Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 594 posts

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#411

Post by StreamBright »

jolux wrote: post #399
quadrangle wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made a code-of-conduct. It pandered too strongly to the list-every-under-privileged-class attitude including explicitly rejecting the concept of "reverse discrimination" and so the reactionary folks who want to insist they aren't sexist and hate any moralizing or politics that challenge them etc. got up in arms. It was all a stupid side-show and had nothing to do with anything that matters to GitHub's basic serv…

The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.

On the other hand do you have any insight they are not losing a large sum of this money because paying customers are leaving for platforms that are not politicised?

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#412

Post by xiaoma »

wapz wrote: post #375
flukus wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But github has a monetization strategy, they're a paid service. This is more about their headcount expanding and possibly losing paying customers because they decided to get political.

I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

Hard to tell. I've heard some pretty bad things involving internal power disputes but externally it mostly looks like dealing with anti-PC trolls harshly, while hiring a few bigoteers. Nothing looks unreasonable in isolation but there is a clear left-leaning bias.

There was the bruhaha over banning someone from the whole site for using the triggering eggplant emoji: https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421...

https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#413

Post by jolux »

flukus wrote: post #406
jolux wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.

I won't claim it's solely responsible, I don't even know if it's significant at all. But I did start moving projects over to gitlab and downgraded my account. The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.

>The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.

Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread.

Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#414

Post by shadowmint »

noir_lord wrote: post #400
quadrangle wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made a code-of-conduct. It pandered too strongly to the list-every-under-privileged-class attitude including explicitly rejecting the concept of "reverse discrimination" and so the reactionary folks who want to insist they aren't sexist and hate any moralizing or politics that challenge them etc. got up in arms. It was all a stupid side-show and had nothing to do with anything that matters to GitHub's basic serv…

> Most people never noticed either way. Noticed, didn't give a shit. Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online. When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.

Totally.

A few people making a lot of noise.

Any suggestion this had a material impact on githubs business is pure speculation.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#415

Post by pawadu »

jlarocco wrote: post #282
Analemma_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't stand on their own feet, I imagine somebody would/will buy GitHub at a firesale rather than see it disappear completely. For all their missteps, they have developer mindshare that is the envy of everyone. If we're lucky it would be someone like Google or Microsoft, if we're unlucky it might be Oracle or SalesForce. Whoever it would end up being though, GitHub won't just vanish.

I agree somebody will buy them before they disappear, but I strongly disagree on the purchasers. I'll take Oracle, SalesForce, or Microsoft over Google any day of the week. The worst Oracle will do is start charging me more, but god only knows what kind of sleazy ad tracking Google will add. No thank you, I'll move everything over to BitBucket. Fortunately, I don't think Google will bother. They already shutdown Goog…

The options you named all use google analytics

They even let you add your own analytics key

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#416

Post by pvdebbe »

daveguy wrote: post #349
alistproducer2 wrote: post #340

The subtext to this (at least why this made it to the front page) is "github is lighting money on fire, can't last forever, but github is infrastructure-status now what if it disappears?" I think this anxiety is why there's a lot of work being done in the decentralized space right now. The UX-side of "web 3.0" is sorely lacking but I think it's only a matter of time before people begin to crack it. I'd love to see so…

Wait. We're on web 3.0 now? What does this version add?

Hard dependencies to JS

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#417

Post by jolux »

StreamBright wrote: post #411
jolux wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.

On the other hand do you have any insight they are not losing a large sum of this money because paying customers are leaving for platforms that are not politicised?

Any platform can and will be "politicized." Mediums that allow unbridled communication between humans are always political to a varying degree. "Politics" is really just a word for structured disagreement, it happens and is happening everywhere.

And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't.

What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#418

Post by jobvandervoort »

tscs37 wrote: post #392
mikepurvis wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I hold out too much hope here, but given GitLab's emphasis on the enterprise and self-hosting, it would be amazing if they could put some effort into making disparate GitLab installations behave like one big network (think Six Apart with trackbacks/typekey/etc way back in the day). Github's huge win is the network effect of having one account and being able to interact on thousands of issue trackers, create…

IIRC Gogs/Gitea and GitLab have plans to enable pull request federation, so you could use your own instance to make pull requests on a completely different one. I also recommend to check out Gitea (community fork of Gogs) if you haven't yet, it's a nice alternative to Gitlab for selfhosting.

Federated merge requests (pull requests) is something we've been wanting to do for a long time [0]. Maybe 2017 is the year to do it.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4013

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#419

Post by hyperbovine »

Trundle wrote: post #363
hyperbovine wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this obsession with the first derivative of value. GitHub already provides loads of value. I understand they need resources to keep the lights on, but they could do that by recouping a tiny fee from their users and most everyone would be happy.

They're not without alternatives already though. In a changing environment to stay still is to fall behind.

That's not as big an issue when there are network effects -- look at Craigslist. Plus, what killer feature is bitbucket going to add at this point to make everyone want to switch? They're practically the same product. All the major innovation happened years ago.

Re: GitHub lost $66M in nine months of 2016

#420

Post by jolux »

flukus wrote: post #407
thewhitetulip wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I read the thread thrice still didn't understand how that makes github political, especially when the company makes $ on enterprise customers. Is the opal project managed by Github?

They hired the professional victim to prosecute anyone that dares to disagree with SJW rightthink. A contributor was forced to leave the project. All over issues that had nothing to do with the project. That's an issue.

Again, do you have evidence that this is actually happening? All I see is a lot of hay made over an issue that the project itself resolved (as well it should have been) from which point it launches into conspiracy theories about what's going to happen now that Coraline is in their employ. She was hired in February, a good 10 months ago. Has anything else happened as you suggest it would to cause concern in this vein since then, or is this all just speculation?
Post reply on HN