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GitHub Discussions Beta

249 points by atymic 7y ago

atymic 7y ago
I've been waiting for something similar to this for a long time. There's a lot of questions & topical discussion that don't fit well into issue. I wasn't able to find GitHub page covering this feature, so the link to to Next.js's repo discussions.
saagarjha 7y ago
Interesting. Will this be rolling out to other repositories at some point to beta-test?
- atymic 7y ago
  I haven't seen any official announcements, and this was the only repo I found that had it enabled. Hopefully it rolls out to a wider audience soon!
- natfriedman 7y ago
  Yep! We're going to try it out in a few interested communities, and if people like it, we'll make it available GitHub-wide. It's early, though, and we want a chance to learn what works and iterate on a smaller scale before introducing it to everyone.
  - crispinb 7y ago
    Quibbling over the details is a given, but people are going to like it. It fulfils such a clear need.
  - kabacha 7y ago
    Is there any way to apply for the beta? I'm maitaining few communities that could really use this feature!
qqii 7y ago
I'd assume that this has a similar scope to team discussions[0] released a few years ago. At the moment most larger projects have communities elsewhere, and smaller projects use issues for this king of discussion. Compared to other community forums it's distinguishing feature will be referencing commits and issues. I'd be interested to see how many projects actually use this feature. [0]: https://github.blog/2017-11-20-introducing-team-discussions/ https://github.blog/2017-11-20-introducing-team-discussions/
- atymic 7y ago
  Interesting, having worked with github orgs for since this was released, I never actually knew this existed. It actually look pretty cool, sad that it didn't get much traction.
mmahemoff 7y ago
Superb. Many open source projects still bounce you to Google Groups for discussion, which is archaic at this point. Even requires Google login just to read threads. Also it's often unclear what the policy is on raising questions in the issues tracker (smaller projects are usually fine with it, bigger projects get overwhelmed and don't want it). This will make it a much nicer separation for everyone and keep the issues tracker minimal.
- kyrra 7y ago
  I can read Google groups just fine in incognito mode. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts It's a matter of what the settings are on the group (the group admins get to decide visibility settings).
- saagarjha 7y ago
  One thing nice about Google Groups is that you can largely use it to its fullest extent from email.
  - rolleiflex 7y ago
    Yup, use through email is huge, especially when combined with not having to create an account — just join the mailing list. I do have some personal experience with this: when we added the backwards compatibility to email to our team discussion tool (Aether Pro), the usage shot through the roof. To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better, 21st century version of Google Groups. (We also offer it to open source communities for free as well: https://aether.app/email https://aether.app/email)
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better Hmm, I'm not completely convinced it would (but I haven't used it, so take this opinion with a grain of salt). Responding to rich text emails is somewhat cumbersome in most mail apps, because there's a tendency for formatting to get all mixed up and it makes simple things like quoting nontrivial.
moltar 7y ago
Oh love it! I’m always unsure if it’s ok to ask a question via issues.
- simpsoka 7y ago
  Thanks! Hopefully helps you find answers, too :)
tamalsaha001 7y ago
So, how do I join discussions beta?
- atymic 7y ago
  AFAIK there's no way to join yet, and there's not even any official posts about it (that I can find).
- simpsoka 7y ago
  We’re testing it out with a ZEIT for now, working to improve things as we go.
  - riobard 7y ago
    Can we please have organizational account-wide discussions?
bob1029 7y ago
This looks like the perfect mechanism to help us disambiguate code-related items from discussion items. We could say something like "Close this issue and link it to a new discussion"... Will give this a hard look when it's available on our org account.
sandGorgon 7y ago
Sorely needed. Tons of projects use issues for discussions/questions..or redirect to stackoverflow. I wonder what will be the reduction in stackoverflow due to this ? One request - have a global "discussions search" . Repos are interconnected to each other. I don't want to have to restrict my topic search to one repository's discussions
- Latty 7y ago
  StackOverflow actively discourages "discussion"—it is for questions and answers. If anything, I'd say it overlaps more with issues than this.
  - sandGorgon 7y ago
    I don't know what stackoverflow discourages, but tons of projects explicitly mention "ask questions on stackoverflow with this hashtag" Having a place to do this right next to the source code would be welcome (as long as there is global search as well) E.g. https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/troubleshooting/#help-my-question-isn-t-covered-i-need-help-now https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/t... Stack Overflow Someone else from the community may have already asked a similar question or may be able to help with your problem. The Kubernetes team will also monitor posts tagged Kubernetes. If there aren’t any existing questions that help, please ask a new one!
