[therealrootuser]

I use GitHub (and GitLab) because it is a convenient way of backing up random coding projects I have sitting around, not because I have any expectation it will be useful to someone. It is just versioned file storage at the end of the day.

I've only dabbled in their CI platforms, and as far as I recall, no one has ever made comments on any of my projects. I would be surprised if most people actually think that if they put something on GitHub that a task force of hundreds of dedicated open source volunteers will suddenly descend on the project and start contributing.

[kreetx]

The benefit of people throwing their code up on github is that it now can also be searched through. So if there is a configuration variable or a function you are wondering about - you can now find what others are doing. (And https://grep.app/ has a fast UI for this)

[pmoriarty]

Can I just rant about how atrociously terrible and primitive GitHub's search features are?

It's quite common for me to search for something and get tens of thousands of identical results which GitHub forces me to scroll through one page at a time.

It would be so much better if GitHub just showed me one single result for all those thousand which are exactly the same, and let me expand that result if I wanted to see one of the other identical matches.

Also helpful would be a way to filter out filenames (or, even better patterns.. better still regexes) which I don't want.

That would make their search results actually useful.

As it is, unless you're searching for something exceptionally rare, they're next to useless.

[mattalbie]

Came here to say this. I mean, just trying to figure out how to use a particular Emacs function, I can search GitHub for that function and find hundreds of examples of people using it. So incredibly useful.