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Comment by 908B64B197 | Hacker News Reader

Clickbait tittle.

It's not the content of what's merged that he's complaining about, it's the default formatting from the GitHub UI (no commit message for instance).

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How is it clickbait, it’s what he said.

> That's another of those things that I really don't want to see - github creates absolutely useless garbage merges, and you should never ever use the github interfaces to merge anything.

He said many things. Picking the one that, out of context, sounds like something irritating and controversial, is the very definition of clickbait.

The definition of clickbait, according to Wikipedia is:

> Clickbait is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading.

I don't see the title as misleading. I expected to see a kernel mailing list email from Linus where he says what he doesn't like about Github merges and that's what I got.

I actually read it in the way that Linus meant it — that the issue was with GitHub.

"The very definition of clickbait" is an interesting topic and phrasing. Have you ever noticed that "clickbait" is often shorthand for a summary that somebody disagrees with? Like, if somebody does a summary you can disagree with, even if not maliciously or objectively wrong, people will accuse them of "clickbait". That bad faith is surmised and accusing people of "baiting" is sometimes not the greatest look, but common.

Not really out of the context. And that thing was probably the whole reason why posting and starting the discussion from this specific url is interesting, as it means a lot while being just little detail.

The tittle sort of implies that "people contributing from GitHub try to merge garbage into the kernel tree".

I really didn't read that from this post.

I don't think so. If it was "Github attracts" I would agree, but "Github creates" implies that it's Github that's problematic.

Sounds more like a general technical github problem with merges.

There is a longer breakdown of the thread here:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/06/github_merges_useless...

He also says: "But it also means proper authorship and committer information etc. All of which github entirely screws up." and they link back to an earlier complaint from him about that.

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