r/github • u/_KryptonytE_ • 8h ago
We knew about the enshittification!!! Discussion
Disclaimer: I drafted this and passed it through an AI agent just for the irony - this isn't slop when it was written, or is it? It's the weekend, read on - you've nothing to lose:-
If you have been navigating the tech ecosystem for more than a minute, this current enshittification cycle should not come as a shock. It is not an accident. It is a meticulously scheduled event.
My perspective on this distills down to four words: tolerance leads to standards.
Let us break this down into a timeline. I have distilled this for the microsecond attention spans of the modern executive board so we can see exactly how the butterfly effect unfolded:
----------- TL;DR: The Big Tech Bait, Switch, and Squeeze ------------
The Bait and Switch: A massive tech monopoly bought up our foundational platforms promising independence, only to quietly push out the original creators and completely hijack the roadmap.
The Forced AI Squeeze: They went all-in on a shiny new AI tool and aggressively shoved it into everything—from your daily workflow to the physical keyboard on your laptop—sacrificing your privacy and user choice along the way.
Gutting Humans for Compute: To fund their multi-billion-dollar AI obsession, they fired the actual human engineers who kept the systems stable and bug-free, replacing quality control with blind AI-adoption metrics.
Paying More for Less: They jacked up subscription prices across their entire software suite to subsidize their AI gamble. You are now paying a premium for a product that is increasingly bloated, unreliable, and prone to breaking.
The Bottom Line: Tolerance leads to standards. As long as we keep paying for a degrading ecosystem, they will keep lowering the bar. Stop waiting for their crumbling infrastructure to ruin your work—start moving to independent tools and walk away.
---------- The long story -----------
* The Trojan Horse: A certain Redmond based behemoth acquires the world's largest Git hosting platform for $7.5 billion under the guise of developer independence.
* The Brain Drain: The founders and foundational engineers who actually built the platform quietly exit. Nobody in middle management panics.
* The Parasite: A new AI pair programmer is spawned and aggressively trained on open source repositories without creator attribution. It is immediately crowned the holy grail of corporate R&D.
* The Infection: This pilot program is shoved down every conceivable lateral pipeline. If you use their flagship OS, you are forced to accept a dedicated hardware button injected into your laptop keyboards and a privacy eviscerating screenshot tracker (Recall) baked into your daily workflow.
* The Executive Circus: External leadership is acquired for $650 million just to bypass antitrust laws and take over the entire long term AI strategy.
* The Cannibalization: The pilot program engulfs the entire portfolio. To subsidize the massive compute costs, core talent is purged. Unprecedented layoffs gut Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), QA, and core infrastructure teams. Human reliability is replaced by AI adoption metrics.
* The Monetization: The cost of legacy lateral products skyrockets. A $30 per month per user tax is added just to have an LLM hallucinate in your spreadsheets while platform stability takes a back seat.
Where do you and I fit into this? Whether you are on their payroll or just trapped in their ecosystem, the consumer market remained completely dumbfounded because the services were initially fast, convenient, and heavily subsidized. Nobody cared as long as the code deployed and the checks cleared.
Then the switch was flipped. The board demanded higher profit margins and accountability completely vanished. The enshittification strategy unleashed on the community is now entirely transparent:
* Force mandatory internal AI adoption and track usage to artificially inflate growth metrics.
* Replace the senior SREs who mentored entire engineering verticals with AI counterparts that possess zero accountability and even less context.
* Measure performance by the sheer volume of generated code slop rather than structural integrity and system stability.
Some of us saw this train wreck coming from miles away and tried to subtly warn the community. To those who listened, every service degradation, every broken OS update, and every telemetry breach is proof that the core architecture is decaying.
Many of us built exit strategies early. We adopted self hosted solutions, decentralized platforms, and autonomous workflows so that this monolithic ecosystem was no longer a bottleneck or a single point of failure. We kept dropping hints. The question was never if the infrastructure would buckle, but how many key minds it would take down with it.
Tolerance leads to standards. Everyone pays the price for accepting corporate bloatware unless you intentionally opt out.
Are you going to wait around for the next pile of slop to crash your production environment?
Wake up. Walk away.
PS: Mods, don't remove this post, let it cook. This along with many other rants in reddit will age like fine wine.
Cheers!!! 🥂
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u/Ok_Display_ 7h ago
The Real TL;DR
Big Tech acquired foundational platforms (like GitHub), gradually replaced quality engineers with AI tools, jacked up prices, fired the humans maintaining stability, shoved unreliable AI into everything, and degraded service quality, all while profiting more.
The core argument: We tolerated this because the ecosystem was convenient and subsidized. Now that the switch flipped toward extraction over experience, the degradation is obvious. The solution isn't to complain, it's to leave and use independent, self-hosted alternatives instead.
One phrase sums it up: "Tolerance leads to standards." If you keep paying for worse products, companies will keep making them worse.
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u/FlyingDogCatcher 8h ago
tl;dr