    - Latty 7y ago
      In terms of displaying content, asking questions is a very different thing to discussion. If you've ever had to trawl through forum threads trying to find answers, it is a nightmare. StackOverflow is much more heavily moderated and curated to keep the answers from being buried. In general, you aren't going to be able to discuss something on SO, and people aren't going to find answers in discussion boards because they don't make it easy to find those answers.
      - sandGorgon 7y ago
crispinb 7y ago
Phew. I've pretty much given up subscribing to issues on well-known projects because they so often get swamped by useless posts from people desperate to take their opinions for a walk (I pity the maintainers). Hopefully this will reduce the issue spam problem.
animalnewbie 7y ago
They just need to create an integrated gitter clone now, or maybe buy it from gitlab. Also this step pretty much kills discourse, doesn't it?
- veeralpatel979 7y ago
  GitHub bought Spectrum (spectrum.chat) in 2018: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g... But I would caution against integrating too many tools into GitHub. As a user, I like that GitHub errors on the side of saying no. You don't want to end up with a bloated product.
  - thisBrian 7y ago
    As long as they retain the option to disable certain features on a repo, I am wholly in favor of consolidating the development stack into GitHub. Easier to mandate 2FA and other security procedures when your team doesn't have to juggle several sites. Friendly aside: the expression is "err(s) on the side of..."
  - dcsan 7y ago
    Zeit's was the most active spectrum community I was part of, interesting they're the lead tester community for this new GH feature. Spectrum fell between a number of posts, it was never really "chatlike" so it looks they've gone completely in the forum direction with discussions.
kvark 7y ago
GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But this will probably backfire in the future :/
- manigandham 7y ago
  Why would it backfire? This centralized approach is the entire model for competitor Gitlab which has grown without issue so far.
  - saghm 7y ago
    I believe GP is predicting it will backfire on the users who buy into the ecosystem, not Github itself.
  - cjamesd 7y ago
    I understood the point to be that to do all these things well is very difficult for a single product / company. I worked at a startup where our solution was to replace five other solutions. Only customers with the simplest use cases found that it worked. The complexity from the breadth makes achieving the requisite depth for a good experience difficult.
  - julienbourdeau 7y ago
    Because Microsoft effectively building a monopoly on OSS. I'm happy now, because the product is amazing but it's always sain to have everything controlled by one company.
- Latty 7y ago
  I don't want to make the same comment repeatedly, but anyone saying this aims at SO is fundamentally misunderstanding why SO is successful and what it offers. SO is literally anti-discussion, the whole point is it is about questions and answers, not discussion, because finding answers to questions on forums was a nightmare. No one wants to read through a thread of context to maybe find an answer. That isn't to say discussion isn't useful or valuable, it absolutely is, it is just a completely different thing. This is competing with Discourse, not SO.
vjeux 7y ago
I have no idea if my suggestion four years ago helped but am glad they finally implemented it :) https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44
spankalee 7y ago
One problem with GitHub's version of these features is how they're tied to repos or organizations. My team works on many projects across repos and GitHub orgs and we have to use ZenHub instead of GitHub Projects because of these barriers. This seems like it'll be great for getting Q&A and random thoughts out of issues, but it won't replace broader boards and lists.
- someuser54541 7y ago
  Slack?
paxys 7y ago
Definitely a welcome addition, but it's funny that after all this time the solution was just to copy-paste the Issues tab and rename it. In fact in our public repos we have a "Discussion" label for such issues and it has worked pretty well.
- natfriedman 7y ago
  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - paxys 7y ago
    Finding such a "simple" and effective solution for a long standing problem is the software development dream.
veeralpatel979 7y ago
Congrats on shipping! I like how quickly GitHub is shipping new features now, compared to earlier: the mobile app, Actions, Sponsors, security scanning, etc. That said, I was a little disappointed that Discussions is essentially identical to Issues :(. While I can't pinpoint any specific issues I've had with Issues for discussions, I was hoping GitHub found, and found solutions for, pain points that users didn't know they had with Issues.
- natfriedman 7y ago
  It's a little different. You can mark which comment answers a question, and comments can be voted. We will probably find some other things we want Discussions to do differently, too, as we iterate.
