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We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#131

Post by Rapzid »

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?

I feel like a parallel universe has suddenly intersected our own.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#132

Post by tshaddox »

FabHK wrote: post #90
capableweb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 u…

> I don't know what else they could have done to try to prevent it. As the author of the post suggests: Prominently spell out "This will remove 54,000 stars." vs. "This won't remove any stars (there are none yet)."

I'm not convinced that would have really solved the problem. One could just as easily post a screenshot of two nearly identical dialogs where the only different is that one says "This will remove 54 stars" and the other says "This will remove 54,000 stars" and the same argument could be made that "the only way to notice the difference is if you happen to notice those 3 zeros."

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#133

Post by vaishnavsm »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #111
vaishnavsm wrote: post #70

I really like this post. While the author clearly feels bad about the fact that they've lost his community and that GitHub didn't restore it (which is honestly what any of us would've felt under similar circumstances), they're also focusing towards the future and using their personal experience as a parable all of us can learn from. Lesson 1 on UI design I think is really important. I often think scary popup boxes ar…

I specifically dislike the "Lessons" section, as it throws all the blame on github and doesn't mention the seemingly obvious advice: "make sure you're not on autopilot when taking potentially dangerous actions, on github or any website". Yes, GitHub probably should show the stars in the warning UI, and hopefully that will prevent some of these mistakes. But GitHub makes it pretty hard to make this mistake already - t…

Sure, I understand that. But I think, as a designer, I can't really control the actions of my users. I can only try to design such that I can get them closer to the action they want to take. From that perspective, I think adding the additional information to the warning UI would, if not solve the problem, at least get us one step closer to helping the user make the right decision.

Tbh, when I've deleted repo's, I've mostly just copied the repo name and pasted it in the box. Careless of me? Definitely. Can GitHub change that carelessness? Probably not. Will a box that says "Stars: 54k" help? I think it'd help me, at the very least.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#134

Post by munk-a »

ncmncm wrote: post #115
Johnny555 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, knowing that it's the only way they have to recover from this situation, they could make the process easier to do and price it out as a service.

Or, just leave everything in place, always, and have the other code ignore the annotations for exactly as long as the repo is private.

Just FYI - you can star private repositories so it's not quite that simple. You'd need to determine if the starring aligns with permissions... but I think it's still relatively reasonable.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#135

Post by hvdijk »

forty wrote: post #60

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?

A practical consequence (not necessarily the only consequence) would be for the people who starred it who use stars as a bookmark feature: they have now lost their bookmark.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#136

Post by wpietri »

forty wrote: post #60

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?

Starring a repo is a way of tracking it. So now there are 55k people who were trying to keep an eye on the project who have silently lost that.

It's also an important indicator of community size and authenticity, important factors in the decision to use the code.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#137

Post by notreallyserio »

JadoJodo wrote: post #124
bsuvc wrote: post #84

Sure, the author should be responsible. Yes, GitHub should have a better UX around this action. But... There is another thing to consider: Is it really necessary that a repo that is accidentally made private and then made public should lose its stars anyway? Is that really what the repo owner or the people who starred the repo even want to happen?

I don’t know for certain but I feel like this could allow something like 1. Takeover/inherit public repo with lots of stars 2. Take repo private (retaining stars) 3. Replace repo code with some malicious/offensive code. 4. Take repo public again 5. Inherit the trust/prestige of the old repo.

Yeah, that's a risk. They could mitigate it by allowing you to revert all branches/tags back to the pre-private state, but we're getting more and more complicated here.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#138

Post by jacobolus »

calcifer wrote: post #81
Dylan16807 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I think the respectful solution is to show it as "you starred X, it's private now, you can unstar if you like" (make sure if the name changes privately then the new name isn't shown). Such a solution is not only good in the case of mistakes like this, it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list.

> it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list. It's honestly hilarious how the definition of 'gaslight' has expanded so dramatically in the past few years that it now means 'anything that confuses me'. For future reference, here's what it actually means [1]: > Psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to q…

The origin of “gaslight” is a movie where a husband surreptitiously removes objects from the room, dims and brightens the lights, etc. and pretends the changes were just the wife’s imagination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)#Plot

Removing bookmarks from someone’s list without notification seems at least broadly comparable (in both cases, the victim is confused and might question their own memory, because the state of the world changed in an incongruous way), though it is the action of an emotionless machine with a programming bug rather than a malicious human.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#139

Post by ncmncm »

nkozyra wrote: post #73
pizza234 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so easy to make this accident - one needs to type the full name of the repository. AWS does the same, for example, when deleting RDS instances, and I find it effective.

Yeah. I'm not sure what else you can do with warnings other than make the person effectively recite back the thing they're doing.

There was an explicit suggestion right there in the article what else they could do, so you don't even have to guess.

Typing in the number of objects that would be deleted in addition to the name is something else.

Or, they could just keep all of them in place, but hidden, and "restore" them all automatically if you made it public again.

There are lots and lots of things they could do better, if they cared. But paraphrasing Eunice, of course they don't care, they're Microsoft.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#140

Post by mattcwilson »

polote wrote: 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.

What could the author have done with this post that would take it from being “blaming” into “giving feedback in an earnest intent to save others future pain”?
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