Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.
An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
This is true but misleading. Unfortunately.
It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users.
There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.
Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better.
Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.
In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop".
My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.
I've moved my projects over to my own personal Forgejo (when I don't care about collaborating on them) and Codeberg (when I do). I find that ecosystem vastly simpler in the common ways that matter. For instance, viewing large diffs and syntax highlighted files is unbelievably faster, about as fast as GitHub's use to be before it was "improved".
For every way I use those forges as a solo or small-group contributor, the alternatives are as good as or better than GitHub today. Some product manager could become a company legend by figuring out how and why that is, then getting someone to do something about it.
To be clear- from a user perspective, "improving GitHub" means "restoring reliability to what it was 6 years ago". There's no killer feature that makes people stop leaving, if my PRs don't lead every third day and actions never work.
I never worked on any SaaS that had such high uptime. It seems pretty good to me. In 10 years, it was always better than 99.5% uptime. That seems impressive to me for a huge, complex SaaS like GitHub.
This graph is literally designed to abuse correlation =/= causation by attaching the arbitrary label "microsoft acquires github" so that the reader will apply causation to the uptime.
Now let's overlay ontop of the uptime graph a few lines of: # of monthly active users, # of monthly commits, size of PRs, action minutes per PR (whatever demonstrates scaling)
Something tells me that the uptime issues follow scale more than they do ownership... but that's not the narrative that this chart was designed for...
Uptime: 4 9s minimum for paying customers for the core service (not necessarily the social features, but pull requests have to work).
I can see the same happening for GitHub, in fact it seems to be actively trying to move in that direction: a platform for AI agents to host code, to review code, with little to no human activity.
Just like everyone who didn’t want to deal with bots left twitter, they will soon leave GitHub for similar reasons. I’m sure there is a future for GitHub as the code hosting platform for agents but it should be no surprise then when real people like Mitchell and the rest of us jump ship.
Same may happen to GitHub. CI/CD tools and workflows can become more portable and adaptable. Independent code review tools that can use GitHub API along with a few other APIs may become popular. GitHub will become one of, not the one. I won't call it a bad outcome.
I use Digital Ocean and couldn't be happier. The bill is small, and it's refreshingly simple to host a container.
I still have battle scars from trying to set up AWS Fargate. It's just a hodge podge of corporately requested features at this point.
- They ditched their previous android app for a new one that doesn't get the grandfathered accessibility access so autofill is mostly useless...
- On mac, safari integration is consistently flaky. It regularly keeps getting blocked in a loop telling me to unlock 1password when 1password has already been unlocked.
- Passkeys are unreliable to the point of being unusable
- Autofill frequently doesn't work well where for some reason the site with the same url as saved in 1password is not offered during autofill. When 1password used to work, it helped catch phishing attempts because it wouldn't show autofill on pages that do not match. Nowadays because of the shitty autofill, people get trained to go to the app, copy the password and paste it in the website. This means that it will no longer protect from phishing attempts
- The previous behaviour of saving any newly generated password as a password object (not login) was much better. Now newly generated passwords are only available in the password history of the browser extension you specifically used.
- I can't tell 1password to ignore a specific website
At this point, the only reason I'm not using bitwarden is that search is very slow on it with 2k+ passwords.
- autofill on desktop is rock-solid, it virtually never fails, much less so than any other password manager autofill
- it works great with passkeys, again rock-solid, and again the best UX of any password manager. passkeys itself are also great
- OTP code integration (only use this for non-important stuff) works great too, again best-in-class
- switch to Electron was great for most, the Windows app sucked and there was nothing on Linux, now we have a good application across all 3 desktop platforms, although it was a slight downgrade for Mac users
- autofill works fine on Android 99% of the time
- 1Password CLI and SSH agent are interesting additions but SSH has a lot of paper cuts
In general, they have by far the nicest UX and UI of all password managers. And they really seem to care. They were the first to introduce stuff like "no automatic autofill" because of security implications, their vault spec is open source (in case they go belly up), they get audited regularly. They were the first to add passkeys and actually made a site (name escapes me) that shows which services have passkeys and how to activate them.