  - veeralpatel979 7y ago
    Thanks Nat! I would also recommend writing a blog post announcing Discussions and its features as soon as you get the chance. Reading this HN thread, I got the impression GitHub actually did just copy/paste Issues into a new tab, as a commenter mentioned, a belief that was backed up by a cursory look at Next.js's Discussions. Now I see that's not fully the case.
Despacito2019 7y ago
can't wait for slack being on target for GitHub (and not just a team integration please... :D)
trenchgun 7y ago
Hmm. So this will be like a classical forum basically?
santamarias 7y ago
Will there be an option for internal discussion? For example ticking off the "internal" checkbox makes the thread visible to team members and collaborators only.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  You can already do this with team discussions (which has been around for a few years).
kitd 7y ago
One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Do you think this kind of deep-threading, or tree-nesting, encourages a forked conversation, with everyone in the discussion trying to respond to individual comments in an ever-growing tree, rather than responding to the current conversation as a whole? I find mailing list threads that are trees very hard to follow. It's probably a conscious decision.
  - kodablah 7y ago
    I've found trees encourage forked conversations in a good way. While I don't find them hard to follow, I do find revisiting them to be a bit difficult. While it can seem difficult to follow the overarching topic given a set of trees, it's near impossible to have any in-depth discussions about more than one thing in flat threads. I have given these models lots of thought and have come to the conclusion that the success/failure of hierarchical conversations is determined solely by the presentation. Common mailing lists and email UIs leave the most to be desired, while HN, reddit, sbnation community sites, etc show a path forward. But nobody has implemented the view properly enough to let you see the forest and the trees at the same time (yet).
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      Here's a concrete example where I think it goes wrong. You say something, and two people respond. There's one thing to say in response to both people - maybe they both misunderstood part of your point. Which comment do you respond to? On places like HN people seem to feel the need to respond to both branches, which causes exponential growth if it continues, compared to if you could respond to the two comments as one. Maybe we need a comment DAG instead? Responding to an arbitrary number of comments? Maybe comments that aren't even siblings?
lqs469 7y ago
Github is becoming more and more diverse. the style of Github has always been a professional discussion about issues or features. But now it may be changing, Maybe because users are becoming more and more willing to use it as a forum to discuss something it's maybe not that useful on it. Now Github has opened up an area to do this, which may be a good thing while maintaining professionalism and making the community is more like a community.
asadkn 7y ago
It is only natural progression here. Heck, I am surprised it took this long. Considering the fact that in many Github projects, "Issues" were being used for discussions, questions, often tangents.
silverwind 7y ago
Aren't all issues discussions in essence? I think they'd have been better of just renaming issues and adding categories like "Issue", "Discussion" etc. Some projects already do this via labels.
- quantummkv 7y ago
  Not really. Issues are problems/bugs/etc that directly affect the product and are related to code. Discussions are for thing that are not related to code, like a user asking for some guidance regarding the code. > Some projects already do this via labels. That was an illogical hack do to limitations. Good on Github for identifying and fixing that.
  - SahAssar 7y ago
    So the only functional difference is that they are shown on different tabs?
alexellisuk 7y ago
This links to Zeit, which seems like a kind of advert for their product? How do we actually find out about GitHub Discussions and opting-into it? Or did GitHub only enrol one company into the beta?
- skrebbel 7y ago
  That's like saying a link to react on github is an advert for Facebook
- leerob 7y ago
  It doesn't appear that GitHub has announced anything about Discussions on their site yet. My guess is that a few select large repositories (e.g. zeit/next.js) are trying out the beta to provide feedback. We'll probably get some official communication from GitHub shortly, with the ability to sign up for the beta.
donatj 7y ago
Is there a real desire to separate these from issues? We use issues to have discussions and it’s never a situation in have been unhappy with.
- frumiousirc 7y ago
  Issues are about bugs in the project. Discussion are about bugs in the person. It's true that it is not always evident which domain a bug exists and so some spill over is natural.
erdinc 7y ago
