If anything, it's the opposite of a dark pattern: you get to see if it'll provide any value for you without paying a dime. It's a far better proposition than paying up only to find out that it won't free up any space for you. The linked site is very clear about how the pricing works.
What makes it a (crystal clear IMO) dark pattern is that the purportedly "free" feature set gives the user no value whatsoever. It only exists to induce sales. Inducing a high-bar commit (the purchase) by first securing a low-bar commit (install + scan) is an old trick. Don't fall for it.
I think this is an outrageous abuse of the term “dark pattern” from people who want to be angry more than they want to think. The website mentions repeatedly what the pricing model is, and the operation is “we show you exactly how much value you would get from paying, and then you can decide whether it’s worth it to you.” That’s as honest and plain as business can get: Plenty of people don’t have many/any files which would benefit from APFS COW snapshots and for them paying before the scan would be a ripoff.
We used to call products like this trials or trialware. There was always clear verbiage on the site attesting to the fact that the product was not free but that you could download it for a trial to see if you liked it before paying for it. But I suppose this doesn't even really offer a trial as it doesn't do anything at all until you pay.
Here, the first mention of any kind of cost to this software is ~1/8th of the way down the page when you're met with Q: How do I pay for Hyperspace? which litteraly states that it's a free download that doesn't do anything unless you pay them, meaning that it is not free in any sense of the term.
> The linked site is very clear about how the pricing works.
Yes, it is.
It is also, very obviously, placed in such a way to reduce the bounce rate off the landing page and increase conversions.
When was the last time you were on a site that had meaningful content below its "releases" section?
Why is the answer to the "How do I pay?" FAQ question bend over backwards to first say
>Hyperspace is a free download in the Mac App Store. Once downloaded, it’s free to scan an unlimited number of files. Scanning will let you know how much space is eligible to be reclaimed.
Why doesn't the app store description say which capabilities are free and which are paid?
One or two of these are innocuous, but there are are a dozen small choices like this that have been made here, all aligned to increase the likelihood of one thing: Put the user in the position where they've already installed the app, sunk some time into it, and are anticipating the benefit before making it clear that they have to pay money.
That the page technically contains the words "you will need to pay for Hyperspace" does not mean this isn't a dark pattern.
You are complaining that it can’t instantaneously perform a complete scan of your disk, and then attributing malicious intent to this lack of magic instant scanning technology.
What are we even doing here. The knee-jerk conspiratorial foolishness on this site is completely off the deep end.
No, I'm complaining that it doesn't ask me to pay before it takes my time to perform a complete scan of my disk (ideally before it even gives me a download of the app).
We both know it does so intentionally, and we also know exactly what the intent is.
Wouldn’t the ideal be that it informs you up front that it requires payment to get the benefit, but allows you to scan to estimate the benefit before deciding whether to pay (but after acknowledging that getting the benefit requires payment)?
There absolutely are serious issues at all times, regardless of how busy the trains are. I'm sorry, but as someone who actually lives in Portland I'm telling you that mentally ill drug users do not give a crap about how many people there are in the train car. After the third time I had to move my kids to different cars or even exit the train entirely due to open drug use and dangerous behavior, I swore off public transit for good.
> I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues.
I think a lot of people are starting to realize that despite years of doom-and-gloom finger wagging about privacy, their lives have never actually been negatively impacted by the horrors of targeted ads and, if anything, are materially improved (free internet search engines, free email, free social networks, and so on).
It recently became very real for a lot of people. The US government is buying that harmless advertising data to target, locate, and arrest/deport people.
If I was an immigrant of any legal status, I would now absolutely think twice about providing a real name or address to any online service. Any benign good-faith "its only for ads" argument has been destroyed within the last year. GrapheneOS/Librem/Pursim should start advertising heavily in immigrant communities.
This also intertwines with the coordinated ID push for many social media networks. It builds an effective framework to target anyone. Trump casually designates people "terrorists" already.
By every available measure, Waymo is safer and more equitable than cabs and rideshares. Waymos don't refuse service on skin color or disability. They don't have to stop every block along a fixed route like TriMet. And they're not profitable. So what's your actual beef, here?
I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.
That part should be worrying; will they need to increase prices significantly when they decide to become profitable?
But more broadly, I agree that Waymo is an improvement over taxis or Uber/Lyft. The comparison to public transit is a complicated and local question (I don't live in Portland and have never ridden TriMet), but in general I think there's a place for both.
The worst part of all this is that GitHub's CTO and VP of Engineering sent out the usual "here's what we'll do to fix things" letter to their larger customers and, without exaggeration, it boiled down to: 1) "Here's a bunch of stuff we already did!" which... clearly isn't working, and 2) "We're continuing our Azure migration." also clearly not working.
