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This, 1000x this. It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future". As a species, we will always take sho

This, 1000x this. It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future". As a species, we will always take shortcuts. If a mental pathway doesn't need to be exercised to do something, it won't be. If we see the same popup a hundred times, we're going to ignore the contents by the 100th time because we're used to it. But it shouldn't be possible to make this mistake if this was designed properly and in a way that made it clear that what you're about to do is actually dangerous and not "dangerous" like the other dozen times you've seen the same message.

icambron 5y ago
That’s not quite it. The solution isn’t to stop them from doing it or warning them more aggressively; it’s to make it genuinely less dangerous. For example, make the stars all come back when you reverse the switch. Of course that’s a lot harder to do, since it’s a lot more than a UX change. So I’m not really slagging GitHub here. But it’s the right way to attack this problem.
- everforward 5y ago
  The counterpoint is that tools like that can be abused. Just as a hypothetical, if I have an open source product and do something the community doesn't like, I can make the repo private til the storm blows over so people can't un-star it. The number of people that remember to un-star it a week or two later is going to be a lot less. I still think you're right, but it's not even as simple as UX and small backend changes. Allowing the repo owner to re-play other peoples' actions comes with complicated policy decisions. GitHub could make it so only support can restore those, but now they're in the awkward position of having to say when it's okay to restore and when it isn't. Still, it may be the best compromise.
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  True "Undo" is, IMO, a pipe dream for all but brand new projects. That will pretty much require you to rearchitect a decent chunk of anything that wasn't built with it explicitly in mind. In this case, I don't quite understand why stars and forks need to be deleted when switching visibility, since it seems like the two shouldn't be linked. I can star and fork my private repos just fine, so it seems like it was just easier to clear it out than to deal with RBAC at that level.
  - kevinforrestcon 5y ago
    Then don't "do" the delete, when the users "do" the delete. Pretend to do it, actually do it 24 hours later, and if they "undo" the delete within that time frame, just remove it from the delete queue process.
  - whym 5y ago
    I don't think any fork was deleted. 3.5k forks as of now vs 3.4k forks in January: https://web.archive.org/web/20220129022012/https://github.com/httpie/httpie https://web.archive.org/web/20220129022012/https://github.co... Many people won't notice some of their stars having disappeared, but many would be surprised to see their forks deleted without their consent, especially those that are not merely a mirror. People can have diverged forks after adding substantial changes without feeding them back to the original for a variety of reasons.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Just not deleting them in the first place, or not deleting them until explicitly asked to, would suffice, and would be, ultimately, less code. So, I am not buying the apologetics.
  - djur 5y ago
    It seems to me that services that pretend to delete data but don't actually do it are usually subject to criticism on Hacker News, not praise.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      You did not read the comment you replied to. Why? And then, why reply?
    - vidarh 5y ago
      The issue tend to be services who are not upfront about it. "This is potentially really damaging, so in case it's a mistake we'll just hide it for 24 hours during which you can undo" or something to that effect would be sufficient.
quacker 5y ago
> It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future". It's sort of equally easy to say Github should do X or Y to improve the UX in this (rare?) case without actually knowing the effort or opportunity cost. Like maybe I'd rather Github figure out how to not have outages so frequently and how to not accidentally give people million+ dollar bills and such.
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  > Like maybe I'd rather Github figure out how to not have outages so frequently and how to not accidentally give people million+ dollar bills and such. I doubt the engineers working on the stability issues or billing have anything to do with UX and vice versa. It's not like there's a singular focus that everyone at the company must prioritize above all else. Multiple people can work on multiple projects and not impact one another at all.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  On one hand you have millions of users who each are obliged to walk on eggshells. On the other, you have a few Microsoft hacks who could easily do the right thing on behalf of those millions of users.
