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Comment by EsperHugh | Hacker News Reader

>github is not a social website

you may not like it, but Github has always been a social website, and now more than ever, just like LinkedIn.

Hopefully in the near future, we'll see them launch "GitHub Dating". I've always wanted to filter my potential partners by their stars and choice of language.

100% needs a checkbox for tabs vs spaces..

Nonsense. GitHub is for working with git repositories. It might have some weird social feed stuff tacked on, but I've never used it in 13 years and to say it's not the main point is an understatement. OTOH social interactions is very obviously the main point of LinkedIn?

You might not have used it as such, but GitHub always aimed to be a social platform and launched as such.

Here is their landing page when they first launched: https://web.archive.org/web/20081111061111/http://github.com...

Notice how the entire page is making you believe they are building a social coding platform? That's no accident, "Social code hosting" tagline in the logo included.

I bet almost all users of the platform don't consider it a social platform and don't use it as such.

Not sure how that matters. If I build a platform explicitly for social coding, but people use it to host images, would you get mad if I continue to optimize for making it better for social coding rather than hosting images?

If you're not sure how it matters that none of the users use it as a social platform, then I'm not sure what you think a social platform is.

> explicitly for social coding

Using source control is not "social coding." You're stretching that word far past its actual meaning, in the effort to make a point.

If I go to a taco shop but order fries instead, and eventually they focus more on tacos and change the recipe for their fries, I would certainly be mad about it. If you are doing a good job for a domain, folks are going to inevitably be bothered when you do worse by that domain, for whatever reason.

Their aims from 15 years ago notwithstanding, it is not a social platform, and does not get used for social networking topics.

Yes, we know git repos get used by clusters of people. That is not the accepted meaning of "social network."

Nobody is posting the news, their kids, or joining film groups on Github.

Social simply means activity that occurs amongst a population of people.

A pull request with the requisite commentary/discussion is absolutely a social phenomenon. Even simply pressing the approve button or the star button is a social act as it is a transaction involving more than one person.

And if you’ve never encountered the toxicity commonly thought of as only belonging to “social networks” in a PR or issue, then lucky you.

Also interesting that MS owns both of those networks. Both pretty smart investments.

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