I definitely agree, and believe that this sort of thing sets a very negative example for young folks coming into the industry. Chasing views, starts, and shares is a sure path to burnout and mental health problems that already seem to plague very online tech people.

*[edit] I don't mean to shit on the OPs work or the coolness factor here. I'm just a bit put off by the idea of creating new anxiety levers for people to pull that don't offer much if any real value.

Bad practice to assume your ethos is the only one at play.

I'd hardly call taking a look at _where_ people are coming from to view your Github profile a "vanity" thing. A view of referrers could be extremely useful in tuning one's developer presence and visibility. That could come in handy when job-seeking, or trying to spread the word about your services and/or company. Both of which Github is widely used for.

Have you ever gotten a job because of your GitHub profile?

Yes. I was sought and employed specifically because of the work visible on my Github profile from 2017 - 2019. My body of work on Github directly contributed to my candidacy for the job I currently hold.

So how would having view statistics helped? Would you have curated your GitHub account differently if you knew who was visiting your profile?

Definitely possible. Could effect repos that are pinned, content of profile blurb on the left, etc. If I had access to where folks were coming from, I could gauge how visible or discoverable my profile was from other sources, my blog, etc.

Sure, but using tracking pixels will always show your github profile as the referer, won't it?

I agree, but I think such information should be available to all people. Some people will be doing this anyway, and they can hide this by using a transparent pixel.

There will also be plenty of people who put images on their profile like this with no interest in tracking the metrics.

What benefits do you feel you get from this over the view counting Github already does for you?

You can't view profile statistics right now. Personally, my intent was to demonstrate the concept. I don't have plans using it.

Seconding this. I don't know if it's a fair comparison but Instagram is removing publically-visible like counts because of their associated consequences, and embeddable banner services for tracking GitHub profile views seems inevitable.

Sorry, but don't project your needs onto others.

It is still useful enough to know if someone looked at your github repos when you're looking for a job. Typically this is useful when a visitor also hits other sites related to you like your Linkedin, or gets a link to your github from a printed resume, etc. It lets you know someone is interested and during a job search that can be useful information. It doesn't have to be only about "vanity", but maybe you're applying some kind of narrow view on the rest of the world.

why the need to make everything "social"? I doubt most of the population has levels of insecurity enough to be continually thinking where to implement such things.

Social isn't necessarily bad. Trouble arises when social is combined with reinforcement learning algorithms to drive engagement. Jaron Lanier makes a good case for not using social media that use reinforcement learning algorithms to drive engagement

> The results are tiny changes in the behavior of people over time. But small changes add up, like compound interest. This is one reason that BUMMER naturally promotes tribalism and is tearing society apart, even if the techies in a BUMMER company are well-meaning. In order for BUMMER code to self-optimize, it naturally and automatically seizes upon any latent tribalism and racism, for these are the neural hashtags waiting out there in everyone’s psyche, which can be accentuated for the purpose of attention monopoly.

BUMMER is an acronym

> Seems like a good moment to coin an acronym so I don’t have to repeat, over and over, the same account of the pieces that make up the problem. How about “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”? BUMMER. BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. To review, phenomena that are statistical and fuzzy are nevertheless real. Even at their best, BUMMER algorithms can only calculate the chances that a person will act in a particular way. But what might be only a chance for each person approaches being a certainty on the average for large numbers of people. The overall population can be affected with greater predictability than can any single person.

Similar dynamics show up in any forum where people compete with others for points, e.g. karma.

Everyday there are fewer and fewer pleasures available to people in this troubled world, let them have this.