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Comment by phillipcarter | Hacker News Reader

Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.

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This doesn't apply to current Github issues, where rather than a lack of the "right" new features, it's just an escalating degradation of existing services that is the complaint.

The attitude of "stay to support the product" can prevent a better replacement. When Digg torpedoed themselves back in 2012 or whenever, that exodus was a big part of Reddit growing from niche to dominant.

The only users who can push for features now are those who can somehow directly influence people working on GitHub (a small number of users) or those with massive purchasing accounts that can shake Microsoft itself to its core (governments, fortune 100 companies).

I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.

> Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone

That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.

To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions.

https://github.com/actions/checkout#note

No. Products don't magically get good because people conjured up features from thin air or just copied a competitor. It is very much a two-way street, especially when the product acts as a platform that tries to support heterogeneous use cases.

It is not the users job. Literally. If you want that kind of feedback from users, then identify your power users and offer them contracts and money.

Yes, it is the job of users to advocate for the products and platform they use if they want certain use cases to get better and features to be built.

What is your BATNA? If you are going to give them money no matter what they do, they have no reason to listen to your feedback. At all.

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