It’s their right, certainly, but it means I use GitHub as a Google Site replacement and my only active repo is archived whenever I’m not pushing commits to silence all the unwanted crap that comes with a GitHub repo. I’d be daft to ignore free hosting and I don’t care in the slightest that it’s one nines. Makes me laugh every time, though, to think of all those billion dollar AI-layoffs businesses having to stop AI work for a day because AI proliferation broke the freemium model and GitHub’s too hooked on being home to unfunded, mission-critical infrastructure projects to close the barn doors on free.
Autofill frequently doesn’t work. Passkeys are unreliable. Creating a new password doesn’t ever get saved.
Other than that it's fine, I guess.
This is funny, because 2025-on seems to be starting some couple years of Linux on the desktop/laptop. Valve introduced millions of people to gaming on Linux, bazzite is exploding in popularity, and that popularity is pouring into other projects like Omarchy, Mint, Ubuntu.
GitHub maybe will end up like Twitter - where the people who are there are there because they have to be, while the people actually enjoying their time online are on different platforms.
Took a year till everyone was using a Mac.
Then I joined some mega-corp, with it's structures and set systems, so opted for a Macbook.
Worst mistake of my life, OSX is horrid, I'd rather use Windows.
We've just been moving into a world where metric hacking is the desired outcome, not an outcome to try to avoid. These companies are only surviving because of their monopoly statuses. Because of momentum. It's a powerful force. It's the reason Twitter still is around. The reason Facebook is still around. But them being around doesn't mean they're good. It doesn't mean they're useful. It doesn't mean it is a good product. It doesn't mean the users like it. It just means people are used to the way things are and they aren't angry enough to leave for something else. But these companies are actively creating friction for users, daring them to leave, gouging them for everything they can. FFS Microsoft is the largest contributor (even more than Valve) to creating "the year of linux". Sure, it'll never have M$FT's market share, but it sure is eating into their revenue.
We've all lost sight of what made software so powerful in the first place. Why it became so successful and changed the world. We used to ship good products that help people, make their lives better, and make lots of money in the process. Now, I think all that anyone cares about is the last part. Now we're actively being hostile to those that make the systems better. And that system is fucked up and will destroy itself. That's not a good thing, because it does a lot of damage along the way. It is a system of extreme myopia.
In the last 5 years I'd argue that most software has made my life harder and more complex, not easier. There are definitely exceptions to this (ghostty being a great example), but there is a strong trend. I know I'm not alone in this feeling and I think we're getting to a point where a lot of people are no longer willing to dismiss their own gripes. This is not a good sign...
I'm glad you're optimistic. I do hope things can change. And my frustration is not directed at you. I really do want you to be right and I really do want to see change come from the inside. But I do not think those leading the companies now have any foresight. To be honest, I'm not even sure there's anyone at the wheel. It feels like we've just let the market forces steer the ship. If the currents steer the ship, then there's no captain, regardless of who claims the title. Frankly, I don't want to be on a ship without a captain, but here we are.
I feel like in a very mundane sense, I pay GitHub for a service, and they use that money to pay developers, to then make GitHub better.
It's tough to be working somewhere when usage is booming, and your service is crashing all the time. It's also tough to migrate your infrastructure between platforms, which it sounds like GitHub finally has to do in order to scale to the next level, to really take advantage of being part of Microsoft, although that has to feel pretty frustrating in the short term.
So hang in there GitHub team. Just keep fixing things.
The attitude of "stay to support the product" can prevent a better replacement. When Digg torpedoed themselves back in 2012 or whenever, that exodus was a big part of Reddit growing from niche to dominant.
I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.
That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.
It does not deserve to get better.
It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code.
Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]
GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity.
You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...
It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.
GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.
Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.
It’s grown in a way that degraded it and that required actual effort. For example:
- The fancy new diff viewer frontend that barely works. Someone wrote that code — it didn’t happen by itself.