I'm not sure if this is necessary. Github, from the beginning, is a platform where we host our source code. I've never needed a discussion board because there are other sites that are precisely serving discussion boards, like StackOverflow. The idea of having everything on the same platform sounds easy but that is also taking out the opportunity of being a simple and elegant tool. Microsoft is changing Github since they acquired. That makes me question ( because they are Microsoft), What happens when they add everything inside Github and then they don't like it? Will they have an opportunity of closing Github? Switching it to something inside their office tool? May be office suite for developers? Combine Visual Studio with Github and discussion boards and todo lists and CI tools... ??? I'm the kind of developer/product maker who likes to use a diversity of products. That feeds my creativity and makes me think differently.. I don't want to lose that one. Anyways... I wanna ask something different, What do you think if StackOverFlow adds git hosting? Will it work?
lala26in 7y ago
Without nested threads its easy to lose track of multiple ideas floating in one discussion (which is inevitable).
wincent 7y ago
New features are great, but I wish they'd make more of an investment in improving their core code review functionality. The lack of an "interdiff" view (between revisions of a PR) and the lack of a proper way to mark PRs as dependent on one another really limit the utility compared to other code review platforms (thinking specifically of Gerrit and Phabricator/Differential here).
- chadlavi 7y ago
  My god, would LOVE PR interdependence. Esp if I could leave a review like "approved after #123 is merged"
- chatmasta 7y ago
  You can compare any two commits. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t that sufficient for you to see the diff of PR revisions? If the issue is reviewing the code, stale reviews for code that was pushed over will be marked as stale.
- shadowfiend 7y ago
  While it's a bit tucked away, when you are viewing the changes for a PR, there is a dropdown in the top left for “Changes from <all commits>”. You can select any range there to view changes from that range of commits. When you've left a review, you also generally get a “View Changes” button in the conversation that takes you to the changes since you last viewed, if new changes are pushed. The issue with this particular link is it tends to be ephemeral.
- seer 7y ago
  Github has a really great url api - you can usually do git related compares right there in the url - github.com/some/repo/compare/HEAD...comitsha is actually a thing. And while not particularly ergonomic you can have PR against other PR since forever. Github is built by devs for devs and has tons of hidden gems scattered in there. Do read their shortcuts help, blog and other dev sources and you might find tools for a lot of the task you can think of.
  - Game_Ender 7y ago
Dowwie 7y ago
Concerns include record retention policy and terms of use governing redistribution of the content
hrpnk 7y ago
A problem with such products offered by GitHub is the fact that they're connected to a single repo. This is maybe suitable for monorepo situations or simple open-source libraries. However, teams work differently and need to manage backlogs across many repositories. The context is usually a team, project, etc. This requires pulling in multiple issues across repos into one backlog along with abilities to manage this backlog and calculate metrics. I've seen some teams manage an 'issues' repository solely with tickets that are later linked to the individual repos' issues and PRs. It's quite a mess and GH does not seem to offer issue statistics and comprehensive query capabilities to manage issues. Has anyone worked with an issue management system (not JIRA) that would be working across 100+ delivery teams and have decent integration with GH/GHE to show PR progress, issue status, releases, etc.? Any experience with FB's https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/ for example?
- Game_Ender 7y ago
  Phabricator works great at the scale you are talking about. With a single monotonic issue number for your company (like Apple's Radar). You have to ditch GitHub totally though, and use Phabricator for code review or the wiki too to get the benefit. Avoid it's repo hosting and CI component (harbormaster). The thing you will miss most is the web based file editing. My advise would be to deploy: Phabricator (issues, code review, wiki), Buildkite (CI - with your own AWS runners), gitolite (repo hosting).
ss3000 7y ago
Interesting, I thought this was going to have something to do with their acquisition of Spectrum, but it appears to be an entirely separate in-house feature. I wonder what's going to happen to Spectrum longer term then. https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g...
- leerob 7y ago
  I had the same thought. Especially since the Next.js maintainers said that Discussions would eventually replace their Spectrum community. Maybe GitHub acquired Spectrum with the intention of slowly migrating its userbase over.
ithrow 7y ago
Tangential question, is github a proof that not every complex app has to be an SPA and it can worked really well or is this legacy thing from their part? Curious to know if they feel they could iterate faster new features for the UI if it were an SPA.
- sudhirj 7y ago
  A lot of apps that started with Rails take that approach, including Github, Airbnb, Basecamp (which technically started Rails), and a few others. Some companies start API first or mobile app first, which makes SPAs much more likely.

