On Friday, 5 September 2014 at 14:34:49 UTC, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
On 04/09/2014 20:21, Kagamin wrote:
It comprises a social network in a sense that every user has
his own
"diary" - a place to store and share his work, and users can
follow and
watch diaries they're interested in, and when they get
notified on
updates in the followed diaries, they instantly go there to
like,
discuss and comment. And - in case of github - contribute.
I know that, but in Github its not common for people to follow
other people. Rather, they follow repositories, or at most,
organizations... That takes away a lot of the social aspect of
it, since it's not people you are focused on.
There is also little element of discovering new people through
the people you already know (although that is technically
possible), it's not a core competency of Github. At most you
discover new repositories through the people you follow, but I
would reckon even that is not a common workflow. Fundamentally
the central unit of the network in Github is a repository (and
perhaps organizations). The people unit is very secondary.
Like I said, you can still consider Github to be a social
network with a very loose definition of what a social network
is, but nonetheless, I consider it significantly different than
Facebook/Google+/MySpace/LinkedIn/Twitter/Instagram/tumblr/etc..
It is a social network because it relies on people interaction as
its most important feature. Without PR discussions / reviews,
without being able to subscribe to users / repositories and
without big user base it would not have been that tempting to
use. You don't go GitHub for its features, you do it for
potential contributors that can be attracted that way (and won't
come otherwise). This is a definitive trait of social network.
You seem to interpret "social" aspect very literally here - it is
not really important if people casually chat and "friend" each
other. Important thing is that same social processes fuel it as
ones that were studied in "traditional" social network - large
user base that generates content for each other and naturally
encourages each other to stay.
