They are also paying people to Tweet. That's the only way for people to get a discount.

Source?

It's right in their blog post, if you read it https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/03/movingtogitlab/

They're not paying you to move, they're offering a discount... Semantics aside, this is a pretty common thing for a competitor to do when something negative comes out about their competition (Either giving out blanket discounts regardless of social media or having you verify a tweet some how)

I understand the value of guerrilla marketing, but at the same time it makes them seem less credible.

Imagine if they offered a 75% discount for defending them or praising them on Hacker News! That would make any comment in support of GitLab suspect.

I think many of the #movingtogitlab tweets were sent before we even offered a discount.

They said more then 1000 were tweeted before they make the blog post. Now they have 2000 tweets.

I bet most of those newer 1000 #movingtogitlab has absolutely nothing to do with the discount.

Yeah but this type of advertising is really common on Twitter and not on HN.

Sounds like quite an overreaction to the MS purchase of GitHub. Good for GitLab, though, they certainly deserve the extra traffic.

I think it's likely that there are fair number of people who were already thinking "I should probably move to GitLab one day", and have taken the recent announcement as a reason to actually get round to it (rather than being directly motivated by disgust for Microsoft or similar).

I fall into this camp. I'm not particularly bothered by Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, but I've been eyeing GitLab for awhile now.

This just gave me an excuse to pull the trigger.

It's not an overreaction. MS sucks, they ruin everything they touch. Move to gitlab with literally one button, move on with your life like nothing happened. What's not to like?

What’s not to like? Moving to GitLab. I actually like Github. It works and works well. Change for change sake is a bad motivation for such a critical part of software development.

If MS “ruins” Github, then I could move then right? Because it’s so easy? Right now, Github isn’t ruined, so what is so compelling about moving now? I am failing to see the emergency. What happens if GitLab is bought by someone else we don’t like? Do we move again? It’s tiring to keep up with all of the things about which we should be outraged. I just want a rock solid product that works. GitHub does that, so what is so compelling about moving to GitLab?

We all liked github. It's not github anymore. Let's pretend it's call MS Hub and now tell me you still like it. If you do, that's fine.

By moving now you're doing a number of things. First, you're telling your contributors and users that you don't like having access to your software controlled by MS. Second, you're supporting their competitor now when they need you, rather than when you need them. Github's competitors may not be around in 5-10 years when you will finally need them, unless they are supported now. Thirdly, it tells MS that you will move if they meddle again, if everyone jumps ship for gitlab et al. then they are much less likely to buy gitlab down the road.

What do you mean 'meddle'? GitHub was looking to sell. Pretty badly by the numbers, considering how much money they were burning. GitLab has the issue of slowness, as their free service just isn't as good, because they can't afford to just burn VC money. That's why GitHub was good.

Exactly what meddle means. If the developer community jumps ship as soon as MS acquires a developer tool, then MS will stop buying (and later ruining) developer tools.