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by armchairhacker 1415 days ago
Slippery slope. First it's cookies for marketing, then it's selling your data, then it's "sponsored" repositories showing up in search. Next thing you know, recruiters are cold-calling you with your private email address and you can't even get to your own README without scrolling past banner ads and autoplay videos. After all, that's pretty much how the rest of the web works.

Do I really think that's going to happen? No. If GitHub were to introduce ads or invasive marketing everyone would move to GitLab in a second. A decent amount of people are already moving to GitLab and GitHub hasn't even done anything! Things like marketing cookies for analytics on marketing pages are genuinely not an issue.

But people take it as a sign, because of all the shit that goes on the rest of the web, and how GitHub explicitly said they were not going to do this. The fact they made a "commitment" not to do this is particularly important because it shows that GitHub's promises don't mean anything.

But migrating your repo is easy. Personally I'm going to wait until things actually get bad before moving.

2 comments

> Next thing you know, recruiters are cold-calling you with your private email address

This already happens.

I see. I didn’t know that they previously committed to explicitly not doing this. Sounds like they kind of shot them selves in the foot.