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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

It really is. I know I've gone from tens a month to thousands a month. They have to be projecting >100B/month in the next year or two.

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wow. they should really institute a maximum amount of individual pushes per-month per-user.

Which will just increase the cries of "enshittification" and hasten the mass migration to the next free platform that surely, this time, won't ever go down.

We're small enough that we've been hosting our git infra for about a year now, I wonder how many other companies figured out they could make the trade. I've had a Github since a couple years after they started and I think they are going to become a Stack Overflow, albeit slower with MS at the helm. If Github is going to be 99% slop it's going to be really hard to use as a fun tool to show what you can do, what you've worked on, side projects, etc. I took github off my resume and I'm probably not going to relaunch my weblog if I end up job hunting, too much low-effort crap and people basically copying what a lot of us had been doing manually for years to really feel like it's anything other than a negative signal.

Ironically a bunch of people already migrated to Codeberg and then Codeberg announced "heads up, we actually don't want your AI slop, we're for real projects only" and AI coders threw a shitfit on HN.

That would just drive users into the arms of the alternatives, which would love to own the world's code... like Cursor/Musk.

Microsoft and GitHub's only option is to suck it up, absorb this growth, and lower failure rates. They have the money, so that's not the issue.

As someone on the sidelines, this is really interesting to watch unfold.

Well either they can handle this load that Microsoft can't, or they can't. If Microsoft are going to continue to be unreliable in the absence of the rate limit then:

If alternatives can handle the load, those who would consider those alternatives if Microsoft opposed a rate limit are likely to move to them anyway.

If alternatives aren't able to manage, then user's aren't going to jump since those services won't actually provide more usage.

I think the number of commits is a red herring, but that said, I wonder how spiky their load is.

Imagine a fee over X commits, but only during certain hours. I can imagine 90% of the commits over 6 or 8 timezones, maybe 50% over 4 right now...

It's not a red herring, every commit necessitates a database hit.

I was thinking the same thing at first: ideas to increase product limits on GitHub, to increase reliability given limited infra.

However, there are sharks in the water, and with the diminishing mean of user technical knowledge, the product actually needs to become even more free. GitHub likely needs even lower friction.

"All it takes" is the insanely heavy technical lift to support that. There is no other solution. All the C-Suite needs to do is foster an environment with well-thought through, and possibly over-funded engineering, at the edge of the art. That sounds like an amazing challenge.

Why would any company want coding data now? It's all garbage. I'd be surprised if anything past 2025 is even used for training.

Me personally, I would like to own the world's code.

The richest man in the world is interested in this dataset as well.

There's nothing special about code here - if you can own the world's $X for any X, you win capitalism.

Let me add one more reply here.

Even if I accepted that given the new repos: all the new code = "It's all garbage." - I would certainly love to be in a position to observe the new code + metadata = software trends, as software eats the remaining world.

I don't think anyone would love to own the world's AI slop. The capex and revenue expenditure would be too high for any ROI.

If you use GitHub as just a software forge then sure you can find an alternative. But I suspect more people use GitHub for its social aspects and they will stick around despite the regressions because building an alternative to an established social network is incredibly difficult if not impossible.

You can get work done on any software forge. But potential employers will still ask for your GitHub. People will judge your personal project by its GitHub stars and be less reluctant to download a binary from GitHub than elsewhere. Potential contributors will leave a PR on GitHub but probably not if they have to make an account on a new platform and learn how it works.

And of course, let's not assume any competitor can just absorb even a fraction of the traffic GitHub receives without suffering similar reliability issues.

I still remember when they decided to limit the number of private repos you could have as a free user. Kind of silly to me at the time, and even more so now!

I remember when you had to pay for private repos in the first place.

Initially there were no private repos for free users at all, it was a selling point for bitbucket that they offered that.

I don't think it's silly for free users to be restricted. If you want something, pay for it. Free trials are trials.

so... when you reach your monthly limit in the middle of the month, what is the recourse?

Or, is the idea just to drive everyone away from your platform?

Uh, pay money for the service you're using constantly?

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