Comment by lkrubner
8 years ago
I'm worried. Consider what happened to Skype. Consider what happened to LinkedIn. I worry something similar will happen to Github. And I love Github.
At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype. I lost all of my old contacts and had to slowly recreate my address book. This is really one of the worst transitions I can recall.
Meanwhile, I act as adviser to a number of entrepreneurs, and the biggest trend of the last year has been "I want to do _______ for professionals, since LinkedIn isn't doing it." The lost opportunities for LinkedIn are very sad.
I would agree with Skype, but what actually happened with LinkedIn? I remember in pre-Microsoft times they asked me for my google email and password.. right not to log-ing with google but the email and password! I understand it's more LinkedIn's fault than Microsoft merit, but I just wanted to say, IMO there were never "good times" for LinkedIn
> what actually happened with LinkedIn?
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
That's not a microsoft decision per se, my friend who was previously SEO PM at LinkedIn made this change to increase signups.
It does bug me that they pollute search results with login-required resources. Search engines should treat that as abuse, or at the very least default to freely available resources, otherwise they just become a menu without prices.
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And even worse MSFT/LinkedIn is suing a small company for spidering LinkedIn's data.
LinkedIn remains as pointless as ever.
I could make the same concern for a bunch of other companies who were to buy GitHub. Indeed, my main concern with GitHub being bought by anyone is the uncertainty of its future, and the fact that it no longer will be 'neutral' ground, so to speak.
It's not in particular Microsoft that concerns me (although their embrace of Git, this seems inevitable for a company like that, considering its history), but that GitHub is now losing its appeal; it being independent from the big players.
what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.
as for Skype, its completely ruined. I have it installed but I am scared to open it. Horrible GUI. Constant updates and generally just useless now.
> what did they do with LinkedIn?? I havent noticed any change.
I think that's his point. He's saying that LinkedIn has the opportunity to do lots of interesting things, and appears to be squandering it.
LinkedIn is excellent as it is; its a utility to keep your CV updated and connect with professionals. We don't want FB-like functionality here, thank god.
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LinkedIn is fine as it is. I found my last 3 jobs on it.
LinkedIn is perfect already.
As I also replied to a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17222045):
It used to be that it would only nag you to sign up or log in when trying to view extended profile attributes. Now it just requires you to log in to even view someone's name and function. It shows up in the search results alright, some day I should find a UA changer to spoof Google and see if they do IP checking or just UA header checking, but generally, they made it completely locked-in now, whereas it was semi-open (at least to view) before. It was a user-configurable setting whether your profile could be viewed by people who are not signed in, and now it's just a completely walled garden.
Agreed about Skype. They're trying to make it like a messaging platform, and added a lot of crappy - completely unintuitive, complex UX that now make it extremely difficult to use their core features of phone calls, video calls, screen-sharing.
I think it has actually improved. They added messaging and now I can get real-time recruiter spam to ignore.
I've heard claims that Skype is no longer peer to peer but runs on msft networks/infrastructure and performance has suffered. Can anyone confirm or shed any more light on that?
Not sure about the performance aspect, but your mention of them changing architecture to send all data through their own servers is well known.
It went from seemed like a ~reasonable security architecture, to outright enabling the monitoring and forwarding of all user conversations. Ugh.
LinkedIn acquired Lynda and are continuing to dominate the online learning space in enterprise. Not sure what you think "happened" to LinkedIn but they're doing great.
I had a pretty similar experience with skype. I lost access to my connected email account and was essentially locked out of my account forever - repeated emails to support were met with silence, alas! Then I connected my facebook account to use skype instead... then they discontinued support for that. Now it's got to a point where attempting to create a new account on the OSX desktop version just shows an error screen every time, so I'm stuck unable to use skype forever. I've moved on to other, better solutions, naturally :)
Could you tell us what "other, better solutions" would you recommend?
If Microsoft does to github what they did to Skype, pushes will go into the wrong repo without authentication for no reason just like Skype had contacts and messages jump from one account to another for no reason. Pretty much everything they touch software wise is a disaster. I wonder if there will be ads or how exactly they will fuck it up, but I know for sure they will. Gitlab is fairly equivalent in features and much better in their pricing and plans anyway so I expect a lot of projects to move.
