A few days ago I came across an article by Jared Palmer titled GitHub isn’t fun anymore besides the somewhat clickbait-y title he talks about the changes that GitHub has made to the trending section and how GitHub doesn’t feel fun any more.
Sure, the trending page is a cool little gimmick section where you can see popular repositories (or used to be able too), but GitHub was never about fun or non-code features. GitHub is a tool.
Since Microsoft acquired GitHub they have introduced a lot of great new features, one of which I find extremely useful is GitHub Actions. The code review workflow is awesome, protected branches, free private repositories and more.
Why does everything have to be gamified? I am 32 and part of a generation that has short attention spans and inability to do mundane tasks. Like children, my generation seemingly needs instant gratification, karma, scoreboards, points and other features to keep us engaged.
The way that trending used to work was too easily gamed and did not necessarily mean the quality of the repos was good. I am glad they changed how it works, how it works now is properly more indicative of popularity than the previous way it worked.
If you think GitHub isn’t fun, you should try Bitbucket, it is terrible and literally the worst source management platform around. You’ll know what funless really feels like using Bitbucket where projects go to die.
I guess as a younger guy you don’t know about the pit of despair known as “Sourceforge” and the related feeling of “f&*k this job” when Google’s first 2 pages are links to it.