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GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

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Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#41
post #40

They are incompetent honestly. If you were to discontinue this page you would at least talk to a few power users of the page and know their mind before taking the decion. They either didn't do it or did it. If they did it but backtrack now it show they don't have much confidence in their decisions, and if they didn't it, what are their pm payed for? That is pm 101

> at least talk to a few

This is more like how to get unrepresentative sample 101.

Maybe they did and concluded it's fine to remove only to find out that general opinion is different.

Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#42

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."

Understand your audience, then back it up with metrics. Otherwise we will easily exclude audience e.g. those who need accessibility support

Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#44

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.

From TFA:

> "The data pipeline that powers the page has historically proven problematic to maintain and so given the low usage, we decided to switch off the Trending page."

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/31644#discussi...

Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#45
post #11

I've never seen the Trending page before, but it looks like another take on the the "Explore" page. I wonder, do people generally go to GitHub just to browse around? But if people find value in it, then who am I to say. By the way, it's deprecating. Depreciation is something else.

I like it for the more niche languages I follow such as rust/go. It's interesting to see where things are happening.

> for the more niche languages I follow such as rust/go

stares while writing Clojure

Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#47
post #7

The most effective thing the team behind this feature did to drive adoption was to threaten to remove it. More people know about this feature now than ever would have through traditional marketing tactics.

Not sure how much this applies for others, but it's certainly true for me. Social media have tainted the word “trending” for me, so it's not something that I would normally click on when I see it.

Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#48
post #31

I do find it a little odd all the comments in this thread are focusing on it as though it was a straight telemetry/metric decision. From the update, this feels more like it was problem area for maintenance purposes, then had its telemetry assessed for decision. "The data pipeline that powers the page has historically proven problematic to maintain and so given the low usage, we decided to switch off the Trending page…

Since Microsoft acquisition GitHub quality seems in decline, constant outages, git pushes that doesn't goes through while status page is green and now the attempt to remove trending page...

Is it the end of the original GitHub's spirit as a social coding?

Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#49

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…

> This is bad logic. Almost everyone goes to the doctor in a year.

They do?

I'm not even making a point about developing countries and access to healthcare, I assume 'everyone' was implicitly 'everyone here' or in developed countries or whatever. But I would be incredibly surprised if that's true here in the UK. Is it an artefact of US health insurance that you can typically claim a 'check-up' per year (so why not even if not needed, you paid for it) or even that it's insisted on for the validity of the policy (ensure you don't have something expensive developing) or something?

Re: GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

#50
post #33

People new to GitHub may want to look at the Trending / Explore pages to get a feel for the site. Those who are frequent users may skip that in the normal course of their business but drop in once in a while, if they are curious. It is okay. At least in the segment of GH users who cared about the feature, there was a significant enough outcry from GH's perspective that they chose to rollback their decision.

People new to GitHub want to create a repository and do a git push, nothing else.

Ooh guessing game! Here's my entry. People new to GitHub arrive by searching for . They read the readme.md and then follow the installation instructions.
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