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Comment by boromi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of turning GitHub into social media. Please GitHub don't go down this route.

GitHub is already social media. What else is the star system, the network of forks, the profile bio and the ability to comment?

Don’t forget the most stereo typical characteristic of function for social media: following another user.

I totally get where you're coming from, but I follow people on GitHub exclusively because I want to see what code they're working on.

I'm not following them because we have reciprocal social arrangement where we're "friends", or because I want to chit-chat with them, or see what they're eating, or what asinine 280 character fragments of streams of consciousness that they emit into the void, or to participate in the typical "best foot forward" profile stalking and preening BS that I can't stand about social media.

GitHub is a social network, no doubt, but it is not social media and I hope that does not change.

Perhaps I’m in the minority but I use the star system almost like a bookmark. Is that not what it’s for? Is a star the equivalent of a “like”?

Not sure what it is for but everyone I talked to uses it as bookmark system.. so you are not alone.. to the contrary.

What are your browser bookmarks for?

Yeah, me too. Stars are for me just Github-scoped bookmarks.

The number of stars and forks indicate the interest in the repository to me.

I'm not sure if I'm convinced this has worked as a bookmark for my repositories: no one ever removed a star from any of them, and no one ever returned with any feedback later. It could be a matter of a small sample size, or of people never actually coming back (which is the bookmark's use case).

Almost every browser denotes 'favorites' with a star, so I’ve always thought 'starring' a project meant the same as bookmarking it or storing it as a favorite to reference later.

The original tagline for GitHub was "Social Coding"

I remember when GitHub used to have private messaging. I liked that feature. It was an easy and unified way to get in touch with other coders on there and felt less intrusive than sending them e-mails out of the blue (or opening issues for the sake of communication, as some do).

There have been times I've wanted to reach out to someone about their open source repository or a question and I've always wondered why there wasn't a messaging feature. Interesting to learn it used to be there.

Same, but then I realized every commit contains the persons email, so I just email people.

Turning into? It’s always been that. That’s actually one of the reasons it’s been successful.

They are just leaning into it more.

Didn't they have some feature years ago where you could tag people. And people took it as an opportunity to harass?

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