Hacker News Reader

they got caught packaging installers with adware / bloatware. Lots of projects / people moved away from it. After the backlash they reversed the policy but the damage was done at that point already.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/419579/new-sourceforge-owner...

Github makes money from private repo subscriptions, Sourceforge was ad based. Also Github focuses on source code hosting, a lot / most Sourceforge projects just hosted the release files to a project.

The quality of the site went down hill, even with ads showing download buttons trying to trick the user.

User experience and design. GitHub was a fresh breath of air compared to SF at the time.