I was going to reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17281866, but Arc won't let me. I don't want to throw my reply out (which I typed before the comment in question became unanswerable), so I'll quote the context here, and then follow with what I was going to comment with.

>>> jimrandomh (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17281278)

>>> It's actually worse than that. As an open-source developer deciding where to host a project, I not only need to trust the host, I also need to expect users to also trust the host. If I expect 10% of potential users to bounce when they see that it's hosted on Sourceforge, well, hosting is enough of a commodity that I have no reason to give up on that 10%.

>> exikyut

>> I think you've unpacked why SF is - sadly - not quite dead, but not quite as alive as it used to be.

> loganabbott [flagged] [dead]

> I could probably say the same thing about you though

---

Wh-- uhh, no. To answer your statement, I've historically been in somewhat bad shape with various mental/other health issues that I've only begun to understand and properly remedy very recently. So, I'm the most alive I've ever been (and still improving).

Okay, maybe responding that way was a bit tangential. I'm honestly not sure how to interpret your comment though. (For what it's worth, I wasn't personally uploading anything to SF when it was in its heyday, kind of because I wasn't. I did know about and download stuff though, like other developers and power/ordinary users.)

I began mentally drafting a reply to your other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17282035 before noticing this one. I think this is the more appropriate comment for me to reply to {I said this before the comment died}, and I'll fold in the sentiment I was going to say to the other here.

Reading the other comment, I understand your somewhat frustration. Here's my perspective as a would-be developer and general intermediate-advanced user (and particularly as a frequent lurker of HN): all I've (and presumably we've) got to work with are the dead-chewing-gum armchair opinions and cargo cult views and reiterations about "yeah someone bought it (nothing seems to have happened since then though)". That's literally the only noise being made around here in terms of "news" or "updates" we get about SF. It's as bad as the lowest-quality commentating on reddit (and I consider that very bad, considering the bent towards intellectualization and healthy debate on here).

IMO, you need to work on advertising your [new] position. It will probably be an uphill (even vertical?) slog for longer than likely comfortable (maybe even financially so - ie, it sounds like some decent, long-term social media management chops may be needed).

That's a bit of a broad statement, so let me add some more data to characterize what I mean.

The open source landscape's changed a lot. Or, in less words, "everyone switched to GitHub"; or at least "all" the developers did - but that means so did all the users wanting first-hand software updates from the devs who switched. Of course only power users (or those following scripts) likely actually clone; it'd be interesting to see what projects[' users] primarily use Releases or other mechanisms to get their updates. In any case GH is the core of a lot of operations nowadays (by "operations" I mean different projects).

I am genuinely interested to learn more about the million users a day you say visit SF. Let me clarify what I mean by "interested".

Firstly, to be frank, I'm kind of amazed that a million people a day visit SourceForge and want proof :) because that's truly impressive. I don't disbelieve you, note; I just kind of want to do a trust-but-verify.

Next, from my own perspective, when I think of GitHub I see it as something most other developers either understand or, at the very least, vaguely know about as "the scary place where you have to use the commandline to make it work" (hopefully this subgroup doesn't get stuck for too long :) ). Generally in terms of publishing libraries and small programs GH removes about 98% of friction, for two reasons. First it uses Git, which (once you at least learn the clone command) Just Works™ with GitHub because GitHub URLs can be pasted straight to Git, https:// and all, and it figures it out. Secondly everyone has at least a vague understanding of Git and GitHub and there are a billion (approximately) videos and websites so people can easily find 100 things all in their preferred presentational style to get started with.

So from a social networking standpoint GitHub provides a level of predictability; I as a publisher can partially know what to expect in advance in terms of userbase and social network. Okay, so you say SourceForge has a bunch of people on board; as a developer, or an artist, or $abstract_computer_person_with_arbitrary_agenda, what can I expect in terms of connections and demographic from SourceForge? The platform itself is a gateway and an enabler; I'm frankly less interested in SF itself (that it supports SVN, Git, etc; or that it supports wikis, etc) than who it can connect me with, and what I can expect of them.

I can opine/surmise a tiny tiny fraction of the kind of thing I'm getting at when I download random obscure computer-science related things and an eyebrow goes up when I see "18 downloads/week" and I think "...how?! lol" (I know the number is valid because my download bumps it up :P). It would be pretty cool for GitHub to publicize the same kinds of statistics, but it's (sadly) probably easier to single out a rogue browser than a Git client.

It would be cool to leverage those statistics to connect obscure niche interest groups - the current approach of "insert email here [_______] (we Most Definitely© Won't® send you things you won't be interested in™)" doesn't really scale to hundreds of interests per user, to be honest.

So, that's the demographic question. Here's something potentially trickier.

I can't say I'm a fan of SF's interface. My main problem is that it is very very heavy. On the 12-year old machine I'm using right now it takes a lot longer to load a SF page than a GH page. This isn't because of the ads, which I'll honestly say I have nuked via /etc/hosts, primarily as a sanity measure (if ads kill browsing on modern machines, try browsing with ads enabled on a single-core 32-bit Pentium M that takes 45sec to open a new tab :D)... it's just that the pages are really heavy. Besides system load (which isn't really a legitimate statistic, I'll accept that), I definitely far prefer GitHub's much more to-the-point approach. It seems faster and more fluid.

There is one specific area of the UI that bothers me a lot: the "recommended downloads", which seem to be the same for me, every time I visit, and include a link to... Apache OpenOffice. Um. This is... dishonest? Everyone knows LibreOffice is where the development is at.

I realize this last point be a hard one to answer. I'll offer two things. Firstly, I understand that GitHub was developed as a green-field from-scratch platform, it got to start again, and it started with a somewhat different, leaner approach: just offering a Git UI, with nothing else on the webpage. So there's that. Secondly, I understand that what you bought had a lot of, er, state in the air that needed to be maintained to keep the ecosystem running smoothly (and happily).

With the above said, I don't know what arrangements are in place behind the scenes, but I do think recommending OpenOffice is a tiny bit much from where I stand.

To sum up, I want to understand what I can get out of SF, I think it would be nice to clean the pages up (the redesign is nice, but I feel it removed a lot of info while retaining the "weight" (imposingness?) of the old design), it would be nice to understand some of the machninations behind SourceForge today, and it would be cool to better connect users and developers with each other. If a million people a day are visiting, learning about that hive of activity will attract me to the platform.

All of this doesn't need a direct reply; I would be very happy to see a highly-upvoted blog post or similar thing posted to HN sometime :)

(Obviously I can't express interest in the behind-the-scenes aspects of SF I don't know about. An in-depth exposé on how SF is currently run would probably be very interesting to some people here.)