Ads like this no doubt. https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/1002879517751414784
"Consider what happened to LinkedIn" Where are you going with this? LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%. Only good things have happened at LinkedIn (I'm an employee) since the MSFT acquisition. If LinkedIn is not doing something, then it sure will consider doing it now, with the vast resources it has available to it now.
"LinkedIn's growth has reaccelerated after the MSFT acquisition to the order of 35%."
I honestly don't know a single professional who still updates or cares about LinkedIn. I have no doubt that it still has the momentum from late comers and straggers, but...eh.
Mind you, it was on the outs long before Microsoft bought it. Not its fault, but it just hit the no longer novel curve.
"with the vast resources it has available to it now"
This part is almost parody, and reeks of comical self delusion (or astroturfing). It is the rally cry of how so many of Microsoft's purchases faded to black.
If Github does die out will be a slow and painful one. Skype was more of a radical change to the core technology. Of course anything is possible. I'm guessing many companies paying for Github's enterprise products are more concerned about the implications of Microsoft owning the company that hosts their proprietary code.
proprietary code which is hosted on git hub enterprise is customer-run on premise, there’s no outside access
And just like they acquired Skype to please the NSA and make changes for its sake, I wonder if this is also a move to backdoor Github projects without the project owners and contributors noticing.
I, for one, would definitely stay away from any open source project that's still hosted on a Microsoft-owned GitHub.
It's tricky to backdoor git repositories, since it's a Merkle tree of hashes and as such immutable. Any attempts at tampering would break git push/pull for developers, and as such be immediately detected.
Binaries could be backdoored, potentially, but with the trend towards deterministic reproducible builds I don't see this happening.
Perhaps modifying code is out of the question, but consider how many juicy credentials / private keys etc must be tucked away in all those private repos...
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You place a surprising amount of trust in a hash algorithm with known collisions (SHA1).
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True in regards to Skype, although that was an acquisition that was done under Balmer's and not Satya Nadella. In regards to LinkedIn I don't see what exactly you think has went/is wrong with LinkedIn from a product perspective since it has been acquired. There's no assurance had it not been acquired that it would have the features your advisees are claiming it should have. It is still the undisputed leader in its market.
Yes, serious chance of GitHub fading like SourceForge did.
Agree. And I had a similar issue with Skype.
>At some point Microsoft told me I had to change my password for Skype. The "Reset your password" process failed 6 times in a row. I eventually had to create a new, Microsoft ID, to use Skype.
I had the same problem. Microsoft Live process didn't feel very intuitive or smooth either.
Me too. I'm waiting for the official transaction to be done and i'm preparing a plan b in case i have to migrate everything.
More mitigation work is just what i needed. The skype one took years, many failures, and resulting in the use of several tools instead of one. Not a win.
Isn't that one of the strengths of Git? The whole decentralization means that it is ridiculously simply to take the whole shebang and migrate to another service or even just self host on a cheap VPS.
Yes but you still have configurations and docs referencing the repo to change. Then find a mean to alert all interested persons. And then write a script to migrate the issues.
It's not a big deal, it's just work that I don't want to do. Espacially since I love github.
Yes but with services like Issues and Wiki built into GitHub and Gitlab ... If you made use of the extra services by the Platform Provider, then you possibly have alot of non-trivial project dependencies to move around ... like your Issue history for the project.
GitHub is also used for recruiting and many other data mining purposes, so seems obvious they’d find ways to restrict the data just enough or require you pay based on how you use the data somehow.
And combining that data with LinkedIn’s data would be valuable indeed.
Microsoft is big, with different divisions you can consider what it did with consumer apps, but you'd be better off considering what it has done with developer tools.
There, Microsoft shines. So, we will just have to wait and see what they do. My guess is the main thing they will do is make it super easy to deploy to azure from the github UI.
Exactly. And AWS/etc integrations will be the redheaded stepchild. Remember when MSFT had all that "super cool" IE-only stuff (VBScript, weird non-standard gradients) that then became the bane of every Web developer everywhere?