Complaints Mount After GitHub Launches New Algorithmic Feed

GitHub has introduced a new feed into the dashboard of users and it doesn't appear to have gone down well with the code shack's regulars. The Register reports: As soon as the new feed arrived, replete with all kinds of exciting suggestions for developers to look at, the complaints began rolling in as users worried the recommendations were turning GitHub into something distressingly like a social media platform. "I do not need to see recommendations, nor activity of people I don't follow," said one user. "Don't fix what's not broken." Others were blunter, stating: "I don't want algorithmic feed" and requesting a feed on stuff that actually mattered â" issues, releases, PRs and so on. GitHub pushed out a new beta version of its Home Feed earlier this week, with the avowed intention of developers reaching a wider audience and building communities. The plan is to make discovery easier and help users "find new repositories or users to follow based on your interests."

As if to demonstrate the levels of discontent around GitHub's new feature, a Chrome extension quickly showed up to disable the social feed by removing the "For You" section on the GitHub dashboard. Not all users were upset by the appearance of the new feed, and GitHub staff popped up to promise that there would be an option to make one's profile private and opt out of pretty much everything via a single setting. It will, however, take until late April before this option is likely to appear, they said. Which prompted the obvious question: "Why is this opt-out instead of opt-in?"

I do not like algorithmic feeds

[SuperKendall]

I have not seen the implementation GitHub delivers, but I am pretty sure I will have no use for it - no platform has delivered an algorithmic feed I've found anything but annoying, and worse hides real data I wanted to see.

Hope you can turn it off...

Re: I do not like algorithmic feeds

[fortfive]

Thereâ(TM)s nothing inherently wrong with a company being large, diverse, flush, and experimental. It (can) provides smart people a stable platform to develop what might progress humanity.

The only real problem is forcing this experimentation on users. Those who want to play with your stuff will opt in, leave the rest of us alone.

But, says the middle manager, think of all that data!

Microsoft owns it, so your options are now theirs.

[kbonin]

Like most of their products, everything is being re imagined as a marketing opportunity, you are the actual product, and like their OS they reserve the right to ignore and change any setting you have made at their whim. And there is nothing you can really do about it other than to install one of the knows fixes from the Linux world. Mint is an easy transition for Windows users... And GitLab is not only a nice alternative to GitHub, its CI/CD pipelines are far more advanced, and unlike GitHub you can self

Best quote

[Arethan]

"I do not need to see recommendations, nor activity of people I don't follow," said one user. "Don't fix what's not broken."

https://github.com/github/feed... [github.com]
 

Re:

[Locutus]

It's obvious the person who said that does not understand that Microsoft owns and operates github.com and if somehow they do and still made that statement then they don't know who Microsoft is.

LoB

Re:

[Arethan]

I don't quite grok what you're getting at.

GitHub Copilot makes sense to me as a Microsoft move.

Introducing a "helpful" (but actually just annoying) assistant, something like Clippy, would make sense to me as a Microsoft move.

To me, messing with feed algorithms is the stuff of Twitter and Facebook.

Developers? Hang out on Github?

[oldgraybeard]

Developers looking to find users to follow? I'm a better developer because I have more followers? I'm a better developer because I follow more projects? I think Microsoft is on the wrong side of the addiction scale. My addiction is writing code and playing with tech.

Github got infected

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

They got infected with the Facebook virus.

Soon every site will look and feel like Facebook- every site, everywhere, all moving towards a more perfect state of looking and feeling like Facebook.

Newsfeeds, Like buttons, emojis, polls, pop-up notifications...it's creeping Facebookitis. Like herpes, once it's there, there's no going back.

Everyone everywhere will be absorbed until Facebook becomes everything everywhere, thereby spawning the Singularity.

I can't wait...

[93 Escort Wagon]

... until they start adding in extraneous ads when I pull a project using the command line!

Meh, why sweat over it?

[lsllll]

I'm 54 now and advertisements don't even phase me any longer. I know how to spot 99% of them via a first glance and skip right over them. It really doesn't take that much effort to train yourself to do that. And of course I use ad-blockers when I can. I don't watch any TV (except the Olympics a little and the Oscars), so everything I watch outside of that is ad-free anyway. But think about this for a second. They have to make money from somewhere. If family/friends of 250 can use FB for free to post

Re:

[crobarcro]

You had lights! Luxury! All we had were carrots, and we had to live down the mine. With no lift neither. three days it took us to climb out each day for school, and the same back down in't evening. And only coal to eat while we were down there!

Re:

[Caro Cogitatus]

You were lucky! We had to build our own computers out of shiny rocks gathered from the river bed. And they only ran Windows 3.1. Oh, how we cheered when our river-rock desktops got Windows for Workgroups!

Expectations?

[Kelxin]

https://news.microsoft.com/ann... [microsoft.com] That should have set the stage for all this and much more. /Thread

Go back to SourceForge?

[ayesnymous]

At least it's not owned by Microsoft.

The wrong question asked

[Askmum]

"Why is this opt-out instead of opt-in?" is the wrong question. "Why is the opt-out implemented after the feature came live" is the better question. Why do programmers/companies always think "hey I have a great new idea and I am 100% sure EVERYONE thinks this is a great idea so I will make this a new mandatory standard option". After which 95% of the users are pissed off at this irrelevant feature they were being pushed.
Happens everywhere and all the time.

Make search better

[SysEngineer]

Microsoft sucks!
If they created a better way to search for repos and a better way to search within a repo that would improve it for developers.

For the love of god

[RghtHndSd]

Let me get a feed on repos I work on specific to labels. Working on a large codebase with many developers and users, I should be able to automatically get pinged on issues and PRs that have certain labels. Instead, it's basically all or nothing. That GitHub doesn't have this basic, trivial to implement feature, that users have repeatedly asked for and instead go with social media crap speaks volumes.