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Comment by IncandescentGas | Hacker News Reader

Good. That's a gain, not a loss. We're better off without social media psyop manipulations and subscription services bolted onto our code repositories. We're better off without a giant evilcorp getting wholesale access to a large majority of the world's source code.

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Personally I never engaged in the community aspect of GitHub.

In my eyes it would be a ginormous gain to our colective mental health to not have the expectation to contribute to open source projects for free, or to have "green squares" every day on a public GitHub profile.

This seems to be such a non issue to me, I always ignored this and its strange to hear others feel compelled.

That's the point of it though. It's designed to be gamified and addictive to coerce users into spending more time Engaging with the site.

Great that it doesn't work on you, but it works really well on a depressingly large number of people.

Especially now with LLMs. My hand coded github activity is through the roof the last two years just because of a job change, but I assume everyone's activity is up in the last 2 years for other reasons and if it meant anything in the past it definitely doesn't now

I just use GitHub for the basics: repo hosting, reviews and actions - what are the "social media psyop manipulations"? I've never really paid much attention to the other features.

But now the users who only use core functions (re: repo hosting, reviews and actions) suffer when the service is down due to overreach with feature implementation.

All the metrics based around how many commits you have made, how many stars your repo has, etc. Why is that info gamified? Its a dopamine addiction channel.

Seriously?

It’s for subset of people who cares about that. You can just blanket-ignore everyone who cares about that, and move on.

Yeah but then VC use these metrics to fund projects and suddenly what was previously a joke now becomes a way to make wealth.

It's good you can isolate yourself from it. But there's plenty of cases.

Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.

And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).

Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.

> Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues

This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.

The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".

I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.

You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.

> The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".

The argument is that there's no need for that much social interaction to produce quality code, quite the contrary, the more social interaction, the more focus is lost.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but there's a reason why the Linux Kernel communication is still done through acerbic email threads.

None of this is specific to GitHub. The exact same problems will sometimes happen any time users and developers communicate, which is a basic requirement of developing useful software. I doubt GitHub issues are worse than mailing lists or any other mechanism.

They almost have to be - which users will be able to get to your issues page and which will be able to find a mailing list? You'll have a much more selective audience in the latter

Demanding work isn't really an issue. Anyone can do that, and also reject the work. Dishonest actors on the other hand would take money for someone else's work.

You outlined what it (and all git hosting other services) are for: repository hosting, optionally issue tracker, mandatorily pull requests (for syncing with master or other branches), Actions for automated steps on merge to a tracked branch.

Could be argued to be both a gain and a loss...

"Replicants are either a benefit or a hazard."

If there are no subscription services, what will fund the free open source repositories?

Who the hell uses GitHub socially?

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