I second this. GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality like the timeline updating when I push commits is unreliable. The other day I opened a PR diff (not even a particularly large one) and it took fully 15 seconds after the page visually finished loading -- on a $2,000 dev machine -- before any UI elements became clickable. This happened repeatedly.
It is fairly stunning to me that we've come to accept this level of non-functional software as normal.
The trend of "non-functional software" is happening everywhere. See the recent articles about Copilot in Notepad, failing to start because you aren't signed in with your Microsoft Account.
We are in a future that nobody wanted.
Not quite everywhere. There's a common denominator for all of those: Microsoft.
Their business is buying good products and turning them into shit, while wringing every cent they can out of the business. Always has been.
They have a grace period of about 2-4 years after acquisition where interference is minimal. Then it ramps up. How long a product can survive once the interference begins largely depends on how good senior leadership at that product company is at resisting the interference. It's a hopeless battle, the best you can do is to lose slowly.
Things don't always ramp up after 2-4 years. Sometimes MS just kills the project or company after that period of time.
See also their moves in the gaming industry.
Heh, I was working at 2 of those gaming companies when they were acquired by m$. I almost fear taking another job in the gaming industry, there seems to be some kind of bastardised version of Murphy's law that any gaming company that hires me will be acquired by ms 6 months later.
I mean, that's obviously not the case, but it's weird that it happened twice!
Very weird it happened twice! But that's a kind of a cool factoid to tell people haha.
Even with devs and publishers that don't die or are killed, they still lay hundreds off when a game is done. Then the studio limps along in pre-production mode on their next game for 4-5 years it seems like...
Maybe the only job stability in the industry is with indies, and... Nintendo?
I for one am shocked--SHOCKED, I say!--to learn that anything bad could happen as a result of a) putting everything in "the cloud" and b) handing control over the entire world's source code to the likes of Microsoft.
Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen any kind of dire consequences?
Nobody. Nobody at all could have seen it. Microsoft is cool now, haven't you seen VSCode? They do Open Source, they run Linux, they've joined the fold, the tiger shed its stripes.
This thread has complaints about software coming from the same supplier both degrading.
The person(s) who wanted this want Azure to get bigger and have prioritized Azure over Windows and Office, and their share price has been growing handsomely.
‘Microslop’, perhaps, but their other nickname has a $ in it for a reason.
> We are in a future that nobody wanted.
some people wanted this future and put in untold amount of money to make it happen. Hint: one of them is a rabid Tolkien fan.
the irony of Tolkien being associated with a techno-dystopia makes me nauseous
Rent seekers paradise (ft copilot)
It’s just feudal with Capital.
Who is it?
MS PM's wanted it, got their OKR's OK'd, got their bonuses, and moved on.
Laughs in my own Linux distro
> We are in a future that nobody wanted.
Nor deserved.
Then why is it the future we have?
It was a complete accident. Nobody could have foreseen it. We are currently experiencing the sudden discovery that Microsoft is an evil corporation and maybe putting everything in the cloud wasn't the best move after all.
Let’s just say there are a couple of guys, who are up to no good. And they started making trouble in our neighborhood.
jokes aside it’s all because of hyper financial engineering. Every dollar every little cent must be maximized. Every process must be exploited and monetized, and there are a small group of people who are essentially driving all this all across the world in every industry.
Hey from the GitHub team. Outages like this are incredibly painful and we'll share a post-mortem once our investigation is complete.
It stings to have this happen as we're putting a lot of effort specifically into the core product, growing teams like Actions and increasing performance-focused initiatives on key areas like pull requests where we're already making solid progress[1]. Would love if you would reach out to me in DM around the perf issues you mentioned with diffs.
There's a lot of architecture, scaling, and performance work that we're prioritizing as we work to meet the growing code demand.
We're still investigating today's outage and we'll share a write up on our status page, and in our February Availability Report, with details on root cause and steps we're taking to mitigate moving forward.
[1] https://x.com/matthewisabel/status/2019811220598280410
Literally everyone who has used Github to look at a pull request in say the last year has experienced the ridiculous performance issues. It's a constant laughing point on HN at this point. There is no way you don't know this. Inviting to take this to a private channel, along with the rest of your comment really, is simply standard corporate PR.
Yes agreed it's been a huge problem, and we shipped changes last week to address some of the gnarly p99 interactions. It doesn't fix everything and large PRs have a lot of room to be faster. It's still good to know where some worst performance issues are to see if there's anything particularly problematic or if a future change will help.
Hopefully the published postmortem will announce that all features will be frozen for the foreseeable future and every last employee will be focused on reliability and uptime?
I don’t think GitHub cares about reliability if it does anything less than that.
I know people have other problems with Google, but they do actually have incredibly high uptime. This policy was frequently applied to entire orgs or divisions of the company if they had one outage too many.