- The unbelievably buggy and slow code review frontend (which is surely related to the diff frontend) was added complexity that did not need to happen. Its badness has nothing to do with how many users use it. It’s just bad in a no-scaling-involved way.
- GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards."
No, it did not have to expand into the AI field. A competent AI-free GitHub Core that could have an optional AI layer on top would have worked just fine if not dramatically better than the current mess.
(I say this as a paying user who will probably cancel soon. The Copilot reviews are kind of nice, but they’re not any better than a third-party system, and I’m getting sick of GitHub not working. Plus, the repos I’ve already migrated off of GitHub get to have nice non-AI things like gasp service accounts.)
Im an outsider and a layman, so this might be totally off base, but...
The way I hear people talking about github reliability doesnt sound like scaling problems to me. If you drive 20 miles every day but then decide to drive 2000 miles and run out of gas, thats a problem of scale. If you drive 2000 miles and your engine explodes, thats a problem of design.
Maybe their design problems are being made evident because of sudden scale, but they're still design problems.
Car analogies are typical, so I'll add in there.
My car can take the four of us, and we can load it up with things from the shops. I can put a bunch of heavy tins of food in there, or some DIY things, but if I put several tons of stones in the boot it'll totally fuck it up.
Is that a design problem?
Not really, it's a relatively cheap regular car, and it failed at a certain scale.
It would be a design problem if it were a flatbed truck, despite it being the same scaling that showed the problem.
Making my car resilient enough to take that weight would require tradeoffs that would either make it worse for other jobs I want it to do or at least add significantly to the cost.
This is similar in engineering software systems too, you can make it handle scaling up better, but this can require a much more complex architecture that may make it slower at smaller scales. It can make it more complicated to work with, add additional risks of failure as well.
There might not have been a predecessor, but it's been obvious for at least a decade that GHA are a very poorly designed programming language, yet nothing was done to improve. They introduced Github Apps that solve many of the issues with Actions, but that requires deploying a service and aren't anywhere near the ease of use of Actions.
Maybe a hot take: no, it didn't.
I think it had all the pieces (api,cli,etc.) already that it would've still be very useful in an AI world without deeply integrating AI things (copilot, etc.). I'd take higher availability over AI features any day.
Yes, and what Github wants public github.com to be is free QA for Github Enterprise. My company is a paying customer with 200 engineers and it's pretty clear we're just Guinea pigs for the Enterprise product.
Isn't this the massive problem? You're trying to do everything, and you can't, and you're trying to do it for everyone all at once, and have tied it all together so much that scaling up gets worse. If it's more than twice as hard to cope with twice the use, then you have to charge a bunch more to customers as you grow - and that's for your customers to get no actual benefit.
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.
The experience has degraded. It's really, really bad. I've seen companies spending thousands and thousands of dollars weekly in developer time *hitting rerun on broken actions*. It's so expensive to start with then so expensive in how awful it is to use.
Something I really don't get I guess is what out of all of this actually needs to be cross-project. How much of my github use needs access to something that isn't running on the same machine? I worked with a team building things actively, maybe 20 devs? That's not really a large set of users. Let's say 10 devs with the workload of 20, the cheapest plan would be $40/mo, enterprise would be ~$200. Would ten heavy users really max out a 64GB ram, 6+8 core new i5 with dual nvme drives, a gigabit connection and unlimited traffic? That's about $40 at hetzner for a box.
I'm not arguing a big federated position, I just don't really get why some of these enormous companies need to be so centralised. It feels like the problem is trying to be a big interlinked thing, and failing at it. The only things I can think of are
1. Links between issues
2. Accounts
3. Search
The first is mostly solved with literally just links, accounts isn't a huge problem and search is fair enough - but search is utterly awful and I cannot find things within one single repo or organisation reliably. So global stuff is irrelevant.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up
If github persists in being utterly shit for developers, it won't be around to find out. I'm not sure at all what part of the AI stuff needs to make everything else bad, and I'm extremely bullish on AI and agentic coding.
