I have no dog in the fight here, and no affiliation to HTTPie, but this definitely seems like a Github issue to me. You can't just give users ways to easily and accidentally shoot themselves in the foot, and then blame the user for shooting themselves in the foot.
Who got shot in the foot here? The article keeps talking about killing 55 thousand people. I’m trying to grok why “unstarring the repo” is such an earthshattering thing. It’s annoying if you wanted it starred / wanted notifications, because you have to notice and redo it… but there’s no irreparable harm, no data loss.
This reads like somebody was placing way too much personal mental value on “the repo for my project has a large number of stars”
So all those people got notifications and then some of them looked further at the notifications and then engaged. Now those people won't get those notifications and won't engage. Most of these people won't notice they don't get these notifications. They won't resubscribe. They're lost forever. This is kind of like losing your email list.
Your comment reads like you don't understand how a community works.
If the measure of community is “people who get my emails, and wouldn’t notice if they stopped getting my emails”, then yea, I guess we just disagree about what a community is.
I’m on an email list for marketing message for a hotel I stayed at last year. TIL that I’m part of their community.
If you focus solely on the getting notifications part. But the core part of any community is the ability to broadcast news to them. If you remove the ability to broadcast news and falicate communication between members then the community fades. Especially, if it's remove.
Not all members of a community are extremely active, some aren't that active at all if you remove the ability to let the less active people know stuff that may be of interest to them then obivously it'll damage a community.
You don't get notifications after starring a repo, they're only a measure of how popular the repo is. The repo did legitimately lose its Watchers, but the author seems a lot more concerned about losing (and getting back) the stars.
There's a repo-user join table that is gone. That's literal data loss. If I delete your contacts, is that data loss? I mean, you still have your phone and all your ex-contacts still have phone numbers.
Have you been living under a rock? Everyone judges repos by their amount of stars. Why do you think every social media network has the concept of likes?
They didn't burn a diary. They burnt the list of people who subscribed to updates to a diary. If those people still care about the diary, they can resubscribe to those updates.
It's crazy to me how quickly this conversation has devolved. If Pewdiepie had all his Youtube subscribers deleted should he just say "oh well, the ones that like me will come back". No. Because that's an absurd attitude. Obviously that would forever hurt his viewership. Github is no different with stars. They matter. Period. Maybe not to you. But they matter.
Pewdiepie's compensation is intrinsically related to his subscriber count, no? That gives him a reason to care. Is your compensation similarly related to your github star count? I sure hope not..
If I unstar your repo, I have not taken anything from you because you never owned my star in the first place. Github presents this number to you as though it were important, to give you a dopamine hit when the number goes up. Their motivation for doing this is obvious. If you fall for this trick, that's on you. You have the choice to stop caring.
And even if the premise of these metrics being important were accepted, the fact remains that the removal of people from the watchers list is not irreversible. No irreplaceable documents were destroyed. No diaries were burned. If the repository had been deleted, commit history erased, that would be comparable to a diary burning. But that's not what happened (and would probably still be reversible.)
For which to happen you've to do the same thing: type out its name. So I wonder if people ask for privatize to be presented with number of stars, should when deleting a repo GitHub present you with number of commits, issues, releases, etc as well?
It's not so easy to make this accident - one needs to type the full name of the repository. AWS does the same, for example, when deleting RDS instances, and I find it effective.
This is explicitly addressed in the article, and a compelling case is made for why that safety measure was ineffective in this case, I encourage you to read the article
> There was an explicit suggestion right there in the article what else they could do, so you don't even have to guess.
I read it, but I disagree.
Honestly I don't think it would have prevented this. If you're muscle memorying past warning signs the text on the warning sign isn't going to matter much.
My point was purely about UX, obviously there are technical solutions to this problem.
Well it's exactly what happened in this case. The user got a sort of warning fatigue with the UX and familiarity with it made it easy to do without much internal debate.
But I think some other UI flaws contribute to that in this case.
Comfort with a UI means eventually you want it to get out of your way and your brain will do what it needs to streamline the process. At which point those elements intended to break the flow of the app no longer do.
The best thing to do is provide undo. Then you can reduce the hoops people have to jump through because the consequences are less severe.
Simplify the modal so the text about what will happen stands independently enough to be parsec on first glance.
Show quantified data on what could happen. Instead of "you will lose all followers" which is true for any app, display "you will lose all 54,318 followers"
