Comment by lynndotpy
21 hours ago
It's certainly not the right platform. It'd be one thing if they had any official communication on the matter anywhere else. Maybe they're ashamed and are trying to limit the visibility while only technically issuing an announcement.
They announced this exclusively on X.com, which ranks barely above Pinterest in terms of usage. That's below Reddit, Snapchat, WeChat, and Instagram, and requires a user account to view profiles and posts. And that's ignoring all the reasons X is a divisive platform with an extreme political bent.
GitHub chose not to announce this on any other social media either (BlueSky, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Mastodon, as of this posting, and with no emails sent on the matter.)
Who the heck follows Github on Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, WeChat?
Wherever they posted, there’s at this time two articles on the Hacker News front page. Sounds like they have reached their audience.
It's to point out how comparatively small X is. It's in the same ballpark as Pinterest and Quora.
Github decided not to use email (which every Github customer has), their sites, or their otherwise active BlueSky.
It's not small in the tech community though. Users are not distributed evenly among platforms. Others may have more users but not as many tech users.
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> Maybe they're ashamed and are trying to limit the visibility while only technically issuing an announcement.
I think that's panic mode from some decision maker (i.e. head of marketing or head of security).
It’s not like they have a choice as a public company. I wonder if this low visibility post meets SEC requirements though.
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I’m not on X, so it’s good to know I don’t matter in tech. I always suspected. Since I’m a paying GitHub customer, though, I should probably matter to them. The right forum for GitHub to post this is with their status page, their blog, their website, or an email to all their customers. Using any sort of social media for this kind of thing is either incredibly sloppy or very intentionally quiet. Given that my tiny employer has a better incident communication plan than this, my guess is this an attempt to downplay things.
> Saying things doesn't make them true, man. Everyone in tech who matters is on X.
The cognitive dissonance is insane here. Indeed, saying things doesn't make them true. Even for you. Facts don't care about your feelings.
Company news really should be posted on a company website first, other platforms secondly in my opinion.
Maybe we need a cultural shift then, because if one needs to use a platform like X, nowadays owned and operated by fascists, then there's something deeply wrong with the tech world. It'd probably take a lot of effort to do so, but it'd be absolutely worth it.
Besides, even if that wasn't a consideration, only posting the announcement to X is just crazy. As others have said, you'd expect for GitHub to make the announcement on their official website. Any paying client would then just follow that for their announcements.
I just spent a few minutes trying to think of a better place, I can't think of one, there is no professional social network, and linkedin doesn't qualify.
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