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> GitHub has very little secret sauce here

GitHub's secret sauce was to use dark patterns meant to accelerate the network effect working in their favor.

Specifically:

1. Quietly kill patches as the main currency in open source

2. Redefine "pull request" to mean "the thing that happens when you click a certain button on github.com"

The end result is that collaborating with GitHub-hosted projects is made arbitrarily difficult unless you're also hosting your work on GitHub.




How did they "kill patches"?


Well, when is the last time you (or anyone else) ever submitted a patch through GitHub? Answer: never. Check out the lengths the Git project itself has to go through to work around the busted GitHub-style pull request mechanism GitHub invented.


Well, that seems to me to be because they provided an alternative to patches that works a lot better for me and the projects I contribute to, and I can't blame them for it.




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