[bluefox]

You are saying "scary", but I think "alarming" is more appropriate.

It's an alarm that should be buzzing through sleepy programmer skulls. It should alert them to the fact that it's no longer the small company that respected programmers, where you felt your account was yours, and your repositories were yours.

The rules have changed with that acquisition, and Microsoft exploited the good reputation of that small company and the inertia of its users. Step by step, the site became more "social", and started suffering from the usual issues. Step by step, we see the same bigco policies that treat users as worker ants. When an ant starts making up a mind of its own, queen ant sends some soldier ants to cannibalize it.

Now, I realize here on HN the tired old rants of Moxie are considered gold. But if you want to skip being treated like an ant, run your own server, maybe support upcoming federation protocols to kill this centralization and bring down the nest, or at least migrate to some place that respects its users in the meantime.

[slavik81]

GitHub has always been about "social coding". This is a quote on their homepage on May 2008 (three months after GitHub was founded):

> What’s amazing about Github is how it really brings the social aspect into play. Chris and Tom are showing us all visually how git development is supposed to work. I know I personally had some bing moments once I started pulling in commits from external git repos.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080514210148/http://github.com...

[bluefox]

Yeah, I was a GitHub user in 2008. Though it obviously had a social aspect, it wasn't considered a "social network" type of site. Its ongoing transformation into one is a result of the acquisition by Microsoft.

[wott]

I have always considered it a social network, 'the social network for young programmers' as I called it, which turned free software into social networking (portfolio for first employment(s), etc.), and that's why I always refused to create an account over there as I don't want to push those things even further, and got gradually more appalled as I watched projects following the trend and moving there one after the other, making themselves more and more dependent of the tools conveniently provided by that silo, and cutting other ways to interact with them. Long before Microsoft entered the picture.

[CRConrad]

Like young people in general don't know what a file is any more, young developers don't know what git is: they think GitHub is git.

[CRConrad]

> GitHub has always been about "social coding".

Yeah, you're right: they weren't "one of the good guys" even before the acquisition. Microsoft were only the biggest and most well-known proponent, but never a monopolist of EEE.