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Comment by scriptsmith | Hacker News Reader

A lot of this traffic is probably due to the opportunistic advertisement on GitLab's home page for non signed-in users: https://i.imgur.com/ZNikKcJ.png

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The irony of this whole thing being that GitLab is hosted on Azure...

I think that the topic 'privacy' isn't the main factor in this case. Most stuff on platforms like GitHub and GitLab are public anyway and shouldn't include any private stuff.

In my case i simply want to move since i really dislike microsoft and their business decisions. I simply don't want to be involved in any "direct" way with this company. Microsoft doesn't have much control over GitLab, just because they use their servers. But Microsoft will have a lot of control over GitHub.

That's fine, although IMO anyone that doesn't like Microsoft's decisions over the past few years is living in the past.

Meanwhile Google is GitLab's largest investor, and I've been burned more times to count. Google Wave? Google Wave?

One move from Microsoft that really disappointed me recently was to prioritize advertisement over user privacy, for example in Windows 10. I read big chunks of the terms and conditions myself and was horrified.

There are many articles covering this, for instance: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b...

How were you burned by google wave? It was never a finished product and for the longest time (probably forever before being canceled) was a beta product.

Investor != owner. Very different in terms of control and influence even if they are the largest investor. It'll be the Google VC and not corporate.

You still have the source code. If big Google tries to take over you can always fork

> Most stuff on platforms like GitHub and GitLab are public anyway and shouldn't include any private stuff.

GitLab offers free private repos. I expect that's a factor in many people choosing it.

Post from 5th April 2018 on their blog says:

"We’re already in the process of migrating GitLab.com to Google Cloud Platform."[1]

So looks like they wont be on Azure for much (?) longer?

1 - https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/

Edit: Found this super-interesting architecture overview: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/infrastructure/production-...

I think the tweet https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200 and the homepage update https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/7c9e6703... happened around the same time. I think #movingtogitlab caused the traffic.

No, folks really are moving. I've imported about 2 dozen of my projects from github and my coworkers and friends are doing the same.

I just moved all of my repos over from github so actually I'm some of the problem haha. :)

The only people who will see that ad are those who have already decided to check out GitLab today. It’s a convincer, not a traffic driver.

Thanks for the image! But next time, please post a direct link instead of the JS blob that Imgur has become. <3

The user actually did. The website redirected.

imgur has figured out how and when it's safe to redirect PNG/JPG requests to a "JS blob" (of advertising), unfortunately. They tried to pull this a few months ago, completely bungled <img> embeds, and had to turn it off in a hurry. I think they've figured it out this time, sadly!

Time for a new image host... imgur has gone all high-level and "scale"-ey, it would seem (particularly with the new video with sound thing).

I was going to say something about toxicity, but this is sadly just a scaling problem. Now that sound - and competing with youtube - is the new "major consideration", just being a competent works-anywhere image host has been relegated to the region of rounding errors, so it doesn't matter in the same way if they get that right anymore.

Also, they're detecting that I'm on a mobile browser and forcing a redirect to a smaller version version of the file with _d appended to the filename. If this were a large file, I would not be able to see the full size without something like changing my user agent.

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