Slippery slope. First it's cookies for marketing, then it's selling your data, then it's "sponsored" repositories showing up in search. Next thing you know, recruiters are cold-calling you with your private email address and you can't even get to your own README without scrolling past banner ads and autoplay videos. After all, that's pretty much how the rest of the web works.

Do I really think that's going to happen? No. If GitHub were to introduce ads or invasive marketing everyone would move to GitLab in a second. A decent amount of people are already moving to GitLab and GitHub hasn't even done anything! Things like marketing cookies for analytics on marketing pages are genuinely not an issue.

But people take it as a sign, because of all the shit that goes on the rest of the web, and how GitHub explicitly said they were not going to do this. The fact they made a "commitment" not to do this is particularly important because it shows that GitHub's promises don't mean anything.

But migrating your repo is easy. Personally I'm going to wait until things actually get bad before moving.

GitHub made a huge fuss in a blog post about their compliance with the ePrivacy directive not more than 2 years ago. I personally found their approach and interpretation interesting and unique, so this change seems noteworthy for that reason alone

> marketing cookies

Do you think ads have gotten better or worse over time?

I think it's unequivocally worse now than it was then. There's a point where you're fed up with seeing the same ads for products you don't want or need.

These are used to track around a person.

Imagine if a store put a tiny sticker on anyone who stopped by to look at their products. Not this person is identifiable as "stopped to look at product X" whenever they visit other stores from the same owner.

Personally, it just creeps me out, even though it's basically the norm online.

I left a thumbs-up reaction on the GitHub post. The cookie outrage is completely absurd.