alt Hacker NewsIt's good you can isolate yourself from it. But there's plenty of cases.
Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues. Or being feed AI slop to review endlessly. Or recruiters filtering resumes via Github activity graphs or repository stars.
And obviously the side shady market of all of the above (e.g. buying/selling popularity).
Like the parent comment, I can't wait for social media to be completely obliterated from code repositories.
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None of this is specific to GitHub. The exact same problems will sometimes happen any time users and developers communicate, which is a basic requirement of developing useful software. I doubt GitHub issues are worse than mailing lists or any other mechanism.
Demanding work isn't really an issue. Anyone can do that, and also reject the work. Dishonest actors on the other hand would take money for someone else's work.
> Open source maintainers being harassed or being demanded work through Github's issues
This isn't "psyops". Sure, it's a bad side of social interactions, but when you interact with other people, there's always some of this - in person as well as online.
The lead-off argument here seems more like "interacting with society can be bad".
I have no argument that selling popularity is bad and filtering by stars is stupid, but I don't blame Github for any of that.
You could equally well assign the success of certain coders to YouTube because they came to attention by showing off their work in livestreams. Which I do not. They found a way to advertise their own success, but it's theirs.