What part of GitHub does this person have a problem with? It's entirely unclear what they mean by social network. Is that like, showing the commits you make on your profile? Having a page that shows what you've worked on at all? This seems like good ways to be difficult to work with in open source projects for zero benefit.
> Is that like, showing the commits you make on your profile?
Yes.
> Having a page that shows what you've worked on at all?
Yes.
> This seems like good ways to be difficult to work with in open source projects
First, open source doesn't start and end with GitHub.
Second, I prefer not to publish anything to Facebook or Twitter feeds, either. That's a position that folks seem to find palatable. (In fact, it's one that programmers appear to be disproportionately sympathetic to.) I don't see why it shouldn't remain so if the subject of the conversation is GitHub.
> for zero benefit
Opting out of the same kinds of personal broadcasting on GitHub isn't "zero benefit" to me. And if it is zero-benefit, it means the service linked here is zero-value. I feel differently. We don't have to agree.
I didn't mean to imply it is, but if an open source project finds it easier to use one platform (such as github), trying to subvert that by emailing patches sounds like a very annoying thing to do. It seems similar to submitting pull requests to the Linux Kernel on GitHub, which explicitly requests that you submit patches on the mailing list.