Customers ability to 1. Punish innovation and 2. Punish a lack of innovation is a little bit hard to overestimate as a Product Manager. Experimentation = bad, no experimentation = also bad. It's like how Google makes some of the best software ever, and also people savagely denounce them every time they kill a failing product. As if they would have learned as fast if they either didn't make the product to begin with or kept it around to languish and maintain.
It isn't a customer's responsibility to be a company's guinea pig, and it's not a secret that customers would be unhappy that tech companies treat them as such. This is especially true when Product Managers intentionally implement features that take advantage of users by monetizing their data and then implementing high switching costs that make it even more painful for the customer once the Product Manager ends their "experiment". If tech companies want to perform market research by experimenting on customers, they should do the same thing that other industries do and compensate the experiment subjects, not take advantage of them.
If you want to disrespect customers by treating them like disposable guinea pigs (and not even giving them the courtesy of notifying them they're part of an experiment), don't be surprised if they start to catch on and treat your company as if it's disposable, too.
It’s incredible to read the casual tone of those postings. Ten years ago Github was just an amazing innovation that could just spin a service shutdown as an experiment - now everything it does is vital infrastructure for modern development.
It's also a service they launched in the first year as a company... I think they were still looking for an MVP at the time, I have no idea how anyone could compare the situations.
i would say that went away because the rubygems ecosystem (including the invention of bundler) improved enough that there was really no reason to use github as your rubygem server. It didn't give you anything but a slightly confusing proprietary alternative with no added value. So people rightly stopped using it, and it rightly went away.
It's not clear to me what the value added for ruby specifically is now. (Yes, I know rubygems.org has problems; but this has feature problems with indirect dependencies compared to rubygems.org hosting).