The difference is that LinkedIn was creepy before Microsoft bought it and it has nothing to do with Ads. LinkedIn is and always has been creepy and sleezy because it's a relationship networking tool and not a platform for work or collaboration. Whenever I used LinkedIn, it always gave me the same feeling I get when talking to a Salesman or Recruiter, that I'm being exploited and they're trying to convince me that it's somehow to my benefit to work with them or go along with what they say.

GitHub is creepy. Centralizing a decentralized software system then censoring projects isn't all rainbows and unicorns.

> censoring projects

Have they ever done that? I wasn’t aware of any such thing.

> GitHub bans repository over use of the word "retard"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118

https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter/commit/c1ac0baa...

Well, it is still decentralized. The author still has a copy of the repo and can always upload to other servers.

The question was about censorship, not dedecentralization. That the author still has a copy is irrelevant.

Here more about GitHub suffering from state-censorship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub

GitHub also censors any content that they deem stolen (such as the NSA Malware / EquationGroup releases) and content that they deem containing PII-data (such as the public LinkedIn crawl of people stating they work for ICE).

So you're upset because GitHub won't assume liability for your potentially illegal activity? Why not ask the EFF to setup a free service to host these sorts of files? They seem like the most qualified Org to do it.

I am not upset, I am neutral. I am merely answering a question with as much objectivity as possible: Providing examples of GitHub censoring projects to someone unaware of this, without adding my own views on this. It was quite curious seeing the, at least, 3 downvotes the initial link received.

GitHub makes judgment calls on what to censor: They deem a project name offensive, they deem some piece of code stolen (unless the NSA admitted to them it was legit, they had no confirmation), they deem publicly available data crawled from the web PII or harassment instigation.

Unless you do not classify these examples as censorship, it is what it is.

I don't think anyone is questioning that it is platform censorship which any private business has a right to do in order to protect it's business.

The objection stems from the fact that censorship is always a dominant issue raised in discussions about platforms for sharing and, while it's important to keep it in mind if you're the type of person who might share controversial or objectionable content, that is type of sharing is the minority.

If we were in an oppressive regime like China where state mandated censorship is the norm, then it would be a much more pressing concern. But for most of us, we're not under an oppressive regime and decrying the platform for censorship is on par with complaining that reddit won't let you dox people or flicker banned you for posting kiddieporn.

thats the nature of censorship, get rid of somthing before anyone is made aware of it.

The "decentralized" nature of Git that GitHub interferes with is within an individual project. Instead of all the developers having their own copies of the repo and sharing things around between each other (i.e. the project is decentralized), there's a central GitHub repo for a project that is considered canonical and everyone interacts with that. This doesn't give GitHub any power to censor projects — Git itself is no more centralized than it ever was. You can use Git without GitHub and it works just as well as ever.

I'm not so sure. LinkedIn was always quite spammy.

Sourceforge did some absolutely egregious things, including bundling adware with windows binaries.

Maybe the people at Microsoft don't know it, but one of the reasons GitHub has such a huge market share is because it hasn't done any of those things.

Sure, MS could have bought it to use its reputation as capital and try and maximise income at all costs. It seems that would be somewhat counterproductive, given the long process Microsoft has gone through to start fixing its image with developers.

Sourceforge got revived from its ashes though. It's a nice site nowdays.

I just opened up a project on there to see what you meant. I immediately got hit with 7 different ads on different parts of the page. It still feels pretty scummy to me. I understand the need for ads but 7? It seems excessive.

Bundled adware were removed from projects and there is no multiple confusing download buttons or other dark patterns. You don't have to look out for scams all the time or distrust downloads from the site. See https://sourceforge.net/blog/introducing-the-new-sourceforge...

You won't see ads on GitHub.

If windows, a software for which I pay money when I buy a laptop can have ads, I am pretty sure at some point Github will also have ads. Its very very tempting to leave free money on the table. Only time will tell (Even though you are the CEO).

Except it ain't free money. Especially when you have viable alternatives like BitBucket and GitLab that are able to operate just fine without ads (well, at least without ads for non-Atlassian products in the former case), the cost is people jumping ship, and git makes that easy to do.

Microsoft would only stand to gain (short or long term) if it's been engaging in its traditional EEE strategy this whole time and is ready to pull the trigger on that final E. Even if that's the case, I can't see any real benefit; it'd just be a middle finger to developers.

Y'know I wonder if there was some legal way to guarantee this promise? ToS's are often "we can change whenever we want, we make no promises".

But can you say Microsoft will not use private GitHub data to sell or run targetted ads outside of GitHub?

In-your-face ads does not even begin to describe how intrusive LinkedIn is and was years before being bought by Microsoft.