the product people is insane, it's an insane decision
Yes!?? Turns out the value is "not enough".
I never click on that and have starred no cool projects from there.
Seems like a totally reasonable product decision from my seat.
It encourages external crawling and aggregation of content hosted on their site. Seeing that their search feature already produces abysmal results, it only further obfuscates public repositories.
The same probably applied to shutting down Google Reader. But it's still brought up a decade later, because it hit the "right" group of users. These changes spend a lot of the goodwill built by Github.