Is the internet becoming too gitty?
There are few places in this world that are more infuriating to visit than GitHub. I’d rather do anything than spend time on GitHub. I’d rather get my teeth drilled while doing my taxes on jury duty in Colonial Williamsburg than visit GitHub.
But I’m not a software developer.
Although, venturing back into the blogging world has brought me closer to the developer side of the web than ever—and it’s made me realize that the modern internet is becoming increasingly more gitty.
From what I understand—which is almost nothing—GitHub is supposed to eliminate gatekeepers and promote open-source technology to foster a more democratized internet. And they achieve this goal through a completely unintuitive platform that is held together by nothing but menus inside of menus and impenetrable terminology.
You don’t just have to know a coding language to use GitHub, you have to know the Language of Coding. “We’re developers: we don’t copy files, we fork them. Idiot.” It’s not inside baseball, it’s inside codebase.
And even if you manage to decipher all of this proprietary language, you’ll still need a chatbot and a prayer to navigate the baffling array of buttons, options, settings, and menus. The whole experience ends up being less about coding than it is about codebreaking.
I have this friend who is fluent in Gitalian. He sent me a 23 minute video aimed at explaining GitHub to n00bs like me. I didn’t make it 3 minutes before getting completely. And the video didn’t even lose me gradually; it lost me instantly—right at the 2:18 mark.
And that’s actually fine. Because I’m just a civilian. If I elect to visit GitHub, I know what I’m in for. But if a supposedly “user-friendly” service or software sends me to GitHub? That’s annoying.
GitHub is actually not the problem here. I don’t begrudge developers their tools. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good use for GitHub—and one day a developer may be able to articulate it to me in English. This is about developers sending users to the the big leagues who should still be playing down in Altoona. (That’s inside baseball.)
Maybe I just took a wrong turn. But it feels like there’s this creeping expectation that everyday internet users need to learn dev tools and terminology just to function online. But don’t take my word for it. Just ask @forkmaster.repoman@mastodon.fart.
You know, maybe one day I’ll learn how to code. And maybe one day I’ll truly understand this world. Maybe. Maybe if I just… commit.
Until then, I promise to keep an open mind about GitHub. And since we’re all just making up words out of thin air, here’s another one you can use the next time you feel something drifting into developers-only territory: gitty.
📘 gitty
adjective | git·ty | /ˈɡɪt-i/
Definition
Any technological process that appears simple at first but unexpectedly requires advanced technical knowledge, often associated with software developers (e.g., using GitHub), and routinely plunges the average user into a state of confusion, frustration, and despair. Antonym: giddy.
Example Sentences
“I came here looking for a new blog theme. I left looking up how to ‘fork’ a ‘repo.’ It was a really gitty situation.”
“I’ve never met Hugo or JSON, but they sound pretty gitty.”
“Launch Terminal and run Homebrew? This is a total piece of git.”