Agreed. The presence of a streak counter on Github did more for my productivity than any other feature or factor. They're a tremendously powerful self-motivation tool. Whenever I'm not on a streak I always find some excuse to sit around and do nothing instead of working on a cool project. A huge portion of all the open source work I've ever done has been because I didn't want to break a Github streak.
You could argue that I can always track my streak myself, but the fact that it was a public metric with visible milestones (e.g 100 days) matters. Even though it's a somewhat meaningless vanity metric, I know people will notice it, and people will notice if I miss a day and break it.
I don't mind the private repos change as much, but it could do with showing private contributions in a different colour (or maybe a diagonal slice of the box). With private contributions the boxes lose some meaning because now all it tells you is "does this person's employer use Github" rather than showing how much open source work they do.
You could argue that I can always track my streak myself, but the fact that it was a public metric with visible milestones (e.g 100 days) matters. Even though it's a somewhat meaningless vanity metric, I know people will notice it, and people will notice if I miss a day and break it.
I don't mind the private repos change as much, but it could do with showing private contributions in a different colour (or maybe a diagonal slice of the box). With private contributions the boxes lose some meaning because now all it tells you is "does this person's employer use Github" rather than showing how much open source work they do.