It's insulting to see the word "progress" being used when the PR experience is orders of magnitude slower than it was years ago, when everyone had way worse computers. I have a maxed M5 MacBook and sometimes I can barely review some PRs.
Can you guys stop adding new features for a while please and just make what’s there more reliable?
For what it's worth, I doubt that people think it's the engineering teams that are the problem; it feels as though leadership just doesn't give a crap about it, because, after all, if you have a captive audience you can do whatever you want.
(See also: Windows, Internet Explorer, ActiveX, etc. for how that turned out)
It's great that you're working on improving the product, but the (maybe cynical) view that I've heard more than anything is that when faced with the choice of improving the core product that everyone wants and needs or adding functionality to the core product that no one wants or needs and which is actively making the product worse (e.g. PR slop), management is too focused on the latter.
What GitHub needs is a leader who is willing and able to say no to the forces enshittifying the product with crap like Copilot, but GitHub has become a subsidiary of Copilot instead and that doesn't bode well.
> people think it's the engineering teams that are the problem;
It could be, some people are just terrible at their job. Lots of teams have low quality standards for their work.
Maybe that still comes down to leaders but for different reasons. You can ship useless features without downtime.
Permitting terrible engineers to continue to work for you is a management problem.
So React rewrite did not help after all? Imagine, one of the largest software tool companies on Earth cannot reliably REbuild something in React. I lost count of the inconsistency issues React introduced.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33576722
React isn't causing these issues.
Then why is the site slower than it was in 2012 on a 2009 Macbook?
Good to know. So it only causes the UI inconsistency bugs.
The new design/architecture allows them to do great stuff in the name of efficiency; for example, when browsing through some parts of the UI, it's now much more capable of just updating the part of the page that's changed, rather than having to reload the entire thing. This is a significantly better approach for a lot of things.
I understand that the 'updating the part of the page that's changed' functionality is now dramatically slower, more unresponsive, and less reliable than the 'reload the entire thing' approach was, and it feels like browsing the site via Citrix over dial-up half the time, but look, sacrifices have to be made in the name of making things better even if the sacrifice is that things get worse instead.
> for example, when browsing through some parts of the UI
React allows this? I didn't realize that I needed React to do this when we used Java and Js to do this 20 years ago. I also didn't realize I needed React to do this when we used Scala and generated Js to do this 10 years ago. JFC, the world didn't start when you turned 18.
I've been a GitHub user since the very early days. I had a beta invite to the service. I really wish they didn't swap out the FE for a React FE.
They need to start rolling back some of their most recent changes.
I mean, if they want people to start moving to self hosted GitLab, this is gonna get that ball rolling.
GitLab is slower for me than that React GH app. Why would I move to GitLab?
Was this a local/on prem version of GL or the hosted web version?
My previous org had an on prem version hosted on a local VM. It was extremely fast, we setup another VM for the runners, and one for storing all the docker containers. The thing I’ve seen people do it use the VM they put their gitlab instance on for everything and ends up bogging things down quite a bit.
Ya, it really was one of the most enjoyable web apps to use pre-MS. I'm sure there are lots of things that have contributed to this downfall. We certainly didn't need bullshit features like achievements.
Even just a year or two ago its web interface was way snappier. Now an issue with a non-trivial number of comments, or a PR with a diff of even just a few hundred or thousand lines of changes causes my browser to lock up.
But even clicking around tabs and whatnot is noticeably slower. It used to be incredibly snappy.
Which website lets you load PRs with 1000 lines and it’s fast? Honest question, it’s not gitlab.
This is just microsoft doing the only thing they know, which is taking a good product and turning it into a monster by bashing out whatever feature is on some investors mind that barely even work in a isolated vacuum-sealed test chamber. All microsoft producs are like bad experiments.
We loved Github as a product when it needed to return or profit beyond "getting more users".
I feel this is just the natural trajectory for any VC-funded "service" that isn't actually profitable at the time you adopt it. Of course it's going to change for the worse to become profitable.
GitHub isn't VC funded at the moment, though. It's owned by Microsoft. Not that this necessarily changes your point.
> Of course it's going to change for the worse
> It's owned by Microsoft.
I see no contradictions here.
I don’t get it. Why making the UI shittier would possibly lead to more profit?
Moving to client-side rendering via React means less server load spent generating boilerplate HTML over and over again.
If you have a captive audience, you can get away with making the product shittier because it's so difficult for anyone to move away from it - both from an engineering standpoint and from network effects.
It seems most of the complaints are about the reliability and infrastructure - which is very much often a direct result of lack of investment and development resources.
And then many UI changes people have been complaining about are related to things like copilot being forcibly integrated - which is very much in the "Microsoft expect to gain a profit by encouraging it's use" camp.
It's pretty rare companies make a UI because they want a bad UI, it's normally a second order thing from other priorities - such as promoting other services or encouraging more ad impressions or similar.
> GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works.
it's almost as if Microsoft bought it, isn't it?