On 05/09/2014 20:42, Dicebot wrote:
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.
I went to the great oracle (Wikipedia) to clarify what is the more
formal and proper term for this. Fair enough, indeed the likes of
Facebook/Google+/MySpace/LinkedIn/Twitter/Instagram/tumblr/etc. are more
precisely called "online social networking services".
So ok, I concede that Github can be called a "social network". Although
under that interpretation so is any web forum or bulletin board that has
more than a handful of people communicating. (Personally I would still
prefer avoiding that term.)
I change my point to say that Github is not a "social networking
service" then.
--
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros
