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Comment by kvark | Hacker News Reader

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie...

I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But this will probably backfire in the future :/

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I don't want to make the same comment repeatedly, but anyone saying this aims at SO is fundamentally misunderstanding why SO is successful and what it offers.

SO is literally anti-discussion, the whole point is it is about questions and answers, not discussion, because finding answers to questions on forums was a nightmare. No one wants to read through a thread of context to maybe find an answer.

That isn't to say discussion isn't useful or valuable, it absolutely is, it is just a completely different thing. This is competing with Discourse, not SO.

It still competes with SO because now you'd post the question about a certain framework or library on its repo's discussions. Also, isn't it kind of explicitly doing that because discussions can elect an "accepted" answer?

Yeah, but way more people look for answers rather than ask them (not to mention the pain of having to answer the same question repeatedly if they can't find the answer).

Accepting an answer is an attempt, but without the moderation, editing, voting, duplicate closing and so on from SO, the quality and ease of finding answers won't be there.

I'm sure plenty of people remember trying to find answers through forums, and it was a nightmare. The thread might not actually have an answer in it, and even if you get pointed to an answer, it'll often need context from the rest of the thread, it might be out of date, or completely wrong.

To put it simply: there is a reason why people use SO almost exclusively for Q&A, and there is a reason people still use forums and stuff as well. Discussion and Q&A have different goals and conflating or combining them leads to pain for users.

even though many projects actively try to dissuade "user" questions and direct you to SO. Now they'll maybe send you to the relevant discussion. This is closer to the "source" for answers specifically linked to one repo or project. For more general questions, we'll see if GH broadens what discussions can be used for; if there will be a place for more general topic discussions

It’ll be very interesting to see how Google ranks the search results. I don’t know about others, but I almost never directly search SO, and almost always end up there through Google. If GitHub Discussions has the answer and Google directs me there, I will definitely not visit SO as often anymore.

I've found the questions that SO surfaces when writing my questions to be pretty good.

Stackoverflow's search algorithm sucks compared to Google. I always use google and add the "site:stackoverflow.com" operator to find answers on SO.

To be fair pretty much everybody’s sucks compared to Google. I think your approach is almost universally sensible.

It looks exactly like SO to me. There is a question, it is voted on, and there are answers, with one selected as the correct answer. There is no reading through the entire thread or anything like what you are suggesting.

It also competes with Reddit.

I am a long time user of SE (questions and answers alike) and I go to reddit for questions which are more vague (because I do not know where to go) or the ones which invite discussions.

I can't wait for stack overflow to fall out of favor. There's few places as beginner-hostile as SO. If you get enough points, you get the close button, which effectively is telling newcomers to RTFM in nicer words.

Yeah, and it's full of low quality drive-by responses by people using it to build their personal brand. Not quite on the same level as say Quora, SO seems to have better checks in place to keep things from degenerating that much. It's definitely present though, just less overt.

Anecdata: I have a question where I was calling super() incorrectly, and another where my reproduction was flawed, not showing what I thought it did. No closures or hostility. Maybe I've been lucky, maybe the advice for asking good questions works.

In any case the act of composing a question according to the guide has answered many more questions than I've actually posted -- some due to the rubber-ducking, others via the "check out these questions" feature.

(This is all orthogonal to the recent issues wrt moderators and community managers)

Stack Overflow has only become more popular since I used it.

I used to answer people's questions. These days I'll go to a section like Node.js and frankly anyone who asked a good, focused question has been answered and you're left sifting through the low-tier questions of people posting an unformatted 1000-line code snippet with "it doesn't work".

Seems to be working pretty well.

Quite the contrary experience, it's specially hostile to knowledgeable people. My last 3-4 questions were all closed because I wrote targeting experts and the mods had trouble understanding what I was asking.

Do you have an example?

Not without sacrificing my privacy :(

That's not what the close button does and it typically requires a few confirmations from other users, so you can't close things randomly yourself. Almost all close votes are reasonable - have a look at the "close vote" moderation queue.

It may seem beginner hostile sometimes, but in practice it's mostly: you can't have a personal approach to everyone when looking through hundreds of messages.

