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We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#501

Post by rob74 »

wpietri wrote: post #123
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…

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.

But still, I also share the opinion that GitHub's UX for dangerous actions on a repository is currently already best in class, so blaming them for your mistakes is pretty unfair. To make your repo private, you have to:

- click "change visibility" in the "Danger Zone" area of the settings.

- select "make private" with an additional warning shown that you will lose all stars and watchers. Ok, maybe it should mention how many.

- type the name of the repo into a box and then click "I understand, change repo visibility".

And yes, sometimes it is important to expect humans to not make mistakes. For example, at railway crossings. Even if you drove over it 100 times and no train came, the 101th time you may still die if you don't check for a train before crossing.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#502

Post by iforgotpassword »

wpietri wrote: post #123
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…

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.

So, displaying an additional or more explicit warning that mentions stars and watchers makes sense. No arguing, hope they do that. But to me also, it left a little bit of a bad aftertaste that the author completely skips over the part of that process where you have to enter the repository name right where they show the two screenshots side by side.

Anecdotal: You have to enter the full name for a couple destructive actions on GitHub, and every time I had to do it was so jarring to me that I stopped everything, rechecked what I'm doing twice, started wondering if I might be dreaming, am on drugs or a voice in my head is telling me to do something dumb. Like, yes we should improve nonetheless, and I usually try to put myself into other people's shoes before judging them, but this is just one of the few times where I just can't help but, you know, think it was somewhat dumb to make this mistake with the current system in place. Like, next time we have this stars and watchers warning in place and still someone will manage to proceed on autopilot, what do we do next? Have a siren sound go off in addition? Have the user enable their mic and spell out the repo name? Send a written letter to GitHub? You'll never get the error rate to 0, at which point would you rather accept people making mistakes and calling them out on it than adding more inconvenience on top that just bothers everybody else?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#503

Post by necovek »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #239
chefandy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much agree— Universal human fallibility is not an avoidable moral failure, but looking down on those who've made, admitted, and taken responsibility for simple mistakes sure is. Unrealistic assumptions about people's attention, processing capability, and physical capabilities may be the greatest hurdle when trying to actually solve people's problems with software. It can even be a safety issue— consider the Th…

> I'll bet the list of side-effects that are important to some people would be pointlessly long. There's many good ways to design this that wouldn't result in pointlessly long lists (which is another problem). You don't need to expose everything that will happen when you do an action, just the "most important". With unlimited budget, you could compare a bunch of metrics to a baseline to figure out what might be impor…

It sounds like you've never been part of an engineering organization (I know you have since you bring up unlimited budget ;)

It is obviously possible to design a much better, contextual warning with (more) relevant details highlighted. How much time is usually set aside for those?

And yet, it's never going to stop mistakes.

And how many other places like these are there in a large service like GitHub?

A much better way to fix this is to expect mistakes and make it possible to revert instead. Soft deletes can make that trivial to implement for the most part too (except in GDPR like cases where you've got to really remove stuff).

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#504

Post by forgotpwd16 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #491

>"The same goes for stars. If you’re one of those 54K people who’ve starred the repo any time in the past decade, the repo is no longer among your starred projects." // This seems like bad design from a UX perspective. Projects I star are a characteristic of my account. If a project is made private, I still want to have the star in my account list; it feels almost like gaslighting to just remove a star.

>Projects I star are a characteristic of my account.

What about deleted repos? Should those be maintained as well?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#505

Post by alpaca128 »

pishpash wrote: post #430
oriki wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes. But without the possibility to undo mistakes you'll stand in ruins before you learned enough lessons.

"Just don't make any mistakes" is the worst stance one can have in this context, it denies reality and only assures you're unprepared when (not if) something important goes wrong.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#506

Post by yu-carm-kror »

I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole thing but this sound like hyperbole

> And GitHub cascade-deleted our community that took 10 years to build.

How does losing stars equate to losing the community? Won’t actual fans be right back using and contributing?

If you remove a contributor of a private github repo it deletes their remote fork and all of their remote branches. To me that’s real loss.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#507

Post by [deleted] »

wpietri wrote: post #123
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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#508

Post by davedx »

Contrarian opinion here.

While things can always be better the Github UX is good enough here. I am reminded of an old phrase:

“A bad workman always blames his tools.”

At some point you just need to accept responsibility for your actions and stop blaming others.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#509

Post by pmontra »

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…

The author explicitly admits "my brain switched to auto-pilot mode." The problem with that is that we're on auto-pilot many times and we realize we're doing it only after something bad happens. The UX should prevent auto-pilot to do harm to us (and possibly to the customer/company relationship.) "You're about to delete 55k stars" should be enough, as the author suggested. But designers can be on auto-pilot too.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#510

Post by Cthulhu_ »

yu-carm-kror wrote: post #506

I’ll admit I didn’t read the whole thing but this sound like hyperbole > And GitHub cascade-deleted our community that took 10 years to build. How does losing stars equate to losing the community? Won’t actual fans be right back using and contributing? If you remove a contributor of a private github repo it deletes their remote fork and all of their remote branches. To me that’s real loss.

> Won’t actual fans be right back using and contributing?

Yes, but if "actual" fans are <1% of your existing user base then your reach and ranking is still far below what it used to be. I'm sure most people on GH don't even remember what repos they've starred, and httpie may be one of just thousands, of which many will disappear from their starred repos overnight without them even noticing.

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