249 points by atymic 7y ago

I've been waiting for something similar to this for a long time. There's a lot of questions & topical discussion that don't fit well into issue. I wasn't able to find GitHub page covering this feature, so the link to to Next.js's repo discussions.

saagarjha 7y ago

Interesting. Will this be rolling out to other repositories at some point to beta-test?

atymic 7y ago
I haven't seen any official announcements, and this was the only repo I found that had it enabled. Hopefully it rolls out to a wider audience soon!
natfriedman 7y ago
Yep! We're going to try it out in a few interested communities, and if people like it, we'll make it available GitHub-wide. It's early, though, and we want a chance to learn what works and iterate on a smaller scale before introducing it to everyone.
- crispinb 7y ago
  Quibbling over the details is a given, but people are going to like it. It fulfils such a clear need.
- kabacha 7y ago
  Is there any way to apply for the beta? I'm maitaining few communities that could really use this feature!

qqii 7y ago

I'd assume that this has a similar scope to team discussions[0] released a few years ago. At the moment most larger projects have communities elsewhere, and smaller projects use issues for this king of discussion. Compared to other community forums it's distinguishing feature will be referencing commits and issues. I'd be interested to see how many projects actually use this feature. [0]: https://github.blog/2017-11-20-introducing-team-discussions/ https://github.blog/2017-11-20-introducing-team-discussions/

atymic 7y ago
Interesting, having worked with github orgs for since this was released, I never actually knew this existed. It actually look pretty cool, sad that it didn't get much traction.

mmahemoff 7y ago

Superb. Many open source projects still bounce you to Google Groups for discussion, which is archaic at this point. Even requires Google login just to read threads. Also it's often unclear what the policy is on raising questions in the issues tracker (smaller projects are usually fine with it, bigger projects get overwhelmed and don't want it). This will make it a much nicer separation for everyone and keep the issues tracker minimal.

kyrra 7y ago
I can read Google groups just fine in incognito mode. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/golang-nuts It's a matter of what the settings are on the group (the group admins get to decide visibility settings).
saagarjha 7y ago
One thing nice about Google Groups is that you can largely use it to its fullest extent from email.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  Yup, use through email is huge, especially when combined with not having to create an account — just join the mailing list. I do have some personal experience with this: when we added the backwards compatibility to email to our team discussion tool (Aether Pro), the usage shot through the roof. To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better, 21st century version of Google Groups. (We also offer it to open source communities for free as well: https://aether.app/email https://aether.app/email)
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > To email users, it just looks and acts like a much better Hmm, I'm not completely convinced it would (but I haven't used it, so take this opinion with a grain of salt). Responding to rich text emails is somewhat cumbersome in most mail apps, because there's a tendency for formatting to get all mixed up and it makes simple things like quoting nontrivial.

moltar 7y ago

Oh love it! I’m always unsure if it’s ok to ask a question via issues.

simpsoka 7y ago
Thanks! Hopefully helps you find answers, too :)

tamalsaha001 7y ago

So, how do I join discussions beta?

atymic 7y ago
AFAIK there's no way to join yet, and there's not even any official posts about it (that I can find).
simpsoka 7y ago
We’re testing it out with a ZEIT for now, working to improve things as we go.
- riobard 7y ago
  Can we please have organizational account-wide discussions?

bob1029 7y ago

This looks like the perfect mechanism to help us disambiguate code-related items from discussion items. We could say something like "Close this issue and link it to a new discussion"... Will give this a hard look when it's available on our org account.

sandGorgon 7y ago

Sorely needed. Tons of projects use issues for discussions/questions..or redirect to stackoverflow. I wonder what will be the reduction in stackoverflow due to this ? One request - have a global "discussions search" . Repos are interconnected to each other. I don't want to have to restrict my topic search to one repository's discussions

Latty 7y ago
StackOverflow actively discourages "discussion"—it is for questions and answers. If anything, I'd say it overlaps more with issues than this.
- sandGorgon 7y ago
  I don't know what stackoverflow discourages, but tons of projects explicitly mention "ask questions on stackoverflow with this hashtag" Having a place to do this right next to the source code would be welcome (as long as there is global search as well) E.g. https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/troubleshooting/#help-my-question-isn-t-covered-i-need-help-now https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/t... Stack Overflow Someone else from the community may have already asked a similar question or may be able to help with your problem. The Kubernetes team will also monitor posts tagged Kubernetes. If there aren’t any existing questions that help, please ask a new one!
  - Latty 7y ago
    In terms of displaying content, asking questions is a very different thing to discussion. If you've ever had to trawl through forum threads trying to find answers, it is a nightmare. StackOverflow is much more heavily moderated and curated to keep the answers from being buried. In general, you aren't going to be able to discuss something on SO, and people aren't going to find answers in discussion boards because they don't make it easy to find those answers.
    - sandGorgon 7y ago

crispinb 7y ago

Phew. I've pretty much given up subscribing to issues on well-known projects because they so often get swamped by useless posts from people desperate to take their opinions for a walk (I pity the maintainers). Hopefully this will reduce the issue spam problem.

