Just because HN is a fun free zone, some evidently believe the rest of the world has to be also. The only way I can understand some of the reactions in this thread is that many are holding a belief the only reason to use Github is your anonymous desk job. Like the question of does the "YOLO" achievement apply to your automated CI pipeline is itself giving away private information by implication.
I'm over here with 80% of my commit history just being recipe markdown.
It feels like the kind of thing that would be a side project. I've never worked at GitHub or MS and have no inside info on this, but I worked at Google years ago and any similar launch from them during (or before) my time there could easily have been a 20% project. Badges on Google's internal company directory proliferated and were widely enjoyed.
It’s a coding social network; these features keep people happy with the GitHub brand and they increase the amount of features any potential competitor must implement if they want to be competitive against GH.