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We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

1–10 of 697 posts

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#2
That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the thing that really failed here is the user who performed the action.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#4
post #2

That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the thing that really failed here is the user who performed the action.

They do raise a good point about the UI though, explicitly showing "you're about to nuke 55k people, are you sure?" would make the user pause.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#5
post #2

That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the thing that really failed here is the user who performed the action.

I have no dog in the fight here, and no affiliation to HTTPie, but this definitely seems like a Github issue to me. You can't just give users ways to easily and accidentally shoot themselves in the foot, and then blame the user for shooting themselves in the foot.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#8
post #2

That's crazy that a manual error by someone, for whatever reason, end up being an article blaming Github for all sort of reasons. And never accepting that the thing that really failed here is the user who performed the action.

I have no dog in the fight here, and no affiliation to HTTPie, but this definitely seems like a Github issue to me. You can't just give users ways to easily and accidentally shoot themselves in the foot, and then blame the user for shooting themselves in the foot.

Who got shot in the foot here? The article keeps talking about killing 55 thousand people. I’m trying to grok why “unstarring the repo” is such an earthshattering thing. It’s annoying if you wanted it starred / wanted notifications, because you have to notice and redo it… but there’s no irreparable harm, no data loss.

This reads like somebody was placing way too much personal mental value on “the repo for my project has a large number of stars”

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#9
"It's their fault, they only showed 5 warning banners. A 6th one would have totally stopped me from doing this."

If a "type your repository name to confirm" box still doesn't make you double check that you picked the right repository, what else can they even do?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#10
post #3

It does strike me as unfair that GitHub themselves made the exact same mistake but were able to fix it with database backups.

I'm just surprised that after going through that pain themselves they didn't decide to revise how that social linking data is handled. A lot of github content is softly deleted by necessity, you couldn't nuke tickets written by a now non-existent user or unmerge PRs so this isn't really a new concept to the team.

I don't think it's surprising they'd do such a thing for themselves and not a customer - I'm more surprised they didn't remove the footgun for future mistakes on their part.

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