Tell HN: GitHub is blocking search unless you are logged in
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Here's a screen recording of that happening:
It's been quite a while since GitHub started gating code search behind a login. However, they recently started gating other types of search as well. The worst part is, you don't notice it immediately for two reasons. First, it doesn't happen on all repositories. I didn't experience this yet with NixOS/nixpkgs for example, possibly because the high volume of activity going on there prevented the switch. Second, the search results do show up right after you hit the search button. However, it shows up a login screen as soon as you start to navigate around the search results. To me, I can't help but feel like they're testing the waters by not making it immediately obvious that this is happening.
The inconvenience doesn't stop there. As you can notice from the screen recording, once you get shown the login page, GitHub will continue to show the login page even if you hit the back button. On top of that, the search query is sometimes not included in the URL, making search results difficult to share.
I get GitHub wanting to require logins for code search, since it takes up computing resources. However, there's something to be said about gating search for issues and pull requests of open source projects without the project maintainers being notified.
what other purpose could it hold other than to harvest your data for their own undisclosed purposes?
Maybe anti-bots or something, but there are other ways to do that. Besides, a bot might just make an account.
Wild!
Or you can self host! Github's changes pushed me to self host recently.
Just feels like an unnecessary step. Sure I have an account and can log in, but why? I just want to know which file has X function, so i can read the implementation. I don’t want to have to download the repo or sign in.
I've also wanted to do code search on my phone, where I have no need to be logged in so I'm not.
In practice my employer would be happy for me to spend my time doing it anyway, because it's the right thing to do. But asking them to pay Github for the privilege is pushing it.
Telling employees to make their own personal account to do company work seems like a bad idea.
The use of a password manager makes re-logging-in effortless.
If necessary, let's focus on the use case of searching a single repo.
There are a lot more AI projects hungry for data to train their models on. This puts content companies in an uncomfortable situation: trademark infringement claims, loss of intellectual property, and more.
LinkedIn isn't a content company either, nor do they really own any content posted there (they don't right?), but a large part of their business moat comes from the network of people posting content there. Scrapers and bots undermine this, something the AI boom facilitates.
they have to serve the source without being logged in, otherwise gpl projects would just move (and we know gpl projects are the opensource trend setters).
so they will always allow you yo download the source. and thats what i do all the time. git clone, grep, rm.
or if you are logged, do it anyway checking code out with ssh which is more expensive for them.
remember kids, after Microsoft bought it, a github account is a social network account.
My account got flagged.
This is the same playbook I have followed with success to disconnect from Facebook, Linkedin, Google, Reddit and Twitter. (And Quora. And Medium..) When it's inconvenient it just makes me try to avoid these sites.
Can't help but feel that's what we're moving towards.
Anyway, I don't buy Github's excuse that the new search 'takes more CPU power'; this must be to prevent scraping data for LLMs. Have you hit the new search rate limits?
whoever fucked this up thinking he's doing good for humanity deserves to be hit with 65,535 lightning bolts in exponentially increasing amperages.
Some sites would probably put everything behind a login-wall. I can imagine some alternative version of git hosting with the following message:
Sign in to clone this repo- It makes it simpler for millions of CIs to check out the code unauthenticated,
- It enables usecases such as “Here is public data as a JSON, it’s our list of IP addresses, just integrate that to your firewall”,
- NPM. NPM entirely.
- Isn’t it required for open-source? If they restricted it behind a login, could we still say we deliver the code to our customers?
*There is some frequent outages on an individual level, but if you try enough, it works.
EDIT : This doesn't affect search of repos. My bad.
Everyone complained about this decision, fast-forward 6 months, Microsoft doesn't give a fuck.
I used the homepage to learn about new projects people I follow are working on or interested it, but now it's nearly impossible to find out.
Enshittification is real.
I think they really improved the code/repository search, but finding issues got really worse.
And IMO finding issues easily should be a top priority for a platform like GitHub.