I didn't consider it rambling. Honestly, I feel it's a matter of taste rather than a flaw and I happen to disagree with you. I can't tell you you're right but I also can't say you're wrong. I think Bitabucket and GitHub just have different perspectives on it. GitHub and I seem to agree on the forking issue but that's a coincidence.
You did try to talk it out and give some concrete examples. I've seen big whine-athons before and your post does not qualify as that as far as I'm concerned.
I think there's the possibility that project owners may start to delete forks and create entirely new repos when the bit rot issue starts to affect the repo they originally forked from. This has it's own set of problems and I might be a little too optimistic but I happen to think there's a chance we'll take matters into our own hands on that issue. Also, I would venture to guess that abandoned projects probably weren't so great to begin with and maybe the bitrot issue won't affect them as much? Like node.js isn't likely to go away and if it or a popular project like it is abandoned the authors would probably announce it and add it to the readme and so everyone will know to start looking at forks over the original.
Anyway, the HN community obviously thought this was important or good enough to be on the front page so you must have done something right. I'm sure if you were really rambling you'd just be lost in the "new" section. I don't always agree with what gets on the front page and I didn't agree with this being there at first either but now I'm starting to come around.
He stopped working on it because he felt it was dead end to keep supporting it since vim plugins are so hacky, but the community loves his plugin. It's has a massive number of forks and patches but he hasn't touched it since 2009.
This fork has taken up most of the new development on the project and really has pushed it hard to almost a 1.0 now: https://github.com/garbas/vim-snipmate
Couldn't he have given someone permission to take over the original repo via pull requests? I was working on a ruby web app with a guy from Italy and the project is dead but I gave him access to the repo and now he can commit and push all he likes until I get the time to work on it again. Would that work for your friend? Maybe he could appoint someone to take charge of that particular repo and keep the original project alive without giving him access to the whole account.
Edit: after reading some other comments I'd also like to suggest that creating an organization would help. Once the project is abandoned by the creator someone else can take over and the creator just drops off. Of course this only works if people put it into practice but it can possibly mitigate some of the problems you have.
If people would be thinking of these things and put these solutions into practice then your criticisms would be a little less necessary. But alas, you can't always rely on people. It really comes down to a choice the way I see it. The way things are and the way you wish they were both have merit. What if GitHub just supported viewing forks differently? It would be cool to see a list of forks without a master for some and a hierarchy for others depending on how you want to filter the page. That would be cool and do a bit of good.
You did try to talk it out and give some concrete examples. I've seen big whine-athons before and your post does not qualify as that as far as I'm concerned.
I think there's the possibility that project owners may start to delete forks and create entirely new repos when the bit rot issue starts to affect the repo they originally forked from. This has it's own set of problems and I might be a little too optimistic but I happen to think there's a chance we'll take matters into our own hands on that issue. Also, I would venture to guess that abandoned projects probably weren't so great to begin with and maybe the bitrot issue won't affect them as much? Like node.js isn't likely to go away and if it or a popular project like it is abandoned the authors would probably announce it and add it to the readme and so everyone will know to start looking at forks over the original.
Anyway, the HN community obviously thought this was important or good enough to be on the front page so you must have done something right. I'm sure if you were really rambling you'd just be lost in the "new" section. I don't always agree with what gets on the front page and I didn't agree with this being there at first either but now I'm starting to come around.