To really hammer this last point home, as agentic coding means we can do a lot more and faster - the unreliability of github has become much more apparent and impactful. Unreliable tests, unreliable code pulling and pushing, unreliable diffs. You're making the agents jobs harder, making the devs jobs harder exactly in the place they now spend much more time.
It makes github dramatically more expensive as a place to work. Also just really fucking annoying.
I think the general answer is that it would take real development effort to make federation work, and having to have compatibilty with other installations slows down your own pace of possible features -- I think these things are undeniable. Arguably worth it for society/the community (I wish we had more open standard federation and less centralization), but from the point of view of the company will it actually lead to increased profits sufficient to justify? In fact, it may do the opposite, if you are one of the largest, then lock-in is better for your profitability. Compatibility with other services is only important for the small upstarts trying to get customers from the largest.
I don't like it, but I think we will get proprietary centralization as long as we have capitalism of the sort we have.
My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.
Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.
The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:
author = comment.author
user = User.find(author.id)
TBH I'm not super invested in github. I pay for it (smallest plan) and use it as a repository and for forking other projects occasionally, and for hosting some small-time static sites. I've never really needed any of it's other features. Every time I go to github.com there's more and more cruft though, which to me means that I'm not their target customer and they will inevitably either alienate me or jack up their prices. Happens every time there's an acquisition so I'm kind of used to it now.
Github has remained surprisingly useful for quite a while post M$ purchase, but I'm old enough to know that everything M$ touches eventually goes to crap. It's like a law.
I remember using CVS and Subversion though, with very limited hosted options, and I thought Github was the bees knees at the time.
I, too, wish Slashdot was worth visiting again. I spent so, so many years there, enjoying the hell out of it since it was Chips&Dips ...
I think that was down to being in a particular IRC channel when CW & co. were building it.
When I was working at Microsoft I got transferred over to GitHub for awhile and someone there noticed my ID and made a big deal out of me having a 4-digit ID. :)
I never thought about it before then.
I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.
No idea how my two character handle made it through… Probably the wrong thread to ask anyone at GH to allow me to block notifications anytime anyone mentions "@ts" but I've come to accept it at this point, lol.
Created at 2010-10-27T23:42:22Z. 16 years! What a wild ride. I used to use bitbucket a ton back then. I loved it.
Will redirect to an image file whose title is your user ID! :D
ID: 67,498 Created: 2009-03-26
17 years, a month and two days ago.
I had just tried asking Gemini to help me get there, and it kept telling me to read line 2 of github.com, as if they were serving JSON on their homepage. :facepalm:
At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.
All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).
If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.
The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted.
This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11.
The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free.
The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.
Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).
What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.
You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.
So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?
Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.
Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!
In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.
Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.
Do you mean Git, not Github? Because Github is centralized by definition, “using it in a decentralized fashion” doesn’t make sense.
I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.
I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that.
And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!
And then you claim your version is only about you. Why post it as a reply, if that’s true? It would be off topic. But it isn’t off topic; because actually you are talking about OP in addition to yourself.
I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.
But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.
This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC
It's like crying when your favorite IRC network gets acquired by a crazy person (eg. Freenode) and refusing to jump onto libera.chat. I get network effects make a scene, but still, come on, new Freenode is not Freenode, it's just a name. Time to move on!
Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale.
Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap
the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.
For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
> My version of your post reads differently:
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
> Walking away would be easy.
Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!
Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.
The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.
It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.
I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.
Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.
My guess is that abuse (people hosting files/data that google didn't/wasn't allowed to host) made it untenable for a service that wasn't generating revenue and had limited headcount.
Something like Google drive or yt could spend a lot more energy stomping it rather than the handful of folks from the open source programs team.
Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.
Good luck, and we're all counting on you.
(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)
Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).
So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.
I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.
> Occam's razor applies here
I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.
“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)
This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.
Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?