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Comment by Shadonototra | Hacker News Reader

obvious and logical choice

github is busy creating Instagram for "Coders"

They now added achievements 5 days ago. I have an achievement for having "opened pull requests that have been merged". It really is becoming a social network.

Wasn't that the whole idea? “GitHub: Social Coding”.

Yea i'm honestly perplexed by everyone on this subject. This has always been on the tin. Big font, right there, for everyone.

It also just happened to be the slick(read nice ux) tool.. so i guess many just pretended it wasn't a social network?

The name is literally "GitHub", not "GitAlone" .

What's bad about that exactly? I like the badge actually. Looks nice and warm.

It's just... noise? I assume the average github user is a developer and has closed dozens of PRs in his life.

It's cool to see someone's code is on the mars rover or in the artic storage. I can't care about achievements like "yolo" "galaxy brain" and "pull shark". I don't understand what information that conveys on a code collaboration platform.

Never occured to me before, but you're right, and it's an interesting way of putting it.

Github boasts "83 million developers", but I think the number of actual developers is probably closer to 0.83 million (which is still a very large amount).

But of course I am an insensitive jerk who likes to exclude people, because I think to be called a developer it takes more than registering an account, creating a repo with a couple of broken files and add noise to the signal.

Totally agree. I have a programming background but don't really program anymore. My Github account has been used for nothing more than submitting issues for projects I use. Any source control I need for other things I do, I use GitLab because of the free private projects and CI integration, but even that's minimal.

GH made private repos free (for an unlimited amount) a few years back (maybe when MS bought them). Not sure about the free tier for GH actions (their CI).

GitHub also has free private projects and CI though. Is that the only reason?

GitHub has a lot more limitations on free projects last I checked, like making it private and using GitHub pages and how many people you can add.

Since the MS acquisition, free accounts can have unlimited private repos.

GitLab CI is better than GitHub Actions

Gitlab restricts its free offering while Github enhances it. I don't know about instagram, but if you're cheap and want free ride, Github just better. Gitlab is open source which is huge for self-hosting and that's about it.

> Gitlab restricts its free offering while Github enhances it. I don't know about instagram, but if you're cheap and want free ride, Github just better.

Well GitLab don't have the unlimited cash of Microsoft, so of course, GitHub can afford to lose money on the free offering. However GitLab have free self-hosted, while GitHub don't ( and as a matter of fact their self-hosted solutions sounds pretty terrible, being months/years behind the SaaS features, while GitLab is the same).

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