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Comment by sciurus | Hacker News Reader

Their Github account at https://github.com/prowriting looks boringly normal. I wonder what could have caused Github's systems to flag it and a customer service rep to decide it was not legitimate.

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There doesn't seem to be much going on there? Over 13 repos, there are like 5 issues, all open, with one response that seems to be from some other user who just randomly wandered in? There are a few commits and a couple of branches, but no releases. Also a couple really ancient forks. This looks like a random person's GitHub page, not a software company's.

They also don't have any links to their GitHub pages on their site. This isn't how organizations normally use GitHub. One suspects they're just using it as a CDN without engaging with any of the coding or social features. Perhaps GitHub has some sort of trigger when particular resources get requested over and over without any referer? Why not just use GitHub normally? Failing that, why not just use a CDN?

CDNs cost money. The whole point of most businesses lately seems to be externalizing costs while providing the least amount of service that they can get paid gobs of money for. I understand that's a sound business model in a race to the bottom, but eventually you hit the bottom and the whole market losses.

They don't cost enough money to justify this whole embarrassing episode. Probably they're just a little bit harder to configure than it was to just dump everything on GitHub.

But now, think this whole thing in this way: Should GitHub block them because of all that?

That's really up to GitHub. They have to weigh the cost of being the lazy dude-bro's CDN against the bother of dealing with entitled whinging like TFA. To be clear, they certainly are justified in blocking this user. GitHub is for collaborative development, not code distribution.

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