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We lost 54k GitHub stars

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#251

Post by [deleted] »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #163
wpietri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you read "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'". You'd learn a lot. https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Understanding-Human-Error... My view is that expecting humans to stop making mistakes is much less effective than fixing the systems that amplify those mistakes into large, irreversible impacts.

This, 1000x this. It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future". As a species, we will always take shortcuts. If a mental pathway doesn't need to be exercised to do something, it won't be. If we see the same popup a hundred times, we're going to ignore the contents by the 100th time because we're used to it. But it shouldn't be possible to make this mistake if t…

[deleted]

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#252

Post by MatthiasPortzel »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #44
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…

So all those people got notifications and then some of them looked further at the notifications and then engaged. Now those people won't get those notifications and won't engage. Most of these people won't notice they don't get these notifications. They won't resubscribe. They're lost forever. This is kind of like losing your email list. Your comment reads like you don't understand how a community works.

You don't get notifications after starring a repo, they're only a measure of how popular the repo is. The repo did legitimately lose its Watchers, but the author seems a lot more concerned about losing (and getting back) the stars.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#253

Post by saila »

vaishnavsm wrote: post #133
cmeacham98 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In addition to typing the repo name, maybe they should make you check a box for each type of item that will be deleted:

    [ ] Delete 54,000 stars?
    [ ] Delete 8,000 watchers?
    [ ] etc

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#254

Post by layer8 »

ncmncm wrote: post #222
layer8 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that IF they delete everything, they should send a notification to the affected users. When the repository is made public again, then since they deleted the star relation it’s not possible to send another notification.

Unless, of course, if they just changed the column setting from "starred" to "was starred". As they could do. If they cared.

That’s why I wrote “IF they delete everything”. You’re saying they shouldn’t delete everything, which I agree with, but that’s not the case I was addressing.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#255

Post by _moof »

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…

> make sure you're not on autopilot when taking potentially dangerous actions

When it comes to repetitive or familiar actions, this is physically impossible. If a repeated action is dangerous you cannot use a human interrupting themselves as your only control. It just won't happen.

Overall this is a classic UI design failure. In addition to the "people physically can't take themselves off autopilot" problem, the interface destroys the user's data without providing a way to get it back. It would take relatively little engineering effort to make this reversible.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#256

Post by bokwoon »

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 assume that the cascading done on GitHub would be done on a FK constraint

GitHub doesn’t use foreign keys, the cascade delete must have been manually implemented.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21486494

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#257

Post by ovao »

tshaddox wrote: post #132
FabHK wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

Another commenter suggested having to type the number of stars you’d be forfeiting instead of the repo name. Kind of a neat idea I think.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#258

Post by CodeWriter23 »

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’ve adopted a pattern of:

If they click ok:

Asking again to be sure you want to destroy masses of data

But even that fails if there is a language barrier.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#259

Post by XCSme »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #241
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?

Let's assume that the stars don't go away when the repo is made private. There are a couple of options: - The users can still see all their stars and find the private repo, which makes it not private. - The users can't see all their stars, they can only see their stars for the public repos. There's no way to find or unstar a private repo that you starred while it was public. This would lead to the situation that if y…

> The users can still see all their stars and find the private repo, which makes it not private.

Why seeing a start you made for a previously public repository makes it not private? People remember things too, there's also the webarchive. You should be able to unstar it or keep your star, the only difference is that you don't know if the repository still exists or not.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#260

Post by KeepFlying »

diego_sandoval wrote: post #241
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?

Let's assume that the stars don't go away when the repo is made private. There are a couple of options: - The users can still see all their stars and find the private repo, which makes it not private. - The users can't see all their stars, they can only see their stars for the public repos. There's no way to find or unstar a private repo that you starred while it was public. This would lead to the situation that if y…

Your last option sounds appealing to me here. Yes it does mean that you can never really make the name of your repo fully private after it's been started, but the name isn't really what's important most of the time.

And there's always the potential to add a other toggle when privating a repo that lets you force-remove all stars.

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