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We lost 54k GitHub stars

httpie.io

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Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#571

Post by jjoonathan »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #569

> The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.” It seems a bit much to expect the website to show you a warning of different levels of severity depending on the stars a repos has, particularly when the standard message is pretty severe and…

> It even makes you type the name

More and more IT systems are starting to do this for more and more tasks. I understand why: it's a hell of a lot easier than implementing a trashcan, timed undo, joining in helpful data, etc, but man, one good session with a couple hundred resources that need to be deleted this way is enough to burn you out pretty hard on these.

Also, systems that go for these lazy solutions tend also to go for the lazy solution of "just delete and recreate the resource" instead of implementing proper modify functionality. This compounds the problem. As if administrative tasks didn't already come with enough drudgery, now you have to constantly do the old timey school punishment of writing lines just to do your job.

"Just add friction" is evil. Easy, but evil.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#572

Post by dmitshur »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #569

> The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.” It seems a bit much to expect the website to show you a warning of different levels of severity depending on the stars a repos has, particularly when the standard message is pretty severe and…

I’m wondering if you got a chance to see this part of the post:

  > […] I obviously had no intention to make httpie/httpie private. So, why then?
  >
  > The proximate cause was that I thought I was inside a different repo; […] What I actually intended to do was to hide the HTTPie organization’s profile README, […]
  >
  > What put me on the wrong path was an otherwise completely unrelated action: I had just done the same (i.e., hidden an empty README) on my personal profile by making jakubroztocil/jakubroztocil private.
  >
  > GitHub’s conceptual model treats users and organizations as very similar entities when it comes to profiles and repos. […] since I just wanted to repeat the same benign action on our organization’s profile, […]
  >
  > I didn’t realize at the moment there’s an inconsistency in the naming of this special repo containing profile READMEs and that it differs for users and organizations: name/name vs. name/.github.
  > 
  > That’s why I proceeded to make httpie/httpie private instead of httpie/.github without realizing my mistake.
For me, this part of the post really helps understand the context in which the mistake was made. The post is long so it is possible some people read other parts but missed this one.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#573

Post by Retric »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #569

> The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.” It seems a bit much to expect the website to show you a warning of different levels of severity depending on the stars a repos has, particularly when the standard message is pretty severe and…

Warnings are vastly less useful than making such activities less dangerous.

If you feel something needs get giant flashing warning messages perhaps make it reversible for a week.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#574

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

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…

> "make sure you're not on autopilot when taking potentially dangerous actions, on github or any website".

Have the advertisements/sign-up/GDPR pop-ups trained us to 'engage autopilot to dismiss the pop-up' as soon as possible irrespective of its importance?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#575

Post by naedish »

react_burger38 wrote: post #328
wpietri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This idea - fixing systems that amplify mistakes into large, irreversible impacts-- is why I am against alcohol, marijuana and other mental-state altering drugs for recreational purposes. (I'm not talking about people who really need pain relief from cancer, amphetamines for ADHD, etc.) If no one in the world drank, smoked pot, or did drugs, how much better off would we all be? 100,000 deaths come from alcohol use ev…

An interesting thought experiment - how many of us would be here at all if not for alcohol? Ignoring butterfly effect aspects, the number of people who were only conceived due to decisions made under the influence of drugs would surely be very large even today, let alone prior to the availability of birth control.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#576

Post by barrucadu »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #547
kif wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the UX is not great, but surely having to type "httpie/httpie" would have given me a pause. Regardless, to make mistakes is human. What I don't really like is how the author starts attacking Github and Microsoft, just because they can't afford to fix the author's mistake. A huge red flag for me.

Once you do it a few times, writing the repo names means nothing. You have to do it on your repo with 0 followers just making it public. It’s not very notable unless you’re new to Github. My advice is for Github to tell you that you’re losing 53,000 stars (not just “all your stars”) to help knock you out of autopilot. I don’t get the finger pointing though. Obviously they messed up, it’s the entire post. But it’s als…

What should the threshold be? 53,000 stars? 50,000 stars? 25,000? 100? No matter what number you pick, there will be someone with fewer stars who considers their stars important enough to merit a warning.

Unless you set the threshold to 1, in which case it's just more meaningless noise, like the repository name (apparently) is.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#577

Post by raldi »

davedx wrote: post #508

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.

Completely disagree; when it comes to programming (where all tools are infinitely malleable), it’s a poor programmer who puts up with suboptimal tools.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#578

Post by wussboy »

jjoonathan wrote: post #571
NoboruWataya wrote: post #569

> The problem is that the box looks exactly the same for repos with no commits and stars and for repos with a decade-long history and 55k stargazers and watchers. And it says “Warning: this is a potentially destructive action.” It seems a bit much to expect the website to show you a warning of different levels of severity depending on the stars a repos has, particularly when the standard message is pretty severe and…

> It even makes you type the name More and more IT systems are starting to do this for more and more tasks. I understand why: it's a hell of a lot easier than implementing a trashcan, timed undo, joining in helpful data, etc, but man, one good session with a couple hundred resources that need to be deleted this way is enough to burn you out pretty hard on these. Also, systems that go for these lazy solutions tend als…

I have worked with an extremely complex system in the past (Genesys Engage telephony) and their configuration was so complex that changing even the most innocuous attribute in the most seemingly unrelated object could bring the system to its knees.

As time went by they slowly started to “improve” the situation by constantly forcing you to click through a “changing this setting may have knock on effects to your system” banner…that they showed every time you changed anything. Making it completely useless for actually preventing you from harming your system and really just giving the impression they were trying to cover their butts legally.

I hated working with that platform.

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#579

Post by barrucadu »

dom96 wrote: post #37

Surprising amount of people blaming the user here. I agree completely with the author, the UX should be different for clearly "big" repos.

How big is "clearly big"? Whenever someone makes the same mistake with a slightly-less-big repository should the warning thresholds be revised to also show up for those?

Re: We lost 54k GitHub stars

#580

Post by barrucadu »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #510
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.

If a user didn't care enough about the project to even remember that they starred it, why is that star being lost a problem? It was already the case that nobody was getting any value out of it.
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