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henrik / toolbox

A site to list Hex packages by category.
http://toolbox.elixir.pm
32 stars 4 forks source link

Show Hex download stats? #13

Open henrik opened 8 years ago

henrik commented 8 years ago

In order to compare the popularity of competing libs, maybe showing Hex download stats would be good.

Note that we would probably need to add some recurring job to fetch these for all packages. Maybe the same job as in #7?

Showing this in the package list might be too noisy. Should we add per-package "show" pages with more detail?

rrrene commented 8 years ago

I've thought about this before and written about something loosely related: http://trivelop.de/2014/02/17/why-inch-doesnot-use-percentages/

There are alot of popularity indicators like package downloads, GitHub stars, watchers, forks, number of contributors (sometimes even looked at over certain time periods like last month).

The problem is: none of these are comprehensive if looked at in isolation. At best, they could serve as an indicator within categories. If you want to have some popularity algorithm, I would suggest computing some kind of index, where all of these numbers are taken into account. Then I would rank the tools of each category according to this metric.

And even then I would be hesitant to showing the actual numbers. Showing that something is 99 rainbow-unicorns and the other thing is 101 rainbow-unicorns will almost always result in "angry customers".

To conclude: not strictly against it, just my thoughts on this, ymmv. :+1:

henrik commented 8 years ago

@rrrene Good points :thumbsup: I'm not sold on having these stats at all (thus the question mark). I'm considering only showing version number (indicating by color if it's pre or post 1.0, as an indicator of maturity), how long ago it was updated (maybe – if that's a good indicator), and license.