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joriswtoday at 9:15 AM9 repliesview on HN

Sentiment for/against GitHub aside...

"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.

This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".

> developers are ditching

Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there


Replies

stymaartoday at 10:33 AM

> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there

The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.

Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.

Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.

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usrbinbashtoday at 11:31 AM

> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos

I'm pretty sure, shortly after the motorized vehicle was made commercialy available, there were only a "handful of remotely meaningful" people and companies who stopped using horses.

Do tell: How many horses are around on todays streets?

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pjc50today at 9:35 AM

You can just insert the word "some" as required.

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juanibiapinatoday at 10:16 AM

Agreed. But if I comment on this, I'm promoting the article. What do I do?

karel-3dtoday at 10:48 AM

howtogeek is low-effort content mill, it's just upvoted here because of the headline, there is 0 actual effort in the article

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latexrtoday at 11:32 AM

A better alternative might be along the lines of “why developers ditch GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives”. That way it doesn’t commit to a trend or exaggerate the situation in your mind, instead making it clear it’s a report on “those X who do Y do it for these reasons”.

p-e-wtoday at 10:05 AM

I’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.

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close04today at 9:44 AM

> a handful of remotely meaningful repos

If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).

They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.

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illliilllltoday at 9:30 AM

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