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We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#51

Post by nkozyra »

akerl_ wrote: post #8
spiderice wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's very much a matter of reputation. Losing the star as a user is a pretty small inconvenience, tantamount to losing a bookmark.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#52

Post by CuriousCosmic »

pizza234 wrote: post #25

The post is omitting that the user must type the name of the repository in full; in this case, they typed `httpie/httpie`. If one is in such a deep autopilot state, no amount of warnings will work.

The post addressed this.

> What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.

> GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. In this context, and since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, my brain switched to auto-pilot mode.

> I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.

> That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.

There's a subtle naming difference between profile README repos for users and orgs that was the root cause of this. The user typed the repo name in however because it matched the same format for the previous profile README repo, it didn't register that this was not in fact the profile README repo they were looking for.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#53

Post by capableweb »

ghoomketu wrote: post #17

That comparison spot the difference pic is really scary. I had to check it 2 times myself before I could spot that the last line is different. Now that you're on the HN's frontpage, hopefully somebody from Github upper management will see this and all will be good soon thanks to gold old HN (especially when they did the same thing themselves and restored it). Wish you the best.

> That comparison spot the difference pic is really scary. I had to check it 2 times myself before I could spot that the last line is different.

That's not the only difference. The other difference is that you also have to type the full repository name, including the organization name.

If they wanted to delete the correct repository, they would have to type httpie/.github, but instead they typed httpie/httpie.

It's unfortunate what happened, but without GitHub removing the possibility at all to delete repositories/change the visibility, I don't know what else they could have done to try to prevent it. It's really hard as a user to affect the wrong repository, as you are gonna have to mentally and literally pause to write out the organization name + repository (httpie/httpie in this case) and if that doesn't stop you, I don't think anything would.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#54

Post by robonerd »

delaaxe wrote: post #36
akerl_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you been living under a rock? Everyone judges repos by their amount of stars. Why do you think every social media network has the concept of likes?

Assuming you're not being sarcastic: a company providing a metric and telling you to care about it does not oblige you to actually give a shit.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#55

Post by burnished »

pizza234 wrote: post #25

The post is omitting that the user must type the name of the repository in full; in this case, they typed `httpie/httpie`. If one is in such a deep autopilot state, no amount of warnings will work.

The post did not omit that, it included the very similar thing they typed as context for how they auto-piloted it. In that autopilot state having to type out 54000 would probably have snapped them out of it. I get why you'd think the author is being unreasonable, they seem to imply that this should already have been done, but I think that is mostly them feeling upset about the situation. The actual observations would be thoughtful improvements to the UI.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#56

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

munk-a wrote: post #47
delaaxe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been living under a rock? Everyone judges repos by their amount of stars. Why do you think every social media network has the concept of likes?

Can you just clarify if that statement was sarcastic or not? I've had a very different experience around stars - they're just a bit of fluff and pretty unimportant compared to watches.

HTTPie's watches were irreversibly deleted, too.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#57

Post by arcticfox »

pizza234 wrote: post #25

The post is omitting that the user must type the name of the repository in full; in this case, they typed `httpie/httpie`. If one is in such a deep autopilot state, no amount of warnings will work.

Your comment is omitting that the post covered this exact point in detail: they had just done the same operating on their personal profile where you have to type [username]/[username]. [organization]/[organization] is the obvious corrolary.

Anyways it's embarrassing that Github made this same mistake themselves, and yet couldn't spare the time for a massive content creator contributing to their platform

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#58

Post by williamsmj »

pluc wrote: post #21

You didn't lose anything, you asked for it to be removed by setting your repository private, albeit mistakenly. Something that is public (stars) cannot coexist with something that is private (your repo), otherwise unexpected things start to happen or you need to write a bunch of pointless edge cases. It makes sense. So does this article, but it should be a "lesson learned" and not a "GitHub fucked us" angle cause it…

The article literally has a section "Lessons learned".

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#59

Post by capableweb »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #27

GitHub made a cardinal UX design sin here: never use a warning when you mean undo [1]. If they had given even a five minute grace period before starting the irreversible process of removing all the watchers, this wouldn’t have happened. https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning/

Which comes with its own problems. What if I just published something I wanted to be secret? Then I need to be able to switch it back to private, and it has to be quick, not after five minutes. Distributed systems with eventual consistency already make fixes like that hard, not to mention caches and whatever.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#60

Post by forty »

What can you purchase with GitHub stars?

More seriously, why do they matter? Is it a prestige thing only or are there practical consequences to losing the stars?

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