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Comment by HellzStormer | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I don't think this is a valid case of enshittifying. Products that you pay for that loses features or break or become more painful to use are enshittifying.

A free feature that stays free but requires you to make a free account (no credit card needed), I can see at least one very valid reason: if the feature heavier than a simple page (which is the case here), then it's an open door for DDOS attacks. Being able to track and ban/block the users that appear to participate in such an attack is totally valid.

The alternative is having to do captchas and the like to use those features anonymously, which is a pain both for user and for the devs/UI, and does feel more like the overall enshittification you are mentionning (even if it's a valid reason)

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> The alternative is having to do captchas and the like to use those features anonymously

This is not the case. You may have noticed that Google Search, Bing, etc. don't require login or captcha to do a search. Billions of people use this search daily. And yet, they will throw a captcha at you, or even just say "you're a bot, stop bothering us" whether you're logged in or not, if their signals have detected what they consider abuse.

Clearly, their signals are not as naive as "anonymous user, require captcha / logged-in user, no checks required". Preventing DDOS != requiring login.

They like you logged in because they can add more data to their verified user identity and activity datasets and sell them for more money. They already make enough money to run the service despite all the anonymous usage, but they'd like more money, you see.

Github managed to offer anonymous search for 16 years before one day Microsoft took it away. Do you think it was due to DDOS attacks, or do you think it was a power-play to attract more sign-ups and logins?

> They already make enough money to run the service despite all the anonymous usage, but they'd like more money, you see.

How mighty of you, a freeloading user in this specific situation, to assert Github has made "enough" money and therefore should offer you services at their own expense... you know, because you want it and therefore are entitled to it.

> Github managed to offer anonymous search for 16 years before one day Microsoft took it away. Do you think it was due to DDOS attacks, or do you think it was a power-play to attract more sign-ups and logins?

So what's the issue here, really? Make a free account and move on with life. Or clone the repo and search it locally if you need to. Or decide to take some principled stance and refuse to work with projects hosted on Github. It's your choice.

It’s Microsoft, one of the most successful companies in human history. A poorly formed moralistic argument about “entitlement” is absurd. They certainly feel entitled to every aspect of my life, as do most other Fortune 500 companies, I think I can safely desire not needing to log in during a damn search.

So again, because Microsoft has more money than you do, it entitles you to their services for free?

Where else in life does this logic apply?

Perhaps you waded into a conversation without even understanding the core complaint. You can search on Github without a user account, entirely for free. However, they do not provide context-based code search to non-users, despite it still being free.

If for whatever reasons you cannot possibly be bothered to create a free user account out of some irrational fear Github will sell your codebase search history to advertisers (laugh out loud, literally), then you don't get to use that feature. Clone the repo and search it yourself, or find a different deep-pocketed service that lets you mooch everything for free.

tldr; Why are freeloaders always the loudest complainers?

"more money than you" is a pretty crazy strawman of the actual comparison they made.

The general idea of imposing more user-friendliness on very large corporations is not a bad one.

> The general idea of imposing more user-friendliness on very large corporations is not a bad one.

This is not a "user-friendliness" issue by it's very definition. The OP is not even a user!

> "more money than you" is a pretty crazy strawman of the actual comparison they made.

Perhaps you didn't read the conversation. The parent literally made the argument that Microsoft (ignoring that Github is a separate company) has plenty of money and therefore should provide this service for free even to non-users.

The service is free. A user account is free. It doesn't get more simple than this.

The naivety to believe the lack of a Github account somehow safeguards your browsing data is as hilarious as it is sad. Further, believing the creation of an account and searching code repositories somehow results in more ads is beyond hilarious.

This entire thread is pure insanity. Life doesn't need to be this difficult people. Create a throwaway account if you are so worried... or find some other service. You are not owed anything by Github - yet despite that they have made it trivially easy to benefit from their services at no cost to you.

> This is not a "user-friendliness" issue by it's very definition. The OP is not even a user!

They don't need an account to be a user, as you seem to acknowledge later in your comment: "The naivety to believe the lack of a Github account somehow safeguards your browsing data"

> Perhaps you didn't read the conversation. The parent literally made the argument that Microsoft (ignoring that Github is a separate company) has plenty of money and therefore should provide this service for free even to non-users.

They said "one of the most successful companies in human history".

That has nothing to do with the parent's amount of money. It's not a human-comparable amount of money.

If the company had ten million dollars the parent wouldn't be making the same argument about size.

