[sobjornstad]

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.

[HoldOnAMinute]

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.

[amarant]

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.

[habitable5]

> 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.

[bonesss]

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.

[michaelcampbell]

MS PM's wanted it, got their OKR's OK'd, got their bonuses, and moved on.

[dylan604]

> We are in a future that nobody wanted.

Nor deserved.

[its_magic]

Laughs in my own Linux distro

[matthewisabel]

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

[Etheryte]

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.

[whstl]

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.

[materielle]

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.

[danudey]

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.

[cebert]

Can you guys stop adding new features for a while please and just make what’s there more reliable?

[tosti]

Why does it trigger a usage limit whenever I search anything at all? Sometimes I can get through but when I go back one page, boom error.

[sodapopcan]

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.

[noodlesUK]

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.

[dev_l1x_be]

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

[catigula]

React isn't causing these issues.

[oldestofsports]

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.

[samgranieri]

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.

[throw20251220]

GitLab is slower for me than that React GH app. Why would I move to GitLab?

[htx80nerd]

>"XYZ used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works. Even basic functionality..."

The new normal is too many cases. Then people act put off you complain, or act like you are expecting too much.

Lots of people are in software development, or management, who dont have the mindset and personality for it. These roles are not for everyone. But people like the $$$ and so the wrong people get involved.

[kimixa]

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.

[tibbar]

GitHub isn't VC funded at the moment, though. It's owned by Microsoft. Not that this necessarily changes your point.

[notpushkin]

I don’t get it. Why making the UI shittier would possibly lead to more profit?

[danny_codes]

I mean.. it’s a Microsoft product now. That’s basically a guarantee it will suck, and continue to get worse and worse until it’s an unusable mess of garbage like everything else they make. I haven’t seen any good user-facing windows products in at least 10 years and somehow the bar drops lower by the year.

[blibble]

> GitHub used to be a fantastic product. Now it barely even works.

it's almost as if Microsoft bought it, isn't it?