You can now set your status on GitHub

All sarcasm aside, this feature is absolutely the wrong direction. Github may have some things in common with social networks, but it operates on a longer-term scale. It&#x27;s the difference between a book and a paragraph. People who care about this sort of daily minutia can find it plentifully on Twitter and Facebook. Github is great for finding out what people <i>have been up to</i>, without caring about <i>what they&#x27;re doing this second</i>, and that&#x27;s what was great about it.

Now I just need a Winamp plugin that changes my status to tell everyone what song I&#x27;m currently listening to, and I&#x27;ll feel like I&#x27;m back in the 90s. :)

I&#x27;m surprised everyone here missed the point by so much. This isn&#x27;t a status update in the Facebook or Twitter sense. It&#x27;s akin to the same feature that exists on Slack and GitLab already. It&#x27;s useful to mark when you&#x27;re on holiday or otherwise not working like usual, so teammates know what to expect from you.

Coming soon:<p>GitHub now reminds you what commits you made on this day last year.

Can I not simply wire it up to all the other bloody stupid status displaying apps that pervade my life?<p>Set phone to DND. Set auto responder on email client(s). Set away status on various desktop apps. Set away on various web apps. Set away on work mobile (cell) apps. Go home.<p>Actually I don&#x27;t bother with any of that. I don&#x27;t answer the phone or any apps when I&#x27;m not &quot;there&quot; or can&#x27;t be arsed or am busy. It&#x27;s what people have done for millennia.

I see a lot of skepticism in this thread. That was my <i>initial</i> impression too, but I actually think this is a good feature now that I think about it.<p>As one example: it will be nice to know if a coworker is out of office or on extended PTO, like vacation. There are usually other &quot;profiles&quot; which display the same information in an organization, but this is a useful place for it too if you&#x27;re about to e.g. tag someone in an Issue thread.

Contrary to the opinions here, I find this to be a very useful feature for the same reason I like vacation auto-responders in email. No I couldn&#x27;t care less if you&#x27;re &quot;feeling the groove&quot; or some nonsense. But a friendly reminder to someone assigning me a review that I&#x27;m in vacation, or swamped in meetings all day would be very useful to me and my team.

It’s pretty clear that public non-chronological, timelines, posts, profile pages, and messaging will follow, along with a mess of spammy recruiters. Then, leetcode style scoring so that employers who can’t interview their way out of a paper bag know who to hire. Can’t wait to see where else they’ll stuff “sponsored content”.

Who exactly wanted this feature? Are they going to try monetizing Github with data mining? Mining commit history for personal metadata could be a (thoroughly despicable) gold mine.

GitHub Stories! Share screenshots of your app or source code and they disappear after 24 hours.

Is this &quot;feature&quot; due to the new ownership? I really don&#x27;t like the direction it&#x27;s going.<p>Soon, we might not be able to make PRs without making our friends &quot;help&quot;, and people will be making accounts for their cat.<p>When my (non-coding) teenage daughter signs up, I&#x27;m leaving!

This is a good reminder that I don&#x27;t use GitHub the way they expect me to. I don&#x27;t use their notifications. I don&#x27;t really ever look at my profile. Certainly not enough that I would go to it regularly to (even think to) update my &quot;status&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m wary of &quot;slippery slope&quot; arguments but I do NOT want a(nother) social network in my life. It&#x27;s hard to imagine how this doesn&#x27;t evolve into GitHub Chat, etc, especially with GitLab buying Gitter, etc. No thank you. Thankfully there are ever increasing (and OSS) forge platforms, it seems.<p>It is a bit amusing, however, to imagine hypothetical horrible, naggy, even more self-promotional LinkedIn&#x2F;GitHub integrations.

The ONLY context in which this makes sense is allowing users to indicate whether they are looking for work or projects to contribute to. Let&#x27;s hope all the excessive stuff (stories, timelines, etc) mentioned in these comments never come to fruition.<p>If you dislike this feature then you need to take ten seconds out of your time to submit feedback through &#x27;set status&#x27; interface.

Dear GutHub,<p>Please stop mucking about with pointless stuff like this and make your search functionality not totally suck.<p>Yours faithfully,<p>All devs everywhere.

Another place where I would need to update my status before leaving for a holiday. Ergh..!

Status: Migrating to another platform<p>This is a really useful feature for indicating that an account is vestigial despite occasional blips of activity. I hope they implement something similar with LinkedIn.

While we&#x27;re griping about GitHub changes, why did they change the reaction emoji style? They look flat and enervated where before they were vibrant and visually distinct.

Is GitHub going to be Microsoft&#x27;s way of getting their own social network? Seems better than Google&#x27;s approach I guess

Is it just me or is this like really stupid?

So, MS shipped their first feature in Github :-)<p>errrrr, actually - second (after unlimited private repos)

This is reminiscent of the UNIX &quot;finger&quot; command usage from 30 years ago.

...why?

Will they provide end to end encrypted chat next?