code cleanup in druntime and phobos

[Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d]

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