Comment by idan
17 hours ago
Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here.
It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)
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. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.
I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.
In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.
I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.
I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.
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.
This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
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.
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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.
Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".
Indeed. Back in 2018 and 2019 I expended a fair amount of time and energy reporting a squash 'n' merge metadata rewriting bug to GitHub and advocating for the behaviour to be changed. [1]
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.
[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368
I'd honestly argue the opposite. Staying with an abusive partner is not likely to resolve the abuse, no matter how much you think so.
Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.
I think OP is basically applying "vote with your wallet" strategy and/or some kind of "action speaks louder than words". As I understood from the article, they have been vocal about trying to change things, but they are shouting into the ether since nothing has changed and in fact only getting worse.
1 reply →
There’s a difference between a relationship with a person and an organization. I think the difference is large enough that the analogy doesn’t really hold.
3 replies →
I do work at GitHub. I shared the above as a nuanced "yes and" to the pain that Mitchell is feeling.
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.
> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.
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.
2 replies →
I'm glad you are optimistic. GitHub will need employees with that attitude if they're going to pull out of their current trajectory.
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.
9 replies →
GitHub lost me when Microsoft used my shitty code to train shitty AI without my permission.
Comparing to twitter is astute, as there are some analysis that point to it being mostly bots in 2025.
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.
I think a better comparison would be between GitHub and 1Password. Both started out as really excellent things for individuals and both became really awful things for individuals in their pursuit of enterprises.
12 replies →
Speaking of a "year of Linux on desktop", it's mostly not happening because the desktop lock-in has largely eased. I of course love my Linux desktop, but I use relatively few native applications, and every one of them is multiplatform now. Windows desktop becomes less and less relevant in its own way, by degradation of experience, and by being replaced with consoles and the Steam Deck.
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.
1 reply →
> 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".
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.
3 replies →
It is actuly good for the ecosystem to have competition. Githubs quasi monopoly was a bad thing. And will continue to be a bad thing in the future if it remains
The problem is that from the outside it seems like Microsoft no longer cares about the product. So much so that "the product" has become "shareholders"[0].
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
> There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.
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 problem is just, you don't pay GitHub for their service, you pay Microsoft for a service called GitHub, and Microsoft will put your money in their "earnings" basket and do whatever they want with it. Not sure if the amount of money Microsoft gets from GitHub subscriptions directly affects how much "love" the GitHub service gets.
Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.
This doesn't apply to current Github issues, where rather than a lack of the "right" new features, it's just an escalating degradation of existing services that is the complaint.
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.
The only users who can push for features now are those who can somehow directly influence people working on GitHub (a small number of users) or those with massive purchasing accounts that can shake Microsoft itself to its core (governments, fortune 100 companies).
I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.
> Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone
That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
3 replies →
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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...
I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less.
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?)
Did Heroku ever actively degrade? Seems more like it was neglected until the competition eclipsed it entirely. What GitHub is doing seems worse, like true active regression.
Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.
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.
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.
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.)
6 replies →
> And it's had to expand into the AI field
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.
Thanks for your perspective, appreciate it!
> What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be.
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.
> central role
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.
1 reply →
If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it.
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.
Fun story about that: In Ruby 2.x, the version GitHub originally launched with, every object implemented the method `id`, which returned the object id (in 3.x, it was renamed to `object_id`). Every object had this id, ActiveRecord models, strings, floats, integers, booleans, etc. Some objects had fixed object ids, like `true.object_id #=> 20`, `false.object_id #=> 0`, `123.object_id #=> 247 (2n+1)`. The `object_id` for `nil` is `4`.
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:
Now, if there was some bug, and for some reason a comment had no author, `comment.author` would return `nil`, `nil.id` would return `4`, and the UI would show Yehuda as the author in the UI. People would ask, "Who is this Yehuda guy, and why is he commenting on my PRs?"
Similarly, when writing Facebook apps with Rails, when you'd hit that same bug you'd see Mark Zuckerbeg: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4
These are the fun anecdotes that make perusing comments here so worth it. Thanks for sharing!
I love this story, makes me wonder how many other fun bugs on GitHub have been lost to time.
This is too funny. Thanks for sharing this tidbit!
1,202 if we're bragging.
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 am 22095 on GH but 213 on Sourceforge :-D I have a 5 digit user id on Slashdot as well (~20k mark if I recall).
4 replies →
Surprised to find I am #79.
I think that was down to being in a particular IRC channel when CW & co. were building it.
Congrats, never thought I'd see 2 digits in this thread haha
1 reply →
In fact now I think about it my claim to fame used to be that Github used one of my Rails plugins. I had written a really simple versioning system (Rails 2 I think) that I used for my blog and they used it, IIRC, for versioning wiki pages.
Nice, someone even lower than my #297!
Mine is 2041.
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'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.
I'm 17722 and also felt late. I was a holdout on Subversion and was resistant to Git in general since SVN still worked fine and had good tooling, but eventually some client work moved to Git and thus eventually Github.
1 reply →
I'm ~46,0000 and I thought I was early!
1 reply →
13274 here!
I was too loyal to mercurial, only switched to git/github long after the battle was lost and won.
1 reply →
Hello late bloomers, 143370 here
Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484.
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.
Genuinely surprised to be just over 10k too! Felt late!