I'm at 60k reputation so I have a decent idea of how it works. My point is that you probably should have a personal approach before voting 'close'.

If you don't, there's no real harm in leaving bad questions open until there is someone else in the community willing to help out.

I find myself looking at closed questions wanting to help but unable to too many times.

I don't disagree. I just don't think this can be enforced in any way. Community defines itself. We've got 75042 people who can cast close votes. Requiring multiple votes helps, but you can't make that many people behave the same way with the same values.

SO is one of the few places on the internet that give me a positive experience pretty much every time I go there.

Type in my programming question, go to the page, scroll down and see a wide variety of idiomatic, well-researched and thoroughly critiqued solutions, very readable, ready to copy, and with the concepts spelled out to study up on.

> [GitHub Project boards] replaced Trello/Waffle and friends.

I've actually wondered whether that feature (the Kanban style boards) will end up going away, as it seem vastly underused by the overall community in comparison to Issues/Milestones/Wikis.

Go to a random substantial repo and click on the Projects tab. It's almost certain that there'll be nothing there.

I agree that it doesn't get much use, but I still think it's a good feature to have. I personally prefer having a project board integrated with everything else instead of using an external service.

I'm guessing those are way more used for private projects (inside companies) than public ones.

>it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way.

I don't like having my revenue generating activities linked to a social network for programmers. It seems like a terrible mix. I am not social at all. I know programming has now become a "social" thing as it is in the mainstream, but I prefer the days of it being an obscure world where you had to join some kind of mailing list.

At the same time, there are still many things that could be improved in the traditional/core Git workflow, and it seems like those are not getting as much attention.

https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2020/01/07/problems-with-pull-...

Why would it backfire? This centralized approach is the entire model for competitor Gitlab which has grown without issue so far.

I believe GP is predicting it will backfire on the users who buy into the ecosystem, not Github itself.

I understood the point to be that to do all these things well is very difficult for a single product / company. I worked at a startup where our solution was to replace five other solutions. Only customers with the simplest use cases found that it worked. The complexity from the breadth makes achieving the requisite depth for a good experience difficult.

Because Microsoft effectively building a monopoly on OSS. I'm happy now, because the product is amazing but it's always sain to have everything controlled by one company.

I was wondering whether Github issues (and now discussions) are exportable?

*Just found the answer: https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/

I find it maddening that git hasn't added a standard mechanism for metadata.

Commit comments are metadata. Tags are metadata. Why isn't there a general-purpose metadata plumbing so we can attach issues, merge and commit discussions, and wikis, in a portable way?

No, being able to export from one centralized repository and import into another isn't good enough.

You can attach as much metadata as you want using git-note.

The Pagure git forge keeps all project metadata (issues, PRs, etc.) on git, so you have it all if your Pagure instance ever goes down & can easily move it to another instance:

https://pagure.io/pagure

I dunno about that. The only thing I use is GitHub Actions. Projects pales in comparison to Asana, and Pages is a nightmare compared to Netlify or NOW.

> Sponsors is about to hit Patreon

At least for Patreon, they have a large enough user base, this won't hit them particularly hard.

I’d imagine open source is just a small slice of the pie compared to the youtube/twitch/gaming audiences. And I imagine any project earning thousands on Patreon isn’t going to attempt to migrate all of that just to keep it in github.

It will probably only affect Patreon’s share of FOSS-projects starting today (and thus doesn't already have a Patreon).

Of course if enough people start using GitHub Sponsors, end-users may make it a expectation/demand to be able to sponsor their favourite projects there if they are going to bother (much like users today won’t bother to sign up for a Patreon-competitor).

And then it might start having a noticeable effect.

That said, anecdotally speaking, today only one of my Patreon pledges are for software projects, and most are for youtubers.

If that holds up for other people too, I suspect Patreon will be fine.

Replaced is incorrect, they're simply competing. Trello and CircleCI are alive and kicking.

CircleCI might be alive and well, but Travis-CI is on the way out, and I'd not be surprised to see CircleCI go out in a few years.

Travis was already on its way down before Github actions

Well that's microsoft 101, what did you expect?

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