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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

Stats about general internet usage should mean very little to GitHub since it is used by a specific subset of the population which I'd wager is way more heavily skewed towards laptop/desktop

Also shouldn't they be able to just know this based on traffic? Why the need to use third-party general research as a source rather than "Our traffic patterns suggest X"?

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Yeah. Looking at stats without context of their audience is what caused the Xbox One disaster. They saw a huge number of hours on Xbox 360 being used for watching streaming shows, so they thought that was all anybody cared about, ignoring the fact that their audience still bought the device as a game console and that alot of those hours were relatives and housemates.

The 360 was a better streaming box than the one.

The one was a crap console all around, but Microsoft’s auth BS is what finally got both of them stuck in our attic. More recently, this happened with minecraft.

GitHub recently forced me to turn on 2FA over SMS. Now they’re running a banner telling me that it has all the problems that were the reasons I didn’t want to turn it on, and telling me to turn on some other 2FA instead.

The mention of general internet usage stats was in the context of broader industry trends influencing overall consumer expectations.

Sure but GitHub users are developers, not "consumers" in the general sense, so that mention doesn't really apply.

Slide ?42? (https://hawksley.org/img/posts/2025-01-08-past-present-futur...) also hints at some level of disconnect, what's the number of users accessing GitHub via Linux?

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