[gracenotes]

I'm reminded of this section from "Reddit: Lessons Learned From Mistakes Made Scaling To 1 Billion Pageviews A Month" (http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/8/26/reddit-lessons-lea...):

> Treat nonlogged in users as second class citizens. By always giving logged out always cached content Akamai bears the brunt for reddit’s traffic. Huge performance improvement.

I have ended up using this philosophy in a website I've been working on lately, where people can post puzzles from The Witness. This includes simplifying decisions such as not tracking solved puzzles unless you have a user id, and not allowing navigating to a random puzzle either, as this routine depends on stored solves and upvotes. Supporting not-logged-in users just means extra code for me.

In general, I don't think this is a bad attitude for a website to have.

It is perhaps different in the case of GitHub, a highly depended-on and well established website which is actually removing functionality here. I would still assume good faith about the reason. And mobile login rates are a problem for everyone, I'm pretty sure, not just GitHub.