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Ordinarily, people might find seeing the repository straight-up too jarring. For people who aren't in the IT world, I'm not sure that seeing Github will be some

Ordinarily, people might find seeing the repository straight-up too jarring. For people who aren't in the IT world, I'm not sure that seeing Github will be some definitive proof that an extension is legit.

traviscj 9y ago
Furthermore, it is only definitive until it isn't. If we trained users to look for the github page, we'd have forked projects that point to the compromised extension, fake github clones that look like the project, fraudulent likes, and so forth.
- tracker1 9y ago
  Or clones that point to the legitimate github repo.
emodendroket 9y ago
Even for people who are that isn't really "definitive proof" of anything.
- TwelveNights 9y ago
  If a project looks popular, you can at least assume it isn't total rubbish though.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I'm not saying I wouldn't do the same, but it's more of a heuristic than "definitive proof."
marssaxman 9y ago
Even in the IT world, having spent literally my entire career writing code, I found github completely inscrutable when it first arrived, because all the explanatory text gets pushed down to the bottom of the page where you can't see it, which is completely opposite from... well... pretty much any other system of organizing information I have ever seen, ever. I felt really pissed off, actually, that so many people were cluttering up hackernews with all these low-effort links to random unexplained directories inside unfamiliar source repos, somehow thinking it reasonable to presume that we would all want to just dig around in their source code trying to understand what it was they were attempting to do. "github.com" became a negative value signal just as strong as "experts-exchange.com", and I tried to avoid ever clicking on such worthless links. It was probably a couple of years before I ever had reason to actually use github and discover that the information I had wanted had been present all along. Now of course the inverted layout has become second nature... but I still think it's a bad idea to send anyone who is not already a github user to a github link and expect them to find anything useful to do with it.

traviscj 9y ago

Furthermore, it is only definitive until it isn't. If we trained users to look for the github page, we'd have forked projects that point to the compromised extension, fake github clones that look like the project, fraudulent likes, and so forth.

tracker1 9y ago
Or clones that point to the legitimate github repo.

emodendroket 9y ago

Even for people who are that isn't really "definitive proof" of anything.

TwelveNights 9y ago
If a project looks popular, you can at least assume it isn't total rubbish though.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I'm not saying I wouldn't do the same, but it's more of a heuristic than "definitive proof."

marssaxman 9y ago

Even in the IT world, having spent literally my entire career writing code, I found github completely inscrutable when it first arrived, because all the explanatory text gets pushed down to the bottom of the page where you can't see it, which is completely opposite from... well... pretty much any other system of organizing information I have ever seen, ever. I felt really pissed off, actually, that so many people were cluttering up hackernews with all these low-effort links to random unexplained directories inside unfamiliar source repos, somehow thinking it reasonable to presume that we would all want to just dig around in their source code trying to understand what it was they were attempting to do. "github.com" became a negative value signal just as strong as "experts-exchange.com", and I tried to avoid ever clicking on such worthless links. It was probably a couple of years before I ever had reason to actually use github and discover that the information I had wanted had been present all along. Now of course the inverted layout has become second nature... but I still think it's a bad idea to send anyone who is not already a github user to a github link and expect them to find anything useful to do with it.