Look carefully at the graph below. It displays the number of software developers that exists in the world. In 2024 there are 28 million software developers world wide. You can check it out for yourself here.
GitHub is a website for software developers. If you haven't heard about it, think of it like a community of software developers, where we can meet, share ideas, and publish open source projects we've been working on. Below are the total number of software developers over the years. As you can see, there are 28 million today.
For a software developer GitHub is brilliant. GitHub has tons of services for people like me. Most of these services are also free, so for me it's frikkin' brilliant. However, for people who don't code, it's about as useful as a goat in the back seat of a taxi. There's absolutely no reason what so ever why a person who is not a software developer would want to register and create an account with GitHub.
GitHub is not the only platform out there, and not all software developers are actively using a platform such as GitHub. A guesstimate would be that 50% of the world's software developers have actually created an account with GitHub. This implies that 14 million software developers have a GitHub account. However, GitHub has way more than 100 million registered users! Excuse me for my French here, but ...
If there are 14 million software developers on GitHub, who the fuck are the remaining 86 million people?
Running some rough stats on the above, implies that 80% of all GitHub users have absolutely no idea what so ever about how to create software at any capacity. Maybe some 10% of these additional accounts can be contributed to project managers and web designers, but even accommodating for such numbers implies that 7 out of 10 GitHub accounts are either fake, or literally Supabase CEO's aunt Jenny (or something).
Registering a GitHub account is not illegal, so aunt Jenny is of course more than welcome to create an account over there - There are also no laws against clicking the star icon on individual projects at GitHub. However, the problem becomes real when open source projects are evaluated according to how many stars they have.
Evaluating the quality of Open Source projects from how many Stargazers they have is the equivalent of counting your children by how many times you masturbated in the shower ...
Not only is it a useless metric, but it probably proves nothing besides that the project is fundamentally useless. Having many Stargazers on GitHub is kind of like having 500+ reviews on Amazon - It implies dick shit zilch!
Social Ponzi Schemes
GitHub has been overrun by the same psychopaths that's been selling likes on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube now for a decade. Yes, you can literally purchase GitHub accounts and likes! I don't want to link to these croks for obvious reasons, but you can probably manually figure out their URL I presume.
They're even running their site on Shopify, making their whole operation simply so absurd I'm not even sure how to comment on them ...
It's all rubbish
I can barely login to Facebook anymore without seeing some AI chatbot provider with an ad having 11,365 likes, and 467 comments. This is course "peculiar" once you realise their website is a single page site, looks like something created with Microsoft Word, for then to having been dumped and exported as HTML. Buying anything online today basically feels more like it used to feel like when you were buying snakeoil in the 1890s.
You know the product is crap, while the sales guy tells you it'll cure all ailments - And once the sheriff comes around, he jumps on his horse and rides like the wind out of town to avoid being lynched - Which is what he actually deserves
The cost to society
Let me ask you a simple question; When your daughter hits the break pedal on her car to avoid front colliding with a truck, who would you prefer having created the software that ensures the car actually slows down instead of speeding up.
- Some high functioning autistic dude with glasses the size of coca cola bottles, who can't even gather the strength to speek to girls, because he's afraid of starting to stutter, and therefore spent 40 years coding instead of playing with his dick?
- Or some dude with a nice tan, being a self-proclaimed "AI expert" on LinkedIn, looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger on all his photos, with a master degree from "The University of Bullshit and Rubbish", taught by "Professor Hoax", claiming to having worked with 501 of all Fortune 500 companies, having increased their revenue by a quadrillion, effectively solely responsible for every single good piece of tech we've got in 2024?
Exactly ...
Hey you, yes you - You that marketing psycho, who have now started infiltrating GitHub with your social scams. Just a friendly piece of advice; Maybe leave us devs alone with our little community, to avoid having satellites start dropping from the sky on to your house, resulting in your entire shit, including your life, ending up going down the toilet like the shit it's probably less worth than.
Just a friendly piece of advice ...
PwC is THAT way!
Then you can go talk to the (other) scammers of the world, such as the four big ones, to sell in your garbage services, based upon prompt engineering ChatGPT, to have it create "next level trading algos", inevitably turning everybody into riches that'll dwarf Elon Musk. However, the real code is still ours, and you'd be smart to keep it that way for a looong, looong, loooong time ...
So stay the fuck out of GitHub you psycho! Or shit might start to get real one of these days ...
Top comments (4)
There are lots of legitimate reasons to have GitHub accounts without being a developer.
Plenty of companies use GitHub for their issue tracking. Sites like ZenHub, which built a Kanban board on top of GitHub issues, make this easy. So, plenty of product people, managers, designers, and other non-developers have GitHub accounts to interact with that.
Also, lots of applications use GitHub as their only way to report issues. I created my GitHub account for the first time just to create an issue on a piece of software I used. I now use it for development as well, but that was not the original purpose. So, some people will create GitHub accounts solely to report bugs.
Also, lots of devs create new accounts when they get a job that uses GitHub. They'll have their personal GitHub account, and then a new one for each time they get a new job. I don't do that, but I've known lots of developers who do.
Yes, obviously the scams, as you've pointed out here, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons for more GitHub accounts than the number of developers who actually interact with GitHub.
Do you have 8 product people for every developer in your organisation? If you do, I suggest you "rethink" your organisational structure a bit ... ;)
But yes, there are legitimate reasons for non-devs, to some extent. I also mention that in the article ...
Still, from 14 million to 100 million. No amount of "legitimate usage" can possibly explain these numbers ...
I run my own gitea, so things like github, at best, have become an "offsite backup". So many fake accounts also means you don't get patches or contributions from people you don't already know, and your projects remain well hidden even with public repos unless you pay for stars, so it becomes rather useless for doing actual things. Even the offsite backup value has diminished somewhat since it seems they now charge for lfs storage, too. Something like codeburg or codehut may prove better for that mission in the future.
Like I said; "only 50% of coders actually have an account" - Which inflates the problem's magnitude ... :/