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I beg to differ on the concept that github became popular because it integrated social media features. I would assert that github became popular because it off

by johnea 3y ago

I beg to differ on the concept that github became popular because it integrated social media features. I would assert that github became popular because it offered free online git repo hosting. The social media stuff was only long after the fact, and accelerated under M$ ownership. An old adage was: Every s/w evolves until it becomes an email client The modern version is: Every s/w evolves until it becomes facebook... Companies look at what's "popular" and try to make their products into that. This is a significant contributor to s/w failing to perform its "primary" function...

nine_zeros 3y ago
> The modern version is: Every s/w evolves until it becomes facebook... This is primarily due to the SV promotion-driven development culture - where Engineering managers don't do anything but performance reviews while offloading all tech work to tech leads. Then, they force every engineer to magically produce "impact" every 6 months or else... It sounds great because surely "impact" must be getting produced every 6 months right? Except, all that has happened is that engineers and product managers are spending months figuring out crap (such as github social, badges etc.) or sometimes boosting some BS metrics. The other side effect is that the work culture has become toxic because every developer is pitted against each other. The outcome? Enshittification of once beloved services. Because the stewards of said services are trapped in a cycle of perverse incentives.
- icedchai 3y ago
  This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done.
  - nine_zeros 3y ago
    > This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done. Been there. The obsession with levels and career ladder documents is too much sometimes. It is so hard to be an IC with constant org-wide impact as opposed to being a manager whose impact is automatically wider due to reporting structure.
    - icedchai 3y ago
      I eventually left. I hated the culture. They would literally shame people for not hitting 90% of their sprint goals, meanwhile the interruptions were constant and never ending. Also, despite all the time spent on code reviews, the code base was incredibly difficult to work with. Technical debt did not begin to describe it. 5000 line single file "modules", decade old dependencies nobody dared upgrade, not to mention Python 2.7 (in 2022), multiple ORMs, on and on.
wilg 3y ago
I agree GitHub is not popular because of its minimal and pointless social features. It became popular because Git is good and they nailed the cloud part of source control. However, social was definitely there as part of the original pitch. The tagline was "social coding" for a long time. But also if you're buying GitHub stars or worrying about people's contribution squares, you're probably not doing great work.
- serial_dev 3y ago
  > I agree GitHub is not popular because of its minimal and pointless social features. I'm not sure I agree. I believe that having a profile for open source work, tracking issues, comments, tagging people in comments, assigning tasks, etc, are all core to GitHub's popularity. Now with issue and comment upvotes, following users, etc, it's even better. A couple of years ago I went through a phase where I was convinced that GitLab is "more open source" so I wanted to push my code to GitLab (and back then they had a significantlybetter CI/CD and Pages/static site hosting offering). In the end, I gave up, because (almost) nobody used GitLab for open source, neither as code maintainers, nor as contributors in the form of reporting issues, and people wanted a Github profile, not a GitLab profile at job applications.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    A GitLab profile might get you hired over a github profile. A gitlab profile shows you are part of a smaller select group. It could be the difference.
ogoffart 3y ago
The only reason I have my projects on Github and not on our self-hosted server, is because of the network effect of users having accounts that makes it easier for them to report bugs and contribute.
nemothekid 3y ago
>The social media stuff was only long after the fact, and accelerated under M$ ownership. Github's original 2008 tagline was "social code hosting". I'd argue the social nature is what made github, as well as git, popular.
gorkish 3y ago
Github became popular because it was SourceForge without all the bullshit.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Yep. For those who don’t do much open source collab, it entered our lives as an open source project discovery, evaluation, and distribution system. Now, of course, it’s also where lots of us push our code that we write for pay, but that’s why we started visiting.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Yep, this was exactly how I got into it at first. Didn't even really notice the social features for years and even now I'm only aware of the social features and don't actually engage with them.
mnky9800n 3y ago
I'm just glad there's no LinkedIn connection
- nologic01 3y ago
  Quite a few people seem to be using github as a place to put a cv. Social media behaviors are creeping in, slowly but surely. The path from here to "Are you currently hiring?" and "You had so many people looking at your profile, unlock your opportunities with a premium subscription" etc. is not that long. But I dont want to pretent I really know how to enshittify a platform.
sowbug 3y ago
I liked having a web frontend to git, which was often much less cumbersome than figuring out the right diff/log/branch incantations. Also, as a cvs refugee, I felt weird committing to just my local repo and not having another place where "the truth" lived. None of this functionality had anything to do with social features; it simply helped act as my bridge between centralized and distributed source control.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
I just use it, because it works well, and saves me a lot of elbow grease. I've managed local servers with Git and Perforce on them, and it's a pain. I like the PR concept. It takes a service like GH to implement it well. I like GH Issues. JIRA is a nightmare (source: Former JIRA admin). If I were doing high-security stuff, I'd probably run my own server (and charge beaucoup bucks), but I don't, so GH is fine. When we run our own servers, backup is a really big deal, and that can be worse than actually running the server. GH handles all that for me. It also basically acts as an offsite backup. As far as stars, I could give a rat's ass. I'm 61, and a tired old warhorse. Status games are for young turks. I did once come across a profile that had a solid bright green activity log. I suspect the chap had a private repo, with a script that checked the same file in, multiple times per hour. I have also heard of people gaming the activity log to display pictures. Mine's fairly solid, but that's just because I stay busy.
WalterBright 3y ago
We decided to use github because: 1. lots of other people used it 2. it provided auditable provenance for all contributions to dlang 3. I got tired of people copying my code and then claiming I stole it from them. Github ended all that 4. it provides a great distributed backup 5. nobody complained about it :-/ 6. Dlang is in the D business, not the repository business. Best to not invent our own. 7. it provides everything we need 8. I didn't think git or github was going to go dark on us