> This entire thread is pure insanity. Life doesn't need to be this difficult people. Create a throwaway account if you are so worried... or find some other service. You are not owed anything by Github - yet despite that they have made it trivially easy to benefit from their services at no cost to you.

I have an account. That doesn't change how companies should work. And I find no "difficulty" in having a little discussion.

> You are not owed anything

Yeah I am. They make mass market money and they use public infrastructure. If the population wants to impose rules on them, the population gets to. Like forcing them to pay taxes. That's money they owe me indirectly.

I don't get to make the decisions on my own, but I can say if I think a theoretical rule would be good.

For the last seven months, Google has pushed every non-login search from my house network through a captcha; the image captcha is typically five to infinite repetitions. Audio captcha works after a single run-through, except that it is frequently "unavailable" now.

I don't know why. Google won't tell me. They just started doing the same for YouTube: "Please login because we have detected malicious behavior from your network".

I know I'm not DDOSing them; I can see all our network traffic. They're just encouraging me to avoid using them.

You're probably blocking ads or blocking tracking in some fashion and denying them signals their naive models use to evaluate whether you're bot-or-not. It could be somewhat intentional but I'd lean towards it being an edge case they just don't care to address.

It's a big enough edge case that not caring to address it makes it intentional.

Well maybe someone in your network or subnet is doing some abuse.

The joy of CGNAT.

I feel this. Recently _some_ company, I have no idea which, has decided my IP is malicious and refuses to serve my requests. This has effectively banned me from a few websites, including a government service I pay taxes for.

In my case, they block me on IPv6 since I use a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel. It certainly used to be the case that my IPv6 connectivity was better and more performant down the tunnel than using my ISPs native IPv6. I have no idea what the situation is today.

My solution was to use a filtering DNS that always returns no AAAA records for domains ending in google.com. This works great and essentially solves the problems. I have to do the same for various netflix domains as well.

I'm dreading having to switch over to native IPv6 -- I don't even know how many /64s will be allocated to me (and how stable they will be).

This could very well be the answer. I'll go check.

That's it. Google now automatically distrusts my HE tunnel. No idea why.

The new GitHub search has some more advanced features than Google, Bing, etc. do, such as Regex: https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/...

Of course, they could have kept the old search (without advanced filters) open, but there is at least a sensible explanation why the new search requires being signed in.

The entire point of Google Search is to take in everyone, serve ads, and drive people to use other Google properties. Every user that has to jump through hoops in order to access Google Search is a net loss for them.

GitHub doesn't really care all that much if random anonymous users can use their search. Anon users can view source trees, wikis, etc. and check out code, which is more than enough for most people.

> Do you think it was due to DDOS attacks, or do you think it was a power-play to attract more sign-ups and logins?

I think you and I don't know anything about what's going on there internally. I'm usually quick enough to assume the worst about actions Microsoft (of all companies!) takes, but even former GitHub employees have commented here that the new search system is much more resource-intensive than the old, and bots and scrapers were causing real problems. I choose to believe people who seem credible instead of playing the cynic and assuming everything is done with evil intentions and that everyone is lying to me.

Sure, they could build a big sophisticated system to figure out who to serve CAPTCHAs to, or who to outright ban, but why spend the time and money on that when they can just require a login, and the people they care about won't really care.

And sure, this move very well might drive some new signups. Maybe that's a net win for them. So what?

> Maybe that's a net win for them. So what?

It raises the question of what will they hobble or take away next to fatten their bottom line. Will they continue to be good custodians of the real treasure, which is the projects that they host?

You may remember SourceForge was a popular hosting site. Ultimately, what caused a mass exodus was that they decided to let malware creators pay them money to wrap around the installer packages of the software they were hosting.

If you're not hosting your own project, there is always this risk. Question the motives of someone who offers to host your stuff "for free" ... and then alters the deal some point down the line.

As far as I can tell, mainline web search engines are mostly serving cached/canned responses these days. They get updated periodically but it's not the same as the late 90s or early 2000s when every search was run against large-scale content indexes. You can occasionally stack keywords or form unique enough queries that you force the engine to do real work, but getting this right seems to get harder and harder over time and their pool of content that's indexed seems to be broad but shallow now.

GitHub code search is still doing real searches and so is much more expensive to run.

> You may have noticed that Google Search, Bing, etc. don't require login or captcha to do a search.

Are you saying you want adds in GitHub search's results? Google, Bing, etc. make money showing you adds. Adding barriers of entry is much less in their interest. Their budget to optimize the search engine is likely much bigger than GitHub's one.

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