Presumably, they prefer to learn by talking to people rather than browsing repos.
The .NET community was, until recently, decidedly not-open-source, so the learning workflow of "open the repo, read the readme, browse the code" might be a new thing for them.
Losen up, linking to something may be subjective. If it's not correct, HN mods can change the URL ;)
Perhaps it's not a bad idea for widening the community ( linking to gitter). I'm actually wondering if they ever used jabber, a not-well-known community for chatting about .net
He's not dodging the question at all, he answered it directly. He obviously likes gitter and chatting with others.