animalnewbie 7y ago

They just need to create an integrated gitter clone now, or maybe buy it from gitlab. Also this step pretty much kills discourse, doesn't it?

veeralpatel979 7y ago
GitHub bought Spectrum (spectrum.chat) in 2018: https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g... But I would caution against integrating too many tools into GitHub. As a user, I like that GitHub errors on the side of saying no. You don't want to end up with a bloated product.
- thisBrian 7y ago
  As long as they retain the option to disable certain features on a repo, I am wholly in favor of consolidating the development stack into GitHub. Easier to mandate 2FA and other security procedures when your team doesn't have to juggle several sites. Friendly aside: the expression is "err(s) on the side of..."
- dcsan 7y ago
  Zeit's was the most active spectrum community I was part of, interesting they're the lead tester community for this new GH feature. Spectrum fell between a number of posts, it was never really "chatlike" so it looks they've gone completely in the forum direction with discussions.

kvark 7y ago

GitHub is slowly eating the surrounding cities. Github pages replaced our hosted sites. Projects replaced Trello/Waffle and friends. Actions replaced Travis/CircleCI. Sponsors is about to hit Patreon, and now Discussions aims for a piece of StackOverflow pie... I think they are doing great in terms of performance and UI, it's hard to resist the convenience of having everything linked together in a coherent way. But this will probably backfire in the future :/

manigandham 7y ago
Why would it backfire? This centralized approach is the entire model for competitor Gitlab which has grown without issue so far.
- saghm 7y ago
  I believe GP is predicting it will backfire on the users who buy into the ecosystem, not Github itself.
- cjamesd 7y ago
  I understood the point to be that to do all these things well is very difficult for a single product / company. I worked at a startup where our solution was to replace five other solutions. Only customers with the simplest use cases found that it worked. The complexity from the breadth makes achieving the requisite depth for a good experience difficult.
- julienbourdeau 7y ago
  Because Microsoft effectively building a monopoly on OSS. I'm happy now, because the product is amazing but it's always sain to have everything controlled by one company.
Latty 7y ago
I don't want to make the same comment repeatedly, but anyone saying this aims at SO is fundamentally misunderstanding why SO is successful and what it offers. SO is literally anti-discussion, the whole point is it is about questions and answers, not discussion, because finding answers to questions on forums was a nightmare. No one wants to read through a thread of context to maybe find an answer. That isn't to say discussion isn't useful or valuable, it absolutely is, it is just a completely different thing. This is competing with Discourse, not SO.

vjeux 7y ago

I have no idea if my suggestion four years ago helped but am glad they finally implemented it :) https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44 https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44

spankalee 7y ago

One problem with GitHub's version of these features is how they're tied to repos or organizations. My team works on many projects across repos and GitHub orgs and we have to use ZenHub instead of GitHub Projects because of these barriers. This seems like it'll be great for getting Q&A and random thoughts out of issues, but it won't replace broader boards and lists.

someuser54541 7y ago
Slack?

paxys 7y ago

Definitely a welcome addition, but it's funny that after all this time the solution was just to copy-paste the Issues tab and rename it. In fact in our public repos we have a "Discussion" label for such issues and it has worked pretty well.

natfriedman 7y ago
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- paxys 7y ago
  Finding such a "simple" and effective solution for a long standing problem is the software development dream.

veeralpatel979 7y ago

Congrats on shipping! I like how quickly GitHub is shipping new features now, compared to earlier: the mobile app, Actions, Sponsors, security scanning, etc. That said, I was a little disappointed that Discussions is essentially identical to Issues :(. While I can't pinpoint any specific issues I've had with Issues for discussions, I was hoping GitHub found, and found solutions for, pain points that users didn't know they had with Issues.

natfriedman 7y ago
It's a little different. You can mark which comment answers a question, and comments can be voted. We will probably find some other things we want Discussions to do differently, too, as we iterate.
- veeralpatel979 7y ago
  Thanks Nat! I would also recommend writing a blog post announcing Discussions and its features as soon as you get the chance. Reading this HN thread, I got the impression GitHub actually did just copy/paste Issues into a new tab, as a commenter mentioned, a belief that was backed up by a cursory look at Next.js's Discussions. Now I see that's not fully the case.

