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We lost 54k GitHub stars

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#121

Post by [deleted] »

capableweb wrote: post #59
jakelazaroff wrote: post #27

GitHub made a cardinal UX design sin here: never use a warning when you mean undo [1]. If they had given even a five minute grace period before starting the irreversible process of removing all the watchers, this wouldn’t have happened. https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning/

Which comes with its own problems. What if I just published something I wanted to be secret? Then I need to be able to switch it back to private, and it has to be quick, not after five minutes. Distributed systems with eventual consistency already make fixes like that hard, not to mention caches and whatever.

[deleted]

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#122

Post by jamesmishra »

This is a well-written blog post describing a real issue with GitHub's privacy mechanism.

But it is also a little silly for the blog post to show graphs extrapolating the hypothetical number of GitHub stars several years into the future. Their graphs' X-axis goes up to 2028.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#123

Post by wpietri »

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…

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.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#124

Post by JadoJodo »

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 don’t know for certain but I feel like this could allow something like 1. Takeover/inherit public repo with lots of stars 2. Take repo private (retaining stars) 3. Replace repo code with some malicious/offensive code. 4. Take repo public again 5. Inherit the trust/prestige of the old repo.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#125

Post by acid__ »

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.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#126

Post by ninkendo »

JadoJodo wrote: post #124
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 don’t know for certain but I feel like this could allow something like 1. Takeover/inherit public repo with lots of stars 2. Take repo private (retaining stars) 3. Replace repo code with some malicious/offensive code. 4. Take repo public again 5. Inherit the trust/prestige of the old repo.

You can do that without the “making it private and public again” part anyway.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#127

Post by tshaddox »

ghoomketu wrote: post #17

That comparison spot the difference pic is really scary. I had to check it 2 times myself before I could spot that the last line is different. Now that you're on the HN's frontpage, hopefully somebody from Github upper management will see this and all will be good soon thanks to gold old HN (especially when they did the same thing themselves and restored it). Wish you the best.

Just showing the two screenshots feels a little disingenuous though. It's not like that dialog just pops up randomly and asks if you want to delete a random repo, and the only way for you to know which repo it's talking about is to read that line near the bottom. In each case the path to summon that dialog had to go through direct interactions with the repo in question.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#128

Post by rhtgrg »

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…

> 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".

I don't know. Github employees themselves have made this mistake as outlined in the post, and they were easily able to recover from it, which probably lowered the priority on changing any UX.

Essentially, it's a complete non-issue depending on whether Github cares about you.

Would you like the police in your area to behave in this manner? I think not.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#129

Post by lexx »

On the plus side. 54k know and use this project not because they have it starred. So it will regain the stars rapidly, and it will again hit all the trending metrics, so new people will discover it also. No biggie

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#130

Post by V__ »

JadoJodo wrote: post #124
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 don’t know for certain but I feel like this could allow something like 1. Takeover/inherit public repo with lots of stars 2. Take repo private (retaining stars) 3. Replace repo code with some malicious/offensive code. 4. Take repo public again 5. Inherit the trust/prestige of the old repo.

But couldn't the same be achieved without taking it private?
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