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We lost 54k GitHub stars

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#421

Post by maxloh »

acid__ wrote: post #125
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?

(Whether it's a good idea or not,) people often use stars as a quick-and-dirty proxy for "is this repo reasonably well trusted?" and "how big is the community for this project?". All else being equal, many people would default to using a repo with 20,000 stars over a repo with 20.

As a junior developer, GitHub star was one of the most important metric when I am choosing library/software.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#422

Post by junon »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #394
njsubedi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But.. one of their developers also made the same mistake as the OP. The OP learned a lesson but seemingly anyone at GitHub didn’t think, “we should fix this confirmation dialog so this doesn’t happen again”.

It’s also possible that they did consider it, but upon investigation it entailed more work than they could justify. I do think including more context about what will be destroyed by the action would be great, and probably pragmatic, but… If typing out the name of the repository isn’t enough, providing context might not be either. The more I think about it, the more it seems like one of those “Whatever, we’ve got a mi…

They're owned by Microsoft and funded/now led by by Nat Friedman. They can justify a lot.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#423

Post by ncmncm »

mypalmike wrote: post #315
ncmncm wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to delete anything at all. Set the "private" flag when the user asks for to make it private. Unset the "private" flag when they make it public again. If it is needful to be able to delete stars, make a separate button for that. But it is hard to imagine such a need.

Stop. You've said the same thing a dozen times in this thread. Besides being repetitive, you're overlooking the obvious fact that having associations from non members of private repos to those repos is problematic. At the very least at the UI level, maintaining known dead internal links is bad form. So you'd be creating edge cases for the UI and probably numerous places deeper in the tech stack as well. Which is fine…

No post body was provided.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#424

Post by kevinforrestcon »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #189
icambron wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not quite it. The solution isn’t to stop them from doing it or warning them more aggressively; it’s to make it genuinely less dangerous. For example, make the stars all come back when you reverse the switch. Of course that’s a lot harder to do, since it’s a lot more than a UX change. So I’m not really slagging GitHub here. But it’s the right way to attack this problem.

True "Undo" is, IMO, a pipe dream for all but brand new projects. That will pretty much require you to rearchitect a decent chunk of anything that wasn't built with it explicitly in mind. In this case, I don't quite understand why stars and forks need to be deleted when switching visibility, since it seems like the two shouldn't be linked. I can star and fork my private repos just fine, so it seems like it was just e…

Then don't "do" the delete, when the users "do" the delete.

Pretend to do it, actually do it 24 hours later, and if they "undo" the delete within that time frame, just remove it from the delete queue process.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#425

Post by notRobot »

Agentlien wrote: post #418
kgeist wrote: post #397

Reminds me of our own quest to stop users from deleting their entire projects by accident in our product. 1st iteration: delete button with a confirmation box (standard stuff). Users click through the box in autopilot mode and still delete their entire projects. 2nd iteration: someone came up with an idea: confirmation box + an additional checkbox (if it isn't checked, the delete button is disabled). Users still mana…

I've seen some software, can't remember which, that forces you to type the name of the project you're deleting to confirm. That's made me think twice.

GitHub does that

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#426

Post by ncmncm »

djur wrote: post #409
ncmncm wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just not deleting them in the first place, or not deleting them until explicitly asked to, would suffice, and would be, ultimately, less code. So, I am not buying the apologetics.

It seems to me that services that pretend to delete data but don't actually do it are usually subject to criticism on Hacker News, not praise.

You did not read the comment you replied to. Why? And then, why reply?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#427

Post by ncmncm »

bokwoon wrote: post #256
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

That it took a half hour to do all the pointless activity says something.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#428

Post by wodenokoto »

DryLabRebel wrote: post #191
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 think this is getting at the more robust solution. When youtube videos are taken down or made private, they are not deleted necessarily from my playlists. There's simply an indicator that they video is 'no longer available'. I don't see why something similar can't be the behaviour for GitHub stars and watches?

You do lose the title, which is super annoying. "What did I used to have?" Super frustrating feeling.

Here's a list of your favourite songs, but two are missing, have fun figuring out which two it is!

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#429

Post by pishpash »

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…

Agreed, the swipe at Microsoft (with links he saved from who knows when!) was especially gratuitous. He mad. Don't write something public when bitter should be a lesson right after don't be on autopilot.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#430

Post by pishpash »

oriki wrote: post #146
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…

Yeah, but on the other hand, "don't make mistakes" isn't a meaningful or useful lesson.

Don't make this specific mistake is a very meaningful and useful lesson.
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