Complaints mount after GitHub launches new algorithmic feed

You’re right, I shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Actions is a great addition, and I haven’t really used Discussions yet, but I’ glad to see that there is some thing to improve what was breaking at the seems trying to do that job before (Issues).

I don’t think GH has gone straight downhill after joining MS. There’s been a lot of good. But I do get the sense that it doesn’t have the unified vision that it had 10 years ago, and that they are doing a lot of things for no clear reason.

I’ve worked in a large company before, and a lot of product changes and “features” we added were more like “division X has this cool new thing and VP y wants more people to start using it internally. How can we plug in into what we build?” I’m half seriously waiting for the day that GH drops Git support and switches to a proprietary fork that is only accessible with VS Code.

It's also "showing me stuff I may want when I least want to be aware of it". Stop the distractions already.

This might be true for social media but for a news app, they control their own pace.

I posted this to their feedback, but I'll share it here too.

The new algorithmic feed gives me absolutely nothing of value - it's giving me a bunch of information I have no need for or interest in. It's just adding pure noise and no signal.

The following feed might work for people who use the commit as the unit of review, but since there's no way to filter it to a certain subset of repos, it's also way too noisy to be useful. And for those of us who use the Pull Request as the unit of review, it's absolutely useless. Again, all noise and no signal.

I would love the ability to construct an arbitrary number of custom feeds to surface information I actually need.

I want to create new feeds, select whether they contain commits, pull request activity (PRs opened, closed, merged, and reviewed, and commented on), or both. Then I want to be able to filter which repos/organizations that feed is limited to. Ideally, I'd be able to select a set of feeds to show on the homepage as tabs I could click between to quickly scan activity in the subsets of repos I work on.

So for example, I would create one feed to be my "Primary Responsibility area at Work". This would be the subset of repos I am primarily responsible for at my workplace. I'd configure it to show PR activity - new PR opens, new reviews, new comments (on review or on the PR), and PR merges or closes. This would surface the information I need and would allow me to very quickly scan to see whether there were any PRs I needed to look over or PR discussions I wanted to add my voice to. This is not a view I have right now. Notifications doesn't surface this information in a way that's easy to scan, and otherwise I have to go digging through (potentially) multiple boards or issues lists to see it. Instead being able to quickly scan down a feed of comments or reviews and reply right in the feed, I have to click through numerous screens and it's easy to miss stuff.

I would then create a second feed that would be "All of work" which I would configure to be just PR activity for my work organization. This would allow me to quickly scan activity in other repos that I'm not primarily responsible for, and contribute if there are things of value I could add. Right now I can't do this at all, I have to rely on my teammates tagging me in. It's just much too time consuming to try to scan through all the activity - even though, were it presented in feed format of just the new stuff, there's probably not so much that I couldn't easily scan it every day. It's the amount of digging through screens and trying to figure out what's new that's time consuming.

Then I'd create a feed for "My Stuff" which would contain all activity on repos I own (PRs and Commits). This would be mostly empty since, for the most part, I'm not collaboration with folks right now. But someday I'd like to, and this feed would be very useful then.

Finally I'd create various feeds for the all the open source I follow based on what project is, how interested in it I am, and how involved in I am.

Having this ability - the ability to create multiple custom feeds to surface this information I want by groups that are meaningful to me - has the potential to make collaboration on Github much easier and more efficient. One of the problems we face as a team is knowing when we need to respond to a pull request. And right now we mostly solve that with process (pinging each other, standups) and tooling (Jira/Slack). Having a feed we could quickly check for new activity would significantly grease those wheels and save us time elsewhere.

This viewpoint underestimates a single person's ability to consume the output of a news organization. There are orders of magnitude difference between the number of stories that can appear in one's newsfeed and the number of stories produced bye a news organization in a day.

One could roughly estimate that by the time a news organization grows to need a full floor of office space, its pace of production will outstrip most readers' ability to keep up and not miss important stories. A temporal feed makes "keeping up" important, as relevant stories will quickly drop off the feed due to newer stories having been published more recently. The reverse is also true: a curated feed allows readers to step away and not worry that they will miss something important.

The pacing of news stories is dictated by a combination of the number of salient events occurring as well as the number of staff.

To use a concrete example, the (already-shortened) Yahoo! Finance News for Apple has 11 stories published today. There are thousands of public companies, and relevant news is published every day about many of them. A temporal feed of company news on the Yahoo! Finance homepage would therefore not be very useful. The pacing is essentially outside the control of Yahoo!, since it is driven by events at thousands of companies.