Yeah, leaving aside other concerns about platforms, Microsoft, and the USA, I too want to stress how GitHub is problematic in GP's «some metrics are bad» sense : the social networking aspect, stars, number of projects, and, as you say, number of contributions and number of lines of code.

Yeah, that stuff is pretty ridiculous, but I think a lot of it predates Microsoft.

There's a big school of thought, that "gamifying" things, brings "engagement" (the holy grail of SV).

I'm old and cynical. It doesn't really do much for me, but it is a well-integrated hosted solution, and that's what I get from it.

well, yeah, they are themselves goodharting the metrics that vcs use. it's fake metrics all the way down