GitHub is really two separate products: a code forge for teams and a social coding platform to collaborate on open source.

When I use the social platform, it is mostly as a read-only website. I am occasionally commenting, opening issues, PRs etc. The slowness and annoyances do not matter that much.

But I live in the team tool, where the annoyances and paper cuts are painful. Besides poor craftsmanship, there is often tension between the simpler design for social which sacrifices usability for pro use cases.

The social platform, which has huge network effects and is really hard to replace, is basically a loss leader for marketing the team product. I wonder if it would be viable for another company to create a team tool that stands on its own by outclassing Github like Linear outclasses Jira? That should be easier to replace. And Microsoft could keep running the social platform for the time being, where the adoption of alternatives is much slower and requires a much longer time frame.