To be honest, I think it has always been sucky in many ways. They change it quite frequently, but it doesn't actually seem to be changes that improve the UI. It only makes it frustratingly different than before.
I often wonder if the projects my team works on ends up that way. We A/B test a lot of changes and often find that it makes absolutely no difference in conversion. In the end we often don't change things that seem to be "obvious" improvements for fear that we'll just frustrate our customers by changing things in ways they don't care about.
Exactly this, it always sucks and it changes too often in completely random ways.
Github's issue tracker is also very half baked, every real project has to has a Trac instance or so somewhere else.
But _it has critical mass_, and pull requests and the way commenting them and testing them etc works is really awesome, and it'll be hard for a new competitor to get people to move.
I wouldn't say the GitHub UI sucks. All you need to do is look back to SourceForge—even before they completely sold their soul to the devil—to understand that GitHub was actually a huge step forward in the UI department. They do a lot right: powerful features, snappy file browser, very good discussion view in Pull Requests, etc.
Granted, there are a lot of warts and confusing navigation and organization, but in many ways this is a function of trying to serve so many disparate use cases. Certainly it could be a lot better, but it's far from easy—certainly not the type of thing you could just throw a UX designer at, but something where you need a UX visionary who also happens to be a developer with deep understanding and practice using git.
I agree with you that Issues is terrible though. I tried to use it for my team, but the show-stopper was that you can't move issues between repos, and so there is no way to stay organized across a non-monolith architecture where you need to take issues in based on front-facing products and not just code-level concerns. If it wasn't for that, we probably would have tried to suffer through it just for the integration benefits.
As others have said, it isn't hard at all. It's just Git. You can host your Git projects anywhere you want. To be fair, Github has reasonable prices and even though I complain about the strange UI, there is a lot of good functionality. The strangely named "Network Graph" has saved my butt more than once.
I have been thinking, though, that I don't like the workflow associated with commenting out of band. I would really prefer that people comment by making a branch and modifying my PR (either with code comments or just fixing the problems directly). If I knew how to do that efficiently, I probably would have almost no attachment left to GH.
It's actually simple. GitHub tests on their free users and see their reaction. If the feedback is positive, move it to paid clients. If not, keep frustrating your free clients so they move to paid accounts.
Why does that make it harder for me to move my paid repos off of github? I don't use PR or the github issue tracker, so I could probably start using the google cloud repos tomorrow if felt like it.
Just went on Github and I can't believe they remove that button. Doesn't seem like anything is gained from it and I'm sure I'm not the only one who uses it daily. I really hope they reverse that change.
It's very annoying. To me a while of searching around to find the explore button also, which got grouped into that drop down. Hiding content in drop downs unnecessarily is very annoying.
I often wonder if the projects my team works on ends up that way. We A/B test a lot of changes and often find that it makes absolutely no difference in conversion. In the end we often don't change things that seem to be "obvious" improvements for fear that we'll just frustrate our customers by changing things in ways they don't care about.
UI design is hard :-)