by johnea 3y ago

nine_zeros 3y ago

> The modern version is: Every s/w evolves until it becomes facebook... This is primarily due to the SV promotion-driven development culture - where Engineering managers don't do anything but performance reviews while offloading all tech work to tech leads. Then, they force every engineer to magically produce "impact" every 6 months or else... It sounds great because surely "impact" must be getting produced every 6 months right? Except, all that has happened is that engineers and product managers are spending months figuring out crap (such as github social, badges etc.) or sometimes boosting some BS metrics. The other side effect is that the work culture has become toxic because every developer is pitted against each other. The outcome? Enshittification of once beloved services. Because the stewards of said services are trapped in a cycle of perverse incentives.

icedchai 3y ago
This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done. Been there. The obsession with levels and career ladder documents is too much sometimes. It is so hard to be an IC with constant org-wide impact as opposed to being a manager whose impact is automatically wider due to reporting structure.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    I eventually left. I hated the culture. They would literally shame people for not hitting 90% of their sprint goals, meanwhile the interruptions were constant and never ending. Also, despite all the time spent on code reviews, the code base was incredibly difficult to work with. Technical debt did not begin to describe it. 5000 line single file "modules", decade old dependencies nobody dared upgrade, not to mention Python 2.7 (in 2022), multiple ORMs, on and on.

wilg 3y ago

I agree GitHub is not popular because of its minimal and pointless social features. It became popular because Git is good and they nailed the cloud part of source control. However, social was definitely there as part of the original pitch. The tagline was "social coding" for a long time. But also if you're buying GitHub stars or worrying about people's contribution squares, you're probably not doing great work.

serial_dev 3y ago
> I agree GitHub is not popular because of its minimal and pointless social features. I'm not sure I agree. I believe that having a profile for open source work, tracking issues, comments, tagging people in comments, assigning tasks, etc, are all core to GitHub's popularity. Now with issue and comment upvotes, following users, etc, it's even better. A couple of years ago I went through a phase where I was convinced that GitLab is "more open source" so I wanted to push my code to GitLab (and back then they had a significantlybetter CI/CD and Pages/static site hosting offering). In the end, I gave up, because (almost) nobody used GitLab for open source, neither as code maintainers, nor as contributors in the form of reporting issues, and people wanted a Github profile, not a GitLab profile at job applications.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  A GitLab profile might get you hired over a github profile. A gitlab profile shows you are part of a smaller select group. It could be the difference.

ogoffart 3y ago

The only reason I have my projects on Github and not on our self-hosted server, is because of the network effect of users having accounts that makes it easier for them to report bugs and contribute.

nemothekid 3y ago

>The social media stuff was only long after the fact, and accelerated under M$ ownership. Github's original 2008 tagline was "social code hosting". I'd argue the social nature is what made github, as well as git, popular.

gorkish 3y ago

Github became popular because it was SourceForge without all the bullshit.

hotnfresh 3y ago
Yep. For those who don’t do much open source collab, it entered our lives as an open source project discovery, evaluation, and distribution system. Now, of course, it’s also where lots of us push our code that we write for pay, but that’s why we started visiting.
dotnet00 3y ago
Yep, this was exactly how I got into it at first. Didn't even really notice the social features for years and even now I'm only aware of the social features and don't actually engage with them.

mnky9800n 3y ago

I'm just glad there's no LinkedIn connection

nologic01 3y ago
Quite a few people seem to be using github as a place to put a cv. Social media behaviors are creeping in, slowly but surely. The path from here to "Are you currently hiring?" and "You had so many people looking at your profile, unlock your opportunities with a premium subscription" etc. is not that long. But I dont want to pretent I really know how to enshittify a platform.

sowbug 3y ago

I liked having a web frontend to git, which was often much less cumbersome than figuring out the right diff/log/branch incantations. Also, as a cvs refugee, I felt weird committing to just my local repo and not having another place where "the truth" lived. None of this functionality had anything to do with social features; it simply helped act as my bridge between centralized and distributed source control.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

I just use it, because it works well, and saves me a lot of elbow grease. I've managed local servers with Git and Perforce on them, and it's a pain. I like the PR concept. It takes a service like GH to implement it well. I like GH Issues. JIRA is a nightmare (source: Former JIRA admin). If I were doing high-security stuff, I'd probably run my own server (and charge beaucoup bucks), but I don't, so GH is fine. When we run our own servers, backup is a really big deal, and that can be worse than actually running the server. GH handles all that for me. It also basically acts as an offsite backup. As far as stars, I could give a rat's ass. I'm 61, and a tired old warhorse. Status games are for young turks. I did once come across a profile that had a solid bright green activity log. I suspect the chap had a private repo, with a script that checked the same file in, multiple times per hour. I have also heard of people gaming the activity log to display pictures. Mine's fairly solid, but that's just because I stay busy.

WalterBright 3y ago

We decided to use github because: 1. lots of other people used it 2. it provided auditable provenance for all contributions to dlang 3. I got tired of people copying my code and then claiming I stole it from them. Github ended all that 4. it provides a great distributed backup 5. nobody complained about it :-/ 6. Dlang is in the D business, not the repository business. Best to not invent our own. 7. it provides everything we need 8. I didn't think git or github was going to go dark on us