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I am incredibly glad they are keeping it around for now -- for now being the key word here. From the way they worded it, doesn't seem like they were prepared for the feedback they received, in terms of (paraphrased) "the few people who used the page seem to love it". How do they not know such an important metric? Shouldn't they be able to measure the number of recurring users? Shouldn't that metric tell them that ins…
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
Chris's insight from that was and I am paraphrasing so hopefully I will get it right: 'It is ok to dive into data with a question you want answered in mind; we should be careful about stumbling onto data and assume the question as a result.'
Needless to say, it is a little different from, say, Amazon's creed so it is somewhat controversial for analysts.
From reading the discussion about this issue here and on Reddit, it seems like most people weren’t aware that this page even existed - but the people who do know about it find it extremely useful. So instead of removing it, how about promoting it more?
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
I mean, how exactly do you argue with something like "0.5% of users have visited this page in the past 12 months, and 0.3% of users have only visited once"? I don't know what their telemetry said, but generally it's something like this. This is empirical enough to say decisively "most people do not care about this feature."
So visits are not the proper metric to depict how useful it is. Just because I consult a doctor once a year doesn't make this appointment less useful than the pizza truck I go to every week.
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
It's literally just webpage with a list of repos that have been starred the most.
It's not like it a complicated feature that needs a bunch of people to maintain lol.
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
But even if it not used by a lot of people, why remove it? It's literally just webpage with a list of repos that have been starred the most. It's not like it a complicated feature that needs a bunch of people to maintain lol.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if we follow that logic big red emergency stop buttons should be removed from machinery because of their low usage.
Sure. But good-sense would, in the case of emergency stop buttons, tell you that despite a lack of thought or usage, they are required for safe operation. You can't make that conclusion with a webpage for content discovery.
Do they even that that feature even exist? I'd say a lot of users ignore most of the (social) features of GitHub beside "a public remote git repo I can download"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, how exactly do you argue with something like "0.5% of users have visited this page in the past 12 months, and 0.3% of users have only visited once"? I don't know what their telemetry said, but generally it's something like this. This is empirical enough to say decisively "most people do not care about this feature."
I love the github trending page, but I need only to visit it 10 times a year for it to fullfill its role. Yet I go to github every day. So visits are not the proper metric to depict how useful it is. Just because I consult a doctor once a year doesn't make this appointment less useful than the pizza truck I go to every week.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the github trending page, but I need only to visit it 10 times a year for it to fullfill its role. Yet I go to github every day. So visits are not the proper metric to depict how useful it is. Just because I consult a doctor once a year doesn't make this appointment less useful than the pizza truck I go to every week.
This is bad logic. Almost everyone goes to the doctor in a year. And again, what is the importance of a doctor’s office. I once used a security tool that looked at the world in a very narrow sense. Despite being a general purpose tool, it would often flag really bad false-positives like “this security group allows all ingress!”, while applied to zero resources, while completely missing other, real, consequential issu…
Wether or not it applies at this case is not determined, but it does underline the fact using only visit metrics for this particular page does not give the whole story.
Which is congruent with the reaction the announcement got.