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thechangelog / nightly

Changelog Nightly unearths the hottest repos on GitHub before they blow up. Subscribe for free. Keep up.
https://changelog.com/nightly
MIT License
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Emails favor quick popularity over steady growth #10

Closed timboudreau closed 8 years ago

timboudreau commented 9 years ago

One thing that is annoying is that, if you have a project that slowly and steadily grows stars, you will never show up in this list. So it favors, not projects that are necessarily most valuable, but projects which initially get a lot of attention.

This is not just an easy stat to game (whenever I open source something I must email all my friends to please star it now, which is weird and annoying), but also one that means many useful projects will never be seen here.

It would be nice if you added a category for "long tail" projects - ones that didn't necessarily make an initial huge splash, but have shown steady gains over time and have not been listed before.

adamstac commented 9 years ago

@timboudreau thanks for sharing your thoughts here. It's very helpful to see your perspective when thinking about what we're doing here.

I will say that is just a start for us. We have plans for more ways to present interesting data to help folks keep up. We also don't want to be a GitHub explore me too of sorts.

With Changelog Nightly, we took what GitHub Archive had done already well, redesigned it to a more presentable version, made it look great on mobile, and updated the content and presentation to fine tune its readability.

I'll let @jerodsanto weigh in with his thoughts around this. He's working on a project (totally heads down) right now, so expect a response back next week sometime.

jerodsanto commented 9 years ago

@timboudreau I definitely see what you mean.

While I agree that it'd be easy to game Nightly (especially on the weekends when there's less new repos and activity in general), the advantage of doing so is minimal. So minimal, I believe, that it's unlikely to be a big problem for us.

That being said, it'd be awesome if we could shine a light on "slow and steady" growth repos as well. I'm not sure if Nightly is the place to do that, though. We have many different avenues which we can use to discover and shine light on those projects.

Adding this to Nightly would require much heavier lifting than we're currently doing. I'm not saying it wouldn't be worth it, just that I'm not sure at this point.

timboudreau commented 9 years ago

So I'm guessing there's no retained state between nightly runs?

The way I'd do it would be something like:

A project that gains popularity slowly is just as likely to be interesting as one that hit rapidly - and that would balance out the ADDishness - after all, 100 stars means the same thing whether they were gained in a day or a year, and not every project owner is tremendously skilled at marketing their work.

On Sun, Mar 1, 2015 at 10:08 AM, Jerod Santo notifications@github.com wrote:

@timboudreau https://github.com/timboudreau I definitely see what you mean.

While I agree that it'd be easy to game Nightly (especially on the weekends when there's less new repos and activity in general), the advantage of doing so is minimal. So minimal, I believe, that it's unlikely to be a big problem for us.

That being said, it'd be awesome if we could shine a light on "slow and steady" growth repos as well. I'm not sure if Nightly is the place to do that, though. We have many http://thechangelog.com different http://thechangelog.com/weekly avenues http:///thechangelog/ping/issues which we can use to discover and shine light on those projects.

Adding this to Nightly would require much heavier lifting than we're currently doing. I'm not saying it wouldn't be worth it, just that I'm not sure at this point.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/thechangelog/nightly/issues/10#issuecomment-76600667.

http://timboudreau.com

daniellmb commented 9 years ago

I have seen this as well, my AngularJS Test Patterns repo gets a couple stars a day, and it eventually overtook my JavaScript Scope Context Coloring experiment that got 400 stars instantly because Paul Irish mentioned it.

I wonder if any other metrics could help the nightly list be less of a fleeting popularity contest (aka the number of stars in a given day). Such as looking at contributor and fork counts as a signal for community involvement or commits and releases as the pulse for repo activity.

timboudreau commented 9 years ago

That would be good. I think the challenge here is that there's what's easy-to-measure and there's what's actually interesting, and they aren't always the same thing.

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 11:44 AM, Daniel Lamb notifications@github.com wrote:

I wonder if any other metrics could help the nightly list be less of a popularity contest (aka the number of stars in a given day). Such as looking at contributor and fork counts as a signal for community involvement and commits and releases as the pulse for repo activity.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/thechangelog/nightly/issues/10#issuecomment-77194464.

http://timboudreau.com

jerodsanto commented 8 years ago

We appreciate your thoughts and feedback on this, but ultimately, I don't believe this change is worth the effort involved. 🍻