It seems like GitHub encourages that? I mean, emoji reacts to issue comments? Not really sure what the point of that is besides "driving engagement".

I guess the argument for it is that it lets people easily "get involved"? Seems like there's some merit to making it easy for users to leave feedback. Maybe thumbs-up or thumbs-down on an issue really is valuable feedback in some situations. I'm torn between saying the social features are bad because they lower the barrier for low quality engagement, and saying that even low quality engagement can lead to valuable insights.

Github launched with the tag line "social code hosting" in 2008:

https://web.archive.org/web/20081216011059/https://github.co...

Which changed to "social coding" later:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110217073759/https://github.co...

"social coding" eventually moved to the page title, and disappeared from the page itself:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120202143623/https://github.co...

"Social code hosting" and "social coding" are not on the front page anymore, but they definitely kept all the social features.

Github is social media

That's because it kinda is a social network. You can "follow" people after all.

This.-

  PS. And, for some people it might undoubtedly be *all* their "social" ...

It is a social medium by definition, tbf.