Despacito2019 7y ago

can't wait for slack being on target for GitHub (and not just a team integration please... :D)

trenchgun 7y ago

Hmm. So this will be like a classical forum basically?

santamarias 7y ago

Will there be an option for internal discussion? For example ticking off the "internal" checkbox makes the thread visible to team members and collaborators only.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
You can already do this with team discussions (which has been around for a few years).

kitd 7y ago

One feature that is missing with this, and with every discussion forum since usenet , is a tree-view of a thread. On my Thunderbird I still follow some usenet forums and it is so much clearer and quicker with a tree view to see who has replied at what point in the thread. Poring through reams of quoted replies just to find where in the thread the answer comes doesn't cut it.

chrisseaton 7y ago
Do you think this kind of deep-threading, or tree-nesting, encourages a forked conversation, with everyone in the discussion trying to respond to individual comments in an ever-growing tree, rather than responding to the current conversation as a whole? I find mailing list threads that are trees very hard to follow. It's probably a conscious decision.
- kodablah 7y ago
  I've found trees encourage forked conversations in a good way. While I don't find them hard to follow, I do find revisiting them to be a bit difficult. While it can seem difficult to follow the overarching topic given a set of trees, it's near impossible to have any in-depth discussions about more than one thing in flat threads. I have given these models lots of thought and have come to the conclusion that the success/failure of hierarchical conversations is determined solely by the presentation. Common mailing lists and email UIs leave the most to be desired, while HN, reddit, sbnation community sites, etc show a path forward. But nobody has implemented the view properly enough to let you see the forest and the trees at the same time (yet).
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    Here's a concrete example where I think it goes wrong. You say something, and two people respond. There's one thing to say in response to both people - maybe they both misunderstood part of your point. Which comment do you respond to? On places like HN people seem to feel the need to respond to both branches, which causes exponential growth if it continues, compared to if you could respond to the two comments as one. Maybe we need a comment DAG instead? Responding to an arbitrary number of comments? Maybe comments that aren't even siblings?

lqs469 7y ago

Github is becoming more and more diverse. the style of Github has always been a professional discussion about issues or features. But now it may be changing, Maybe because users are becoming more and more willing to use it as a forum to discuss something it's maybe not that useful on it. Now Github has opened up an area to do this, which may be a good thing while maintaining professionalism and making the community is more like a community.

asadkn 7y ago

It is only natural progression here. Heck, I am surprised it took this long. Considering the fact that in many Github projects, "Issues" were being used for discussions, questions, often tangents.

silverwind 7y ago

Aren't all issues discussions in essence? I think they'd have been better of just renaming issues and adding categories like "Issue", "Discussion" etc. Some projects already do this via labels.

quantummkv 7y ago
Not really. Issues are problems/bugs/etc that directly affect the product and are related to code. Discussions are for thing that are not related to code, like a user asking for some guidance regarding the code. > Some projects already do this via labels. That was an illogical hack do to limitations. Good on Github for identifying and fixing that.
- SahAssar 7y ago
  So the only functional difference is that they are shown on different tabs?

alexellisuk 7y ago

This links to Zeit, which seems like a kind of advert for their product? How do we actually find out about GitHub Discussions and opting-into it? Or did GitHub only enrol one company into the beta?

skrebbel 7y ago
That's like saying a link to react on github is an advert for Facebook
leerob 7y ago
It doesn't appear that GitHub has announced anything about Discussions on their site yet. My guess is that a few select large repositories (e.g. zeit/next.js) are trying out the beta to provide feedback. We'll probably get some official communication from GitHub shortly, with the ability to sign up for the beta.

donatj 7y ago

Is there a real desire to separate these from issues? We use issues to have discussions and it’s never a situation in have been unhappy with.

frumiousirc 7y ago
Issues are about bugs in the project. Discussion are about bugs in the person. It's true that it is not always evident which domain a bug exists and so some spill over is natural.

