Because it's Microsoft. Categorically incapable of respecting their users.

What's interesting to me is how many people went like 'Oh, Satya really gets open source, this time it will be different'.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225599

The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their marketing department, they just inject themselves into everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100% lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored.

With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway.

It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this?

This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.

Not to white-knight microsoft here, but I think the problem they run into with every product is that because of their ubiquity, they rapidly reach saturation with most every specialized product they sell. You cannot grow a business if your market is saturated, even if you're the only one selling. So they have to find a way to expand their market. With specialized tools, that's done by generalizing, right? And anyone who has ever driven a screw with a swiss-army knife can tell you, generalized tools never work as well as dedicated tools. Thus, Word ultimately sucks. Windows ultimately sucks. Github ultimately sucks. They are all of them trying to be everything for everyone, because the alternative is just mumbling along, being really good at being tools, but being really bad at conveying profit to their creators.

Growth. It's a disease. Can't just work on a good product it's got to make arbitrary growth targets.

> why they ruined GitHub

Are we living in the same world? GitHub is not ruined at all, it still works great (as in it’s completely usable), it’s still where 99% of open source projects are hosted, and it’s still a no brainer to use it for public or private repos (having used Gitlab extensively, GitHub is just so much more user friendly). There is more competition, which is good, but GitHub is still the default option for open source by a long margin

Product managers do not care about customers. They only care about their bonus and the line moving up.

Ah, I think this is due to human nature. People came in and wanted to "do" something with GitHub. To give it their stamp, to help boost their career/ego.

I'll never understand why anyone thought they wouldn't ruin it. It's a miracle it even exists anymore.

Big company isn't good at {thing} absorb company who is and apply all their know how to the part that does {thing} killing all the good parts in the process.

Happens almost every time.

the main pull of GitHub is not primarily git, which is easily done without an external provider. It's the bundle of all the little tools various other conveniences with git repositories, and how they're streamlined together into a workflow that many places are now beholden to. So they can afford to rough up the userbase a bit in the name of increased value extraction because so many paying customers are trapped in the GitHub ecosystem.

GitHub was sold because it didn't make too much money. Microsoft bought it for OpenAI only, to train Copilot on the vast amount of code.

Of course, MS every once in a while says that it makes a lot of money, but they don't really say how much is costs to keep it up. Their free tiers are still very generous, even they are buggy as hell - I can't imagine that the profit it makes even dents MS' bottom line (assuming it's not in the red). But at the end of the day the model training is done.

I guess Github doesn't have a lot of use anymore, beside having a lot of users that you can use to experiment with such shenanigans to see what can you get away with.

Everyone is just figuring out again why Microsoft was so hated in the 90’s.

Conversely GitLab was well positioned to take the space but then went and ruined their opportunity too.

This type of behaviour seems to be endemic within Microsoft. They're like the scorpion in the Russian tale of the scorpion and the frog, seemingly a retelling of the Persian tale of the scorpion and the tortoise:

A long time ago, a scorpion came to the edge of a great river. Not being a good swimmer, it asked a nearby frog if it might get a ride across.

The frog eyed the scorpion warily. “I’ve heard of your kind. I see the stinger you hide behind your back. I wish I could help you, but I cannot risk it.”

“Why would I sting you?” the scorpion reasoned. “If you die, we would both drown.”

The frog was convinced. It let the scorpion climb atop its back, then began to swim across the great river. But when they were halfway across, the scorpion suddenly stung the frog.

As the poison spread through his body, the frog cried out, “Why did you sting me? You have killed us both!”

The scorpion replied, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.”

Microsoft just can't help it that they end up destroying the goodwill they inherit when they buy a property. It is in their nature.

it's not that deep, once a company reaches a certain size it gets ridden with middle managers looking for their next promotion. middle managers are gonna middle-manage.

This is just the way MS is and always has been. It was inevitable. It's part of their longstanding EEE strategy. Anyone who thought otherwise was fooling themselves.

Microsoft can't help themselves. They ruin everything that they touch.

Because Microslop always hires cheap labor that ends up becoming management, and then things start to break. And the cycle continues. This is what happened at Bank of America, Citi and others.

Some Product Manager who wanted his promotion of the year went with: Oh how about we squeeze more revenue from our unpaid users

This was inevitable once Microsoft wrote a check for $7.5 billion. You're not going to pay that much and not recoup your investment. You might say that they could've gotten it from existing income. Maybe that's true but it doesn't matter. Because you can get it faster by turning all the knobs to increase income and decrease costs.

Profit has a tendency to fall over time. A growing company can escape this for awhile by expanding their marketshare or expanding into new products. Eventually the only way to head this off is by raising prices and cutting costs.

Entshittification is fundamental to our system.

Consider this too: the people who are making decisions about Github's future have no investment in it's long term success. They're VPs, directors, managers and ICs who are simply trying to get promoted and get their bonuses by squeezing out short-term revenue. They'll be long gone before it all goes to shit.

It's almost like we have a distortion based on the workers' relationship to the means of production.

Their goal was to have a captured audience. Once the audience is captured, of course enshittification will happen.