So needless to say, if you depend on GitHub for critical business operations, you need to start thinking about what a world without GitHub looks like for your business and start working your way toward that. I know my confidence in GitHub's engineering leadership is at rock bottom.
I could sorta see a situation where the reality is "we're in the middle of a miserable transition and it'll clean up when we're done" but I don't think anyone has confidence that's all it is at this point.
Even that doesn’t really make sense to me, unless they’ve done it in a way where everything has to move at once.
Everywhere I’ve worked, if a migration is causing this much downtime then you kill the migration or slow it down. If every change has a 10% chance of bringing the site down, you only do a change every week or two until you can work out the kinks.
Reminds me of the bank for my business where a larger bank with terrible IT bought a smaller bank with great IT - guess which systems they standardized on? Online banking is still much worse than before and the web interface still says "will be migrated by end of 2023" for some parts. Many customers just left and complaints were widely reported in the media. I probably should leave, too.
Here are some relevant excerpts from an October 2025 article[1]:
> In a message to GitHub’s staff, CTO Vladimir Fedorov notes that GitHub is constrained on capacity in its Virginia data center. “It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot, which are changing how people use GitHub,” he writes.
> The plan, he writes, is for GitHub to completely move out of its own data centers in 24 months. “This means we have 18 months to execute (with a 6 month buffer),” Fedorov’s memo says. He acknowledges that since any migration of this scope will have to run in parallel on both the new and old infrastructure for at least six months, the team realistically needs to get this work done in the next 12 months.
If you consider that six month parallel window to have started from the time of the October memo (written presumably at the start of October), then that puts us currently or past the point where they would have cut off their old DC and defaulted to Azure only.
Whether plans or timelines changed, I have no idea of course but the above does make for a convenient timeline that would explain the recent instability. Of course, it could also just be symptomatic of increased AI usage generally and the same problems might have surfaced at a software level regardless of whether they were in a DC or on Azure.
Putting that nuance aside, personally I like the idea that Azure is simply a giant pile of shit operated by a corporation with no taste.
>It’s existential for us to keep up with the demands of AI and Copilot
if by chance the CTO reads this, as a user of GitHub I would find it really existential if GitHub continues functioning as a reliable hub for git workflows (hence the name), and I have the strong suspicion nobody except for the shareholders gives a lick about copilot or 'AI' if it makes the core service the site was designed for unusable
Why? What is the correlation between profit and shareholder sentiment (besides the fact that shareholders want said profits)? They don't really influence the operation of the business meaningfully.
Sure, but I think it's the wrong way around. Appeasing shareholders doesn't make you profitable, being profitable appeases shareholders. I think there is a wealth of evidence that appeasing shareholders actually impedes profits overall.
Incorrect. They need to appease/trick/threaten/etc those that are paying for their services. Shareholders just demand they do so at the greatest (often short term) rate.
i heard that they asked LinkedIn to do this too and they either refused or their systems were too complex so they refused to. Maybe that explains why LI availability seems ok
The New York Times has been thriving. They're profitable and their stock is near all-time highs. If the internet killed WaPo, why didn't it kill NYTimes?
As the sibling said, papers used to make money via ads and classifieds. NYTimes pivoted to games. This gives people a reason to go to NYT every day and gives them upsell opportunities to full subscriptions. WaPo and others don't have the alternate revenue source.
It's notable that they blame "our upstream provider" when it's quite literally the same company. I can't imagine GitHub engineers are very happy about the forced migration to Azure.
Having worked there around 2020-2021 there were many folks not happy with being forced to use azure and being forced to build GitHub actions based on azure devops. Lots of AWS usage still existed at that time but these days u bet it’s mostly gone.
True enough. The world is never as predictable as the computers we program, and the computers we program are never as predictable as we feel they should be.
Nobody is happy with Oracle anything! It has some users because it is free. It has paid users because Larry Ellison bribed the government. Nobody would choose it voluntarily.
A few years ago I talked to an developer advocate for Azure. I wanted to know why it took for ever when you wanted a new public IP. My take was that it felt like they went out on the internet to look for an IP to purchase from a 3rd. party. The answer I got was that do to the silos within Microsoft it might as well be a 3rd party supplier. The slowness is exactly because IPs are/were a managed by another Microsoft entity, who views any interaction, even within the company, as hostile.
I get your point, but it just sounds a bit funny when it's an artefact of corporate structure that it's true.
Like imagine if AWS was composed of separate companies for different services - Fargate was an Heroku acquisition say - and then they all went down and blamed their 'upstream provider' because they can't work without say VPC or EC2 availability.
I think that's all GP meant, it just reads a bit funny, not that it's wrong.
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