Comment by jballanc
10 years ago
It's 2016, and GitHub is stagnant.
GitHub used to bill itself as "Social Coding", but the "Network" graph has not seen ANY updates since its original introduction in April of 2008. Issues has seen very few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses internally have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g. https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/1372).
The word "Social" no longer appears on GitHub's landing page. They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
I've been puzzled for a while with what github is doing hiring so many social impact employees.
https://twitter.com/agelender
https://twitter.com/_danilo
https://twitter.com/rachelmyers
https://twitter.com/nmsanchez
https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating
https://twitter.com/ammeep
https://twitter.com/davystevenson
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
I doubt it. Github has a reputation problem. I wouldn't put anything sensitive on there, given the attitude github leadership showed about privacy ethics in the Julie Horvath incident.
Even if you don't have anything against Github relating to the Horvath incident, there are other things like Github shutting down people's projects because they wrote a doc containing the word "retard." In other words, now they are in the business of regulating the content of open source projects (beyond obvious precautions like not hosting stolen credit card databases, child porn, etc.)
They seem to think they're too big to fail.
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I happen to be an acquaintance of Rachel Myers, and while she does do not-for-profit stuff outside of work, do you have some evidence that she's a "social impact employee" there? It's not obvious on her Twitter/Github profiles.
I don't want to assume any motive to your comment, but I think it would be a cause for concern if the world at large assumes that women/minorities are hired strictly for their "social impact".
I assumed it had to do something with community involvement from here
https://github.com/blog/1521-rachel-myers-is-a-githubber
Github is a trailblazer here for tech companies taking social impact seriously. There is nothing derogatory about it. They do amazing projects in this area
eg:
http://connecthome.hud.gov/
https://github.com/detroitwaterproject/detroit-water-project
I was merely curious about how this fits into their grander strategy.
Yeah, I'd honestly like for a website that actually focused on "Social Coding" rather than the Enterprise Money that GitHub is focusing on. Tbh, that is what GitLab, Bitbucket does also which is why they really are only effective as replacements rather than improvements upon.
I wonder if threads like this keep popping up if people will say "Fuck it" and build an OSS Github clone that focus on being the Reddit of Code/Git rather than another Version Control Enterprise product.
I'd do it but I'm an asshole, not a community builder.
EDIT:
Since I'm in the edit window and its complaining I submit too fast:
Tbh, the problem with Kallithea SCM and Trac is they aren't really built to generate network effects. They both suffer from the same problem as literally every other unsuccessful Github competitor has:
1) You need something built to generate a network effect first, other considerations second, to successfully compete.
2) You need to then leverage that network to chase Corporate money.
GitHub seems to be neglecting #1 in favor of #2 and that imbalance is an opportunity if someone can exploit it. However, that requires someone who is good at being a community builder rather than a software dev.
Recently even Python language planned to move its repositories to github.com for network effect, instead of helping projects like kallithea SCM and trac by partnering with software conservancy or gnu. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
I hope they change the decision to support one of the project like Kallithea or trac by migrating their system and build network effects.
> instead of helping projects
This isn't how it works. You don't help projects by pretending the football-stadium-sized issues with them don't exist and using them despite their flaws.
Trac is an awful, awful piece of software. It's awful to set up, to use, to maintain, to gather feedback from, it's awful for just about everything. If in some very weird parallel universe it gathered even 1% of the following that Github has today, you'd find a 20 page google document at the top of HN about its issues.
This is me being nice. Kallithea is a lot better, but it's just a far poorer Github-like clone. You might as well use Gitlab.
The other advantage of Github is the network effect. You don't have to create yet-another account, which removes a barrier to contributions.
When you're an open source project, you can think of the "Submit issue" button as your payment form. Same UX rules apply: The user must be able to file the issue as easily as possible. You should not throw obstacles in their way. You should not ask 50 questions when they can't answer half of them, especially if they just want to tell you "You have a typo in decode.c" or even just say hi.
Time to enrollment. How easy is it to become a contributor? When I file an issue on your project, I am doing you a favour - you should help me help you. I have myself given up on several large scale projects because they use shit software for bug tracking. It's not fun.
A lot of people don't understand this today. Github has fixed these issues and this is a huge reason why they are popular. And before you say anything, this document here is about is not time to enrollment, but quality of life when you are already a developer (especially on large projects). I'd certainly love for GH to fix those.
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> and trac
Because, honestly, trac just sucks. It ain't as bad as the stuff Atlassian sells but still... it tries to be a fusion of MediaWiki and Bugzilla, and eh nope.
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OMG can we get a moratorium on "tbh"? Just say "Indeed" or some other filler. "To be honest" is bad writing even when it's spelled out.
How reasonable is it to make issue tracking and social interaction part of the SCM itself [with optional web interface] ?
git issues "This needs attention"
>> Issue #1 created
git issues
>> List of issues
git issues -u #11
>> Issue #11 up voted
>> #11 Important stuff, needs attention
git issues -d #6
>> Issue #6 down voted
git issues -f #4
>> Issue #4 flagged
Your `.git` directory would become huge pretty quickly and you would have plenty of problems with people commenting on issues without having a repo up-to-date. How would you handle conflicts in that case?
How is that a different problem than people editing code in a repo that's out of date?
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> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
Maybe putting most of their efforts into Atom and Electron?
Mayhap it is related to their abandonment of being a meritocracy as doing such was being divisive? Success can be very devise as well so perhaps they are making a noble sacrifice to avoid dividing people.