erdinc 7y ago

I'm not sure if this is necessary. Github, from the beginning, is a platform where we host our source code. I've never needed a discussion board because there are other sites that are precisely serving discussion boards, like StackOverflow. The idea of having everything on the same platform sounds easy but that is also taking out the opportunity of being a simple and elegant tool. Microsoft is changing Github since they acquired. That makes me question ( because they are Microsoft), What happens when they add everything inside Github and then they don't like it? Will they have an opportunity of closing Github? Switching it to something inside their office tool? May be office suite for developers? Combine Visual Studio with Github and discussion boards and todo lists and CI tools... ??? I'm the kind of developer/product maker who likes to use a diversity of products. That feeds my creativity and makes me think differently.. I don't want to lose that one. Anyways... I wanna ask something different, What do you think if StackOverFlow adds git hosting? Will it work?

lala26in 7y ago

Without nested threads its easy to lose track of multiple ideas floating in one discussion (which is inevitable).

wincent 7y ago

New features are great, but I wish they'd make more of an investment in improving their core code review functionality. The lack of an "interdiff" view (between revisions of a PR) and the lack of a proper way to mark PRs as dependent on one another really limit the utility compared to other code review platforms (thinking specifically of Gerrit and Phabricator/Differential here).

chadlavi 7y ago
My god, would LOVE PR interdependence. Esp if I could leave a review like "approved after #123 is merged"
chatmasta 7y ago
You can compare any two commits. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t that sufficient for you to see the diff of PR revisions? If the issue is reviewing the code, stale reviews for code that was pushed over will be marked as stale.
shadowfiend 7y ago
While it's a bit tucked away, when you are viewing the changes for a PR, there is a dropdown in the top left for “Changes from <all commits>”. You can select any range there to view changes from that range of commits. When you've left a review, you also generally get a “View Changes” button in the conversation that takes you to the changes since you last viewed, if new changes are pushed. The issue with this particular link is it tends to be ephemeral.
seer 7y ago
Github has a really great url api - you can usually do git related compares right there in the url - github.com/some/repo/compare/HEAD...comitsha is actually a thing. And while not particularly ergonomic you can have PR against other PR since forever. Github is built by devs for devs and has tons of hidden gems scattered in there. Do read their shortcuts help, blog and other dev sources and you might find tools for a lot of the task you can think of.
- Game_Ender 7y ago

Dowwie 7y ago

Concerns include record retention policy and terms of use governing redistribution of the content

hrpnk 7y ago

A problem with such products offered by GitHub is the fact that they're connected to a single repo. This is maybe suitable for monorepo situations or simple open-source libraries. However, teams work differently and need to manage backlogs across many repositories. The context is usually a team, project, etc. This requires pulling in multiple issues across repos into one backlog along with abilities to manage this backlog and calculate metrics. I've seen some teams manage an 'issues' repository solely with tickets that are later linked to the individual repos' issues and PRs. It's quite a mess and GH does not seem to offer issue statistics and comprehensive query capabilities to manage issues. Has anyone worked with an issue management system (not JIRA) that would be working across 100+ delivery teams and have decent integration with GH/GHE to show PR progress, issue status, releases, etc.? Any experience with FB's https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/ for example?

Game_Ender 7y ago
Phabricator works great at the scale you are talking about. With a single monotonic issue number for your company (like Apple's Radar). You have to ditch GitHub totally though, and use Phabricator for code review or the wiki too to get the benefit. Avoid it's repo hosting and CI component (harbormaster). The thing you will miss most is the web based file editing. My advise would be to deploy: Phabricator (issues, code review, wiki), Buildkite (CI - with your own AWS runners), gitolite (repo hosting).

ss3000 7y ago

Interesting, I thought this was going to have something to do with their acquisition of Spectrum, but it appears to be an entirely separate in-house feature. I wonder what's going to happen to Spectrum longer term then. https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-github~1d3eb8ee-4c99-46c0-8daf-ca35a96be6ce https://spectrum.chat/spectrum/general/spectrum-is-joining-g...

leerob 7y ago
I had the same thought. Especially since the Next.js maintainers said that Discussions would eventually replace their Spectrum community. Maybe GitHub acquired Spectrum with the intention of slowly migrating its userbase over.

ithrow 7y ago

Tangential question, is github a proof that not every complex app has to be an SPA and it can worked really well or is this legacy thing from their part? Curious to know if they feel they could iterate faster new features for the UI if it were an SPA.

sudhirj 7y ago
A lot of apps that started with Rails take that approach, including Github, Airbnb, Basecamp (which technically started Rails), and a few others. Some companies start API first or mobile app first, which makes SPAs much more likely.