hub /həb/
noun
1.
the central part of a wheel, rotating on or with the axle, and from which the spokes radiate.
Look at the article:
> We find that the unannounced removal of daily activity streak counters from the user interface (from user profile pages) was followed by significant changes in behavior.
> Long-running streaks of activity were abandoned and became less common.
> Weekend activity decreased and days in which developers made a single contribution became less common.
> Focusing on a set of software developers that were publicly pursuing a goal to make contributions for 100 days in a row, we find that some of these developers abandon this quest following the removal of the public streak counter.
Look at this bullshit. People doing work just to maintain their streaks. People making literally one contribution just to keep it up. That's fucked up and needs to be fixed. Nobody deserves this operant conditioning stuff.
The name is irrelevant. The vast majority use it for hosting. What someone wants or doesn't want has already been decided in the market.
Git is absolutely trivial to use in a fully decentralized fashion. GitHub and GitLabs success shows how much people don't want to run their own servers.
> "social coding"
Social coding is not Github's primary function and it's hasn't been promoted in earnest, this way because it's secondary at best. Ostensibly, it's hosted git. That's the naming, the function, and most developers think of it as such. The vast majority of users are either corporate developers who work for some company and can't care less about the "social" aspects of it or insular developers with projects that never see the light of day.
Notably, this paper only sourced public repositories, where many people use it as an element of their work portfolio. This doesn't speak to "all of github".