How likely/unlikely is GitHub to enshittify at some point in the future?

Question

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 profit2. Git being the basis means that developers can easily move to competing services or just self-hostOn 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 abuses their dominance?

brucethemoose2 · Accepted Answer

Isn'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.

gregjor · Answer

Pay for it.

lordkrandel · Answer

It'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.

verdverm · Answer

pretty 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__ · Answer

> 1. being backed by Microsoft, it is not under pressure to seek short-term profitYeah, it&rsquo;s not like we already have ads and tracking on a microsoft paid product right.

How likely/unlikely is GitHub to enshittify at some point in the future?

Pay for it.

It'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.

pretty 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

> 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.