chefandy 5y ago
Pretty much agree— Universal human fallibility is not an avoidable moral failure, but looking down on those who've made, admitted, and taken responsibility for simple mistakes sure is. Unrealistic assumptions about people's attention, processing capability, and physical capabilities may be the greatest hurdle when trying to actually solve people's problems with software. It can even be a safety issue— consider the Therac 25 incident. That said, superlatives like "impossible" aren't realistic here. As long as an action is possible, it is also possible to fuck it up. The challenge screen does require typing in the repo name which is a pretty solid attention-getter. It would be nice to list the important side effects in big angry letters but I'll bet the list of side-effects that are important to some people would be pointlessly long. Maybe a sanity check requiring repos with extremes in certain metrics to get a sanity check from support first— but I have had some preeeeettty protracted response times from GitHub support.
- wpietri 5y ago
  > The challenge screen does require typing in the repo name which is a pretty solid attention-getter. This is not quite correct. In requires inputting the repo name. It's attention-getting the first time. But recently with some colleagues as part of a handoff we went through 50+ repos and archived the irrelevant ones. Very quickly the person doing the actual archiving went from typing to just copy-pasting the repo names. For programmers, copy-pasting from one spot to another can become very mechanical. So I think this UI choice works well for something that is done very occasionally. But it's no better if people are in the habit. Whereas showing novel information about the cost of the choice would be helpful in breaking the routine. Then could then also make it so that they had to type something only when the operation has a high cost, and what they typed could be something not directly copy-pasteable.
  - chefandy 5y ago
    That's fine. The goals of designing a sanity check prompt to snap people out of autopilot are entirely different from goals you might have in a security system— their being defeatable isn't even a flaw. Jersey barriers vs rumble strips. If someone deliberately doing the same thing over-and-over can avoid the manual effort, that's fine. Their frustration would likely make them think about it less. You don't, and shouldn't get prompted to do the same thing using the API, either.
klabb3 5y ago
Yeah. A warning that can be pattern matched by a human brain, that is just a routine action, will result in autopilot behavior. Flipping early repo visibility is common, I assume. Flipping visibility of 100+ star repos is likely much less common. So having a separate warning in that case might help you snap out of autopilot due to novelty. A common knee-jerk reaction to "users aren't taking our warnings seriously" is making the warning look more scary and involving more (mechanical) steps – such as two confirmations instead of one. Well, that's pattern matchable and subject to desensitization. Like the article states, it's more efficient to instead show what you're about to remove, i.e. a summary of the content as opposed to an identifier, then you get both novelty and proportional scariness, depending on how "big" it is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Proven 5y ago
necovek 5y ago
I am surprised so many people treat losing stars as "dangerous": I can certainly emphatize with the designer coming up with this pop-up while looking at a sample project with 12 stars. Considering this project was out of ordinary in having 54k stars (article mentions being in top 80), they should not be surprised that their case is not top of mind. Sure, it would be nice to highlight the most destructive of actions, but they already had to type out full project path as confirmation. I do believe it would be better if Github allowed restoring data in the next few days (soft deletes ftw) once they hit this issue themselves in the past. And Github support should have recognized that this project is a special, out of ordinary project, and afforded it some engineering time to restore everything.
- Conan_Kudo 5y ago
  > I am surprised so many people treat losing stars as "dangerous": I can certainly emphatize with the designer coming up with this pop-up while looking at a sample project with 12 stars. Lots and lots of websites and companies use the number of stargazers as a strangely important metric for success, so losing them can be really bad.

