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Ask HN: How likely/unlikely is GitHub to enshittify at some point in the future?
The phenomenon of enshittification are typically associated with growth-focused startups bait-and-switching, or unprofitable entities trying to seek rent as a last-ditch effort.
At first glance, GitHub has two points against a similar mode of collapse:
1. being backed by Microsoft, it is not under pressure to seek short-term profit
2. Git being the basis means that developers can easily move to competing services or just self-host
On the other hand, increasingly convenient value-added features means that its ecosystem are increasingly enticing for developers to build things on top of it.
Over time, the treasure trove of meta-history residing in Issues etc become increasingly lock-in prone, and there is no easy way for a community to move those data off of the platform if at one point GitHub decides to pull a Twitter.
To what degree can developers be assured that market incentives makes GitHub unlikely to become too user hostile, and how should developers balance between enjoying their value-add features/build their community on the ecosystem vs guarding against giving too much market leverage lest they one day abuse their dominance?
- gregjor 3y agoPay for it. “Enshittification,” a stupid term, seems mainly to mean “Something I use doesn’t work the way I personally think it should.” When the product is free you just take what you get or find an alternative. When you pay you at least have a small vote.
- jaggs 3y agoThat statement fundamentally misunderstands what enshitification means. I think it might help if you read Cory Doctorow's original exposition.
- gregjor 3y agoI know what it means. Making up a meme word is not exposition. “Degrading quality” is mostly in the eyes of the user. If Microsoft never changed anything in Github again they didn’t “degrade” it, but it will get called “enshittified” for not having dark mode or a Rust SDK or whatever it is that counts as “degraded quality” to some subset of users. Calling advertising in free products “enshittification,” I think the most common use of the word, has a solution: pay for services you find valuable.
- jaggs 3y agoAgain, you're showing that you don't know what it means. There is a distinct process which is done to qualify. This goes beyond simple degrading quality. Bad customer support is degrading quality, but that's not enshitification. You may not like the word, but it was created not as a meme, but by a well respected wordsmith to describe this process. :)
- gregjor 3y agoI know what it’s supposed to mean. We may not agree on the interpretation or whether it describes this or that product. Doctorow offers as evidence his opinion that Google search “suuuuucks.” That’s not a metric. Google search is full of SEO crap and ads, sure. It’s still useful, but most important to me: it’s free. Monetizing the user base looks like degradation if you start from free and expect that companies owe you something for nothing. Otherwise it’s just profit-seeking. That may make the platform or product feel shittier to some users, but the “enshittification” comes from disappointed expectations, or opinions about how something should work. It’s not an objective property of the product or platform. I don’t use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc. They seem like shit to me, but hundreds of millions of people get value from those things. I pay for YouTube and GitHub, paying not to see the ads and other junk. So those platforms aren’t enshittified for me, but people using them for free have to put up with the shit. This discussion a while back was good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35864049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35864049
- eternityforest 3y agoIsn't the point of enshittification just about having customers with too much inertia to switch, so you stop caring about them even though they pay you?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIsn't it already profitable from the private/corporate repos? Not to speak of the enormous synergy across many MS branches. Lots of enshittification pressure is financial, when the free service is a very generous loss leader, yet is also the golden goose the company is built around. Neither is the case here, I don't think... so maybe it will delay the eventual enshittification.
- lordkrandel 3y agoIt's already there. Now from the code header aside "Blame" there is an ad: "Do you kniw you can ask your organization to pay for Copilot?". I don't want Copilot or ads on a work tool.
- rapnie 3y agoCheck Github Next [0], much more AI to come. All the broad features working together, while delighting users, create ever more vendor lock-in. Github is allowed to become this huge one-stop-shop online development platform. With increasing platform dominance, the enshittification inevitably follows. [0] https://githubnext.com https://githubnext.com
- verdverm 3y agopretty sure Google is already well on its way, you can see it in recent design and UX "improvements" a lot of their best graduated and moved on to their own ventures, I heard it was the loss of their best PMs which has had an outsized impact
- licebmi__at__ 3y ago> 1. being backed by Microsoft, it is not under pressure to seek short-term profit Yeah, it’s not like we already have ads and tracking on a microsoft paid product right.
- polski-g 3y agoThey already did. The code browser is unusable now and breaks your browser's back button.