GitHub doesn’t have ads and makes its money off of enterprise subscriptions (and Copilot), so I don’t think “engagement” is a very important metric for them.

To the company, no. But to people trying to get a promotion/bigger budgets by proving the features they work on are getting a lot of usage, plausible.

> To the company, no.

Why not? Companies love to boast about MAUs and similar metrics (even if completely bogus), it has good effect on stock prices.

Those are very general stats. They won't drop just because they disincentivize abuse of issues or pull requests.

I suspect it's more to do with issue management isn't their core product so doesn't get the same attention an issue management system would give it.

Wait if it's not their core product, what is? GitHub is, at its core, a file/history browser + issue management system + merge request system built around Git. There's not that much to it other than issue management.

It's core product is git hosting, you use it to host your git repositories. You use features such as Pull Requests to power how you merge within your git repositories. If the issue system isn't working it's not a big deal, but if we can't use git it's a massive deal. It's all in the name GIThub

Most companies don't use GitHub's issue management system they use issue management tools such as JIRA, Trello, etc. Issue management, project management, CI/Actions, wiki, discussions, etc are all nice to haves and are probably more aimed at the open source projects that are used as a marketing tool.

Most open source projects (you know, the thing GitHub claims to exist for) do pretty much exclusively use GitHub issues for issue tracking though. GitHub makes it pretty difficult to be on GitHub and not accept GitHub issues.

But open source projects are not what keeps GitHub in business that is just marketing. Companies paying for git hosting is.

You can easily disable issues.