I think one of the reasons for github's success is that it put a lot of emphasis on the "social" part of the website. At some point using github was "cool" and I think there's been a massive network effect. It's sourceforge meets facebook.

I sometimes wonder if github's not headed to become the new reddit. At least if you look at some of the comment threads on the site it looks that way [1].

Bitbucket feels more like an old school "code hosting" service. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[1] https://github.com/visionmedia/n/issues/86

>I sometimes wonder if github's not headed to become the new reddit. At least if you look at some of the comment threads on the site it looks that way [1].

You mean the new old reddit, I presume? Where reddit was a tech-dominant site rather than a news aggregator / spam site?

As someone who mostly uses github to browse through source code, the experience in Github is much better. Their source browser is fast and the code is very readable. Now, I'm trying to see if the new bitbucket can compare but there is no Explore option on the homepage so I can't really check their source browser.

If you just want to look at the source code browser, you can look at my code, it is available at https://bitbucket.org/achshar.

This was a big one for me switching to GitHub and it is massively improved with this new update.

Well, Github's UI used to be much better, now it's comparable. I do wonder why Bitbucket insists on having "overview" as the standard page to go to when visiting a repository, making Code the default would be a better idea IMHO. Also because more people use Github, more people are likely to start using it so they can fork their favorite projects

To me it makes a lot more sense:

1) not all users are coders. For instance Sourceforge assumes that people will be most interested in downloading a binary. Not a bad assumption for its time, and still its primary usage. Github often the top google link for a project, and would be intimidating for somebody who just wants to download and use a Windows app.

2) If I'm interested in something, I take a look at the README, code, issues & wiki. So code as one of many rather than front and center is not necessarily correct. But once I've started using something, I've already got the code and am much more interested in everything else.

You can optionally change the landing page to show the code instead.

There is something to be said for sane defaults. That being said, if the target audience is not developers, then perhaps this is a sane default. I think Bitbucket is pretty good; however, I personally prefer Github as it caters to my tastes much more.

I know, it's just that the default is overview

I don't mind this now that the README is displayed above the fold, a big improvement IMO.

Traction.

But BitBucket will continue to get better, and Atlassian doesn't produce shit products.

Maybe it is just the installations I have had to use in the past (Possibly installed on slow computers or requiring too many custom fields etc) but as an issue reporter I loath JIRA as a slow and clunky issue tracker which also makes finding issues annoying.

Maybe it has wonderful features for the developer side but I haven't used that part of it so I cannot comment.

Whenever I go to report a bug on a project and find out they have JIRA I shudder.

Yeah, my first impression of JIRA was pretty bad as well..

It doesn't help that bitbucket.com links to some random blog.

Well, the fact that Bitbucket didn't support Git until half a year ago, probably explains it.

It's been a year actually, but ye I imagine that had something to do with it as well.

I'll tell you why: the 'git' in 'github' which helped to create all the hype around it. I came across lots of developers that thought github was somehow related to Linus, and for them and everyone else it was almost intuitive that github was the way to go if you wanted to use git.