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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 an

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.

akerl_ 5y ago
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”
- delaaxe 5y ago
  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?
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Can you just clarify if that statement was sarcastic or not? I've had a very different experience around stars - they're just a bit of fluff and pretty unimportant compared to watches.
    - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
      HTTPie's watches were irreversibly deleted, too.
      - robonerd 5y ago
        > Irreversible If the watchers still care to watch, they can choose to watch again.
        pessimizer 5y ago
        That's not a reversal. If I burned your diary, you could write a new one, but nobody would call that a reversal.
        robonerd 5y ago
        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.
        spiderice 5y ago
        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.
        robonerd 5y ago
        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.)
        5y ago
  - robonerd 5y ago
    Assuming you're not being sarcastic: a company providing a metric and telling you to care about it does not oblige you to actually give a shit.
  - Rapzid 5y ago
    I feel like a parallel universe has suddenly intersected our own.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  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.
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    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.
    - that_guy_iain 5y ago
      Yea, over simplify it, that's always great. 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.
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    To be fair, people very active in a project will probably realize relatively quickly. Those most likely lost to the wind forever are the ones that star a repo and forget about it. I think the problem self corrects but agree there's a short term slowdown possibility in the wake.
  - MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
    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.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  It's very much a matter of reputation. Losing the star as a user is a pretty small inconvenience, tantamount to losing a bookmark.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > there’s no irreparable harm, no data loss. 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.
  - lalopalota 5y ago
    I've never considered data I deleted to be lost. "Do you want to delete this?" "Yes" "Are you sure?" "Yes." .... "OMG it's all gone!?!?"
pizza234 5y ago
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.
- HL33tibCe7 5y ago
  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
- nkozyra 5y ago
  Yeah. I'm not sure what else you can do with warnings other than make the person effectively recite back the thing they're doing.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    There was an explicit suggestion right there in the article what else they could do, so you don't even have to guess. Typing in the number of objects that would be deleted in addition to the name is something else. Or, they could just keep all of them in place, but hidden, and "restore" them all automatically if you made it public again. There are lots and lots of things they could do better, if they cared. But paraphrasing Eunice, of course they don't care, they're Microsoft.
    - nkozyra 5y ago
      > 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.
      - tentacleuno 5y ago
        > If you're muscle memorying past warning signs the text on the warning sign isn't going to matter much. Do you have any concrete evidence for this? A lot of people keep saying this but don't provide anything factual in the way of UX studies, etc.

akerl_ 5y ago

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”

delaaxe 5y ago
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?
- munk-a 5y ago
  Can you just clarify if that statement was sarcastic or not? I've had a very different experience around stars - they're just a bit of fluff and pretty unimportant compared to watches.
  - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
    HTTPie's watches were irreversibly deleted, too.
    - robonerd 5y ago
      > Irreversible If the watchers still care to watch, they can choose to watch again.
      - pessimizer 5y ago
        That's not a reversal. If I burned your diary, you could write a new one, but nobody would call that a reversal.
        robonerd 5y ago
        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.
        spiderice 5y ago
        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.
        robonerd 5y ago
        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.)
        5y ago
- robonerd 5y ago
  Assuming you're not being sarcastic: a company providing a metric and telling you to care about it does not oblige you to actually give a shit.
- Rapzid 5y ago
  I feel like a parallel universe has suddenly intersected our own.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
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.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  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.
  - that_guy_iain 5y ago
    Yea, over simplify it, that's always great. 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.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  To be fair, people very active in a project will probably realize relatively quickly. Those most likely lost to the wind forever are the ones that star a repo and forget about it. I think the problem self corrects but agree there's a short term slowdown possibility in the wake.
- MatthiasPortzel 5y ago
  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.
nkozyra 5y ago
It's very much a matter of reputation. Losing the star as a user is a pretty small inconvenience, tantamount to losing a bookmark.
pessimizer 5y ago
> there’s no irreparable harm, no data loss. 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.
- lalopalota 5y ago
  I've never considered data I deleted to be lost. "Do you want to delete this?" "Yes" "Are you sure?" "Yes." .... "OMG it's all gone!?!?"

pizza234 5y ago

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.

HL33tibCe7 5y ago
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
nkozyra 5y ago
Yeah. I'm not sure what else you can do with warnings other than make the person effectively recite back the thing they're doing.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  There was an explicit suggestion right there in the article what else they could do, so you don't even have to guess. Typing in the number of objects that would be deleted in addition to the name is something else. Or, they could just keep all of them in place, but hidden, and "restore" them all automatically if you made it public again. There are lots and lots of things they could do better, if they cared. But paraphrasing Eunice, of course they don't care, they're Microsoft.
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    > 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.
    - tentacleuno 5y ago
      > If you're muscle memorying past warning signs the text on the warning sign isn't going to matter much. Do you have any concrete evidence for this? A lot of people keep saying this but don't provide anything factual in the way of UX studies, etc.