Comment by sgift
5 years ago
> Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.
This sounds like "Without GitHub you will get less spam", which is probably true, but I think the reason is not "github is bad", it's: Less people will find your project.
Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off, but it's very different from "all will be better without Github"
Less people finding your project could be an improvement if the people you loose are the onse that just create the kind of spam contributions mentioned in the article. You don't need GitHib for useful software to become popular, it is just one channel. And you definitely don't need the gamified bullshit like total stars on your profile.
The spam problem was caused by the gamification. It probably would occur with any platform.
> Less people will find your project
That is false. Firstly, even if your project is not hosted on github, clones of it will appear on github anyway.
Secondly, planting yourself in the middle of a vast ocean of garbage is not a good strategy for being found. You might be thinking of the Github of twelve years ago.
> Maybe that's a worthwhile trade-off, but it's very different from "all will be better without Github"
Making up quotes is not cool; those aren't my words, and that's not my position, so I'm not going to be gulled into defending it or kept from calling attention to what amounts to a sleight of hand here, even if it wasn't intentional.
(And this really chafes, because after I wrote what I meant, I even revised it to pre-empt[1] getting sucked into a discussion where someone responds to the wrong reading—specifically trying to avoid things like this. But when people don't even respect the constraint of sticking to others' actual words and instead conjure up other words that make for a more convenient world[2] to operate in, then there's almost nothing that can be done.)
> This sounds like "Without GitHub you will get less spam"
Well, it shouldn't; that's reductive.
If the bad stuff that arises from GitHub, its culture, and its practices were proportionate to its size, that would be one thing. (But also not itself a good reason not to consider ditching it—just like it's not obviously true that it would be a good idea to use Windows because the risk of malware is rational given its size as a target.) What's bad about GitHub, though, might in fact be disproportionate to its size—and in some cases, especially with respect to the practices that get promoted in that world, are things that are bad irrespective of GitHub's size.
1. https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.htm...
2. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Least_convenient_possible_wo...
I have no skin in this game, but I find that "all will be better without Github" is a reasonable short approximation of your "Ditch the 'Hub, its userbase, and what is considered "best practice" there, and then many of these problems get dialed back a lot.".
You have explained your criticism of GitHub, and I agree that it should have done things differently from the beginning. Still, your proposed solution for users is literally to "Ditch the 'Hub", promising that "many of these problems get dialed back a lot". It's really not a far stretch to "all will be better without Github".
> Still, your proposed solution for users is literally to "Ditch the 'Hub", promising that "many of these problems get dialed back a lot".
This is accurate. Let's let that be the place we stay.
> I find that "all will be better without Github" is a reasonable short approximation [...]
Well I don't, and it's my position, isn't it? It's not accurate. I don't think that "all will be better without GitHub"—and what's more is that I practice the "without GitHub" part; I have the firsthand experience to be able to say it's not true, so I wouldn't try to tell anyone that it is—and I didn't. I'm responsible for my own ideas, not ones imagined upon me.
Moreover, if I argue that A and B are not equivalent and that I prefer deal with A in its original form and not B, and you argue that they are equivalent, it's not rational for either party to insist that we deal with B in place of A. So let's not.