackoverflow. ... : -1 point
The answering sequence goes somewhat like this:
Bjarne Stroustrup says that it can not be done because... : -1 point
The c++ standard says that
Bertrand Meyer explains that the concept of privacy is.. because.. : -1 point
Declare the variable public or use setters-getters : -1 point
In every inst
Re: (Score:2)
You work at a sad sad place. Discussions where I work circle around the next motorcycle release from BMW, What the one LeMons racing team next year is going to do (Yes we have our own team) and how bad the latest release of the Compilers and IDE are and how we really should revert back to the less buggy version and just not tell management.
How do you find your github numeric id? (Score:1)
So I went to look at this visualization, and wanted to find myself and some friends, and what our projects looked like in this city, but we are using github and I couldn't easily figure out how to get a github user number given the regular user name. I don't think that is confidential, because you can type numbers in and sometimes photos appear. (Maybe they are just neighbors though.) I kind of agree with the last poster in that the simulation needs more descriptive notes to tell what things map to what.
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I saw him (Score:1)
iPalin: (Score:3)
I can see Snowden from my house!
Nice first step for Visual Analytics (Score:4, Interesting)
I like it very much. That's an appealing way to go beyond the classic 2D graph visualization. I am part of the StackOverflow community and this visualization really shows the sub-communities existing in the website. Sometimes you have a huge skyscraper surrounded by smaller buildings, like the Git related questions (search for user ID 6309). Then you have less specific communities such as the web development (CSS, PHP, Jquery, Javascript,...) one (search for my own ID: 806221) where there are less leaders but a lot of mid-level reputation contributors.
I think this visualization could be nicely completed by community labels. To go on with the city metaphor, you could have a road sign for each cluster of buildings. I can count 10 big community in the StackOverflow metropolitan area. A modularity algorithm would identify these clusters. Then you could get a list of most frequent tags in the users of the cluster to build the road sign.
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong topic?
StackOverflow Jerks? (Score:2)
What are the cities? (Score:2)
It would be nice if the big "cities" in the StackOverflow graph would be labelled with the tags which cause the grouping.
Stack Overflow? (Score:1)
I stopped following links to Stack Overflow when I do a search on a problem I'm trying to solve.
Useful outcomes there are few and far between in my experience with it. Is is far worse than Ubuntu Community Support where these is at least incentive to being a problem to resolution. That is not what I see on Stack Overflow.