icambron 5y ago

That’s not quite it. The solution isn’t to stop them from doing it or warning them more aggressively; it’s to make it genuinely less dangerous. For example, make the stars all come back when you reverse the switch. Of course that’s a lot harder to do, since it’s a lot more than a UX change. So I’m not really slagging GitHub here. But it’s the right way to attack this problem.

everforward 5y ago
The counterpoint is that tools like that can be abused. Just as a hypothetical, if I have an open source product and do something the community doesn't like, I can make the repo private til the storm blows over so people can't un-star it. The number of people that remember to un-star it a week or two later is going to be a lot less. I still think you're right, but it's not even as simple as UX and small backend changes. Allowing the repo owner to re-play other peoples' actions comes with complicated policy decisions. GitHub could make it so only support can restore those, but now they're in the awkward position of having to say when it's okay to restore and when it isn't. Still, it may be the best compromise.
mynameisvlad 5y ago
True "Undo" is, IMO, a pipe dream for all but brand new projects. That will pretty much require you to rearchitect a decent chunk of anything that wasn't built with it explicitly in mind. In this case, I don't quite understand why stars and forks need to be deleted when switching visibility, since it seems like the two shouldn't be linked. I can star and fork my private repos just fine, so it seems like it was just easier to clear it out than to deal with RBAC at that level.
- kevinforrestcon 5y ago
  Then don't "do" the delete, when the users "do" the delete. Pretend to do it, actually do it 24 hours later, and if they "undo" the delete within that time frame, just remove it from the delete queue process.
- whym 5y ago
  I don't think any fork was deleted. 3.5k forks as of now vs 3.4k forks in January: https://web.archive.org/web/20220129022012/https://github.com/httpie/httpie https://web.archive.org/web/20220129022012/https://github.co... Many people won't notice some of their stars having disappeared, but many would be surprised to see their forks deleted without their consent, especially those that are not merely a mirror. People can have diverged forks after adding substantial changes without feeding them back to the original for a variety of reasons.
ncmncm 5y ago
Just not deleting them in the first place, or not deleting them until explicitly asked to, would suffice, and would be, ultimately, less code. So, I am not buying the apologetics.
- djur 5y ago
  It seems to me that services that pretend to delete data but don't actually do it are usually subject to criticism on Hacker News, not praise.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    You did not read the comment you replied to. Why? And then, why reply?
  - vidarh 5y ago
    The issue tend to be services who are not upfront about it. "This is potentially really damaging, so in case it's a mistake we'll just hide it for 24 hours during which you can undo" or something to that effect would be sufficient.

quacker 5y ago

> It's easy to be an armchair engineer and say "well, obviously, don't make this mistake in the future". It's sort of equally easy to say Github should do X or Y to improve the UX in this (rare?) case without actually knowing the effort or opportunity cost. Like maybe I'd rather Github figure out how to not have outages so frequently and how to not accidentally give people million+ dollar bills and such.

mynameisvlad 5y ago
> Like maybe I'd rather Github figure out how to not have outages so frequently and how to not accidentally give people million+ dollar bills and such. I doubt the engineers working on the stability issues or billing have anything to do with UX and vice versa. It's not like there's a singular focus that everyone at the company must prioritize above all else. Multiple people can work on multiple projects and not impact one another at all.
ncmncm 5y ago
On one hand you have millions of users who each are obliged to walk on eggshells. On the other, you have a few Microsoft hacks who could easily do the right thing on behalf of those millions of users.

chefandy 5y ago

Pretty much agree— Universal human fallibility is not an avoidable moral failure, but looking down on those who've made, admitted, and taken responsibility for simple mistakes sure is. Unrealistic assumptions about people's attention, processing capability, and physical capabilities may be the greatest hurdle when trying to actually solve people's problems with software. It can even be a safety issue— consider the Therac 25 incident. That said, superlatives like "impossible" aren't realistic here. As long as an action is possible, it is also possible to fuck it up. The challenge screen does require typing in the repo name which is a pretty solid attention-getter. It would be nice to list the important side effects in big angry letters but I'll bet the list of side-effects that are important to some people would be pointlessly long. Maybe a sanity check requiring repos with extremes in certain metrics to get a sanity check from support first— but I have had some preeeeettty protracted response times from GitHub support.

wpietri 5y ago
> The challenge screen does require typing in the repo name which is a pretty solid attention-getter. This is not quite correct. In requires inputting the repo name. It's attention-getting the first time. But recently with some colleagues as part of a handoff we went through 50+ repos and archived the irrelevant ones. Very quickly the person doing the actual archiving went from typing to just copy-pasting the repo names. For programmers, copy-pasting from one spot to another can become very mechanical. So I think this UI choice works well for something that is done very occasionally. But it's no better if people are in the habit. Whereas showing novel information about the cost of the choice would be helpful in breaking the routine. Then could then also make it so that they had to type something only when the operation has a high cost, and what they typed could be something not directly copy-pasteable.
- chefandy 5y ago
  That's fine. The goals of designing a sanity check prompt to snap people out of autopilot are entirely different from goals you might have in a security system— their being defeatable isn't even a flaw. Jersey barriers vs rumble strips. If someone deliberately doing the same thing over-and-over can avoid the manual effort, that's fine. Their frustration would likely make them think about it less. You don't, and shouldn't get prompted to do the same thing using the API, either.

klabb3 5y ago

Yeah. A warning that can be pattern matched by a human brain, that is just a routine action, will result in autopilot behavior. Flipping early repo visibility is common, I assume. Flipping visibility of 100+ star repos is likely much less common. So having a separate warning in that case might help you snap out of autopilot due to novelty. A common knee-jerk reaction to "users aren't taking our warnings seriously" is making