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.
I was late to the party: 457,207
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.
https://api.github.com/users/steveadams
For comparison, I'm 208,820 and we're in the same year: I got that number 2010-02-23. So GitHub more than doubled user count that year, impressive for a "late to the party" growth.
https://api.github.com/users/fmalk
Top million though! Still earliest 1%.
I'm at 18 years and ID 1653. It took them a while to gain traction.
1 reply →
Genuinely surprised that I'm only 2,187. Weird to think about how quickly I must have jumped on it.
My user id is in the 2,660,000s, 2012 here and I joined when I was 13.
hah, my cheat here is https://github.com/YOURHANDLE.png
Will redirect to an image file whose title is your user ID! :D
I love that https://github.com/yourhandle is an existing organization.
I can't believe I joined Github back in 2009. I was a hardcore Mercurial fan and user back then. :)
April 27th 2010 and I felt pretty good getting a five character name (my own name). My ID is 254XXX
10126 here. I wouldn't have guessed it was that low.
Around 40000 and a real name with 4 digits. Thought I was late.
In the 40k range too. I was too cheap at the time to pay for anything or else I would have signed up earlier.
Woah, January 2009 (in the 40,000s), like some others I felt I was late to the party. I guess not :).
And here I thought I was doing well at 47979. That was January 2009, so not too bad.
wow, I'm in the 6.3 million group, 2014. I am surprised it's both that low and that old. Nothing compared to 5 or 6 digits, though. :D
Thanks for the link.
ID: 67,498 Created: 2009-03-26
17 years, a month and two days ago.
33000 something, nov 2008. Just interesting to see how the growth escalated in 2009 judging by other comments here as well.
heh, beat you by three days, ID 65973, 2009-03-23 :)
Nice, mine is 5082
133882 / Oct 1st 2009
You're going to crash the server.
Wow — I'm user 404!
1 reply →
It was going to crash, anyway.
926648 checking in.
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:
366; nbd
https://api.github.com/users/nullstyle
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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 issue is that modern software businesses aren't encouraged, in the slightest, to care about polishing products.
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.
I think it's true that lacking sufficient numbers in power is essential for change, but I also think there is a lack of people who give a shit. I've had many 1-on-1 conversations, some lunch casual and some more directly syncing on a project, wherein we'd come to straightforward conclusions on next steps. And then we'd have full team meetings to make official decisions and I'd find myself alone asking questions about a leader's out of the blue contradicting proposals. I'm not sure how one functions in this (I guess typical?) environment.
Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).
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).
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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?
> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into.
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.
Decentralized networks benefit from hubs if they benefit a subset of the network, which GitHub has for a long time. A hub is a focal point and there can (and should be) many of them in the git "network."
Shrug
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.
> Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion.
Do you mean Git, not Github? Because Github is centralized by definition, “using it in a decentralized fashion” doesn’t make sense.
looks like you work at github.
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 don’t think they were trying to hide that - they said they’re a “hubber” at the top. Maybe not obvious, but not obfuscated.
Correct, sorry I thought this was pretty obvious but in retrospect maybe not.
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!
1 reply →
Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.
And it's just a host of git, you can just jump platforms...
This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC
Totally. And a small correction I think to your analogy is:
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!
I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.
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.
> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale
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
"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.
github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering.
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.
Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network.
For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
I don't miss the days when every project had it's own SVN server....
I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)
As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.
This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.
The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent.
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.
Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?
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.
Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda
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.
git is an infrastructural public good. github is a company that sells you git adjacent services.
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.
> Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize?
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.
I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality.
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!)
As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance".
Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).
The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”.
So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.
Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable.
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 fully agree with your points but have to mention that market capitalization is not money available to the company. Microsoft is valued over a trillion dollars at the stock market, Microsoft doesn't "have" a trillion dollars they can spend.
huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.
What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab.
“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 :)
Fyi your HN description still says Heroku
derp, haven't touched that in a while. TY!
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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.
Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.
I'm wondering now how the heck we ended up so early on Github. It was back then just a small unknown startup but i'm not sure what connection we first 30,000 users share. At the same time i remember there must have been also some connection to Y Combinator back in 2008. Is there a way to see my own history of probably first commits or activity on Github? Oh, i found out. It was the early Rails Community on Github. That's probably what the first Github Users all share in common.
145XXX and I am on the other side of the world, no connection to SV at all
That was my connection too! I joined in 2008 when I got my first Rails gig where they were using GitHub, which I hadn't heard of before.
I'm user 7xx,xxx but I also believe I created a Github account while working on Rails projects (basically copying Ryan Bates and assembling things together. haha good times)
I'm also surprised. I'm user 34967 and I was pretty far from Silicon Valley when I joined in late 2008.
2 replies →
fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.
You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s
github is their precious. i’ve heard it called that name before, though not by them /G
shrug, I can't fix a lot of things in our reality, but I'd love to leave software development in a better state than when I found it
Hi, tangential but your post mentions only two pronouns when the recent trend is to mention 3 out of respect for gender fluid people who often use slight deviations in the third pronoun as an indication of their fluidity. Hope you do better
First, a reminder of the guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
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?
Thanks for the civility. I apologise for posting it as a reply to a wrong comment indeed.