Microsoft using GitHub to promote their products

4 points by kroggen 5y ago ↗ HN

It is not the first time that I click on GitHub's Explore to see the trending repos and... Azure appears two times there with just 2 new stars on the day!

When we want to see the trading repositories we don't want ads, but this is a type of ad what we are getting there. And annoying as any unexpected one, hidden as an organic result.

6 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 19.1 ms ] thread

alpb 5y ago ↗

Can you please write a detailed analysis on this and perhaps publish on Medium? Right now you have 1-2 data points without screenshots. It's hard to understand what you’re talking about. My bet is Explore page is buggy as hell and there's no intentional promotion here.

TAForObvReasons 5y ago ↗

https://github.com/trending

Currently #1 is Azure / azure-sdk-for-js and on the right side it says " 2 stars today"

Why that is currently trending is anyone's guess, but I would expect that the recent outage led to an influx of traffic compared to what it would normally see. The star count wouldn't necessarily reflect that

ehutch79 5y ago ↗

I don't see azure anywhere in the list.

https://github.com/explore

darrenkopp 5y ago ↗

OP mentions the trending repos so I believe they are looking here: https://github.com/trending

darrenkopp 5y ago ↗

Is the algorithm that manages the ranking here well known? I'd suspect that it isn't just based on stars.

[deleted] 5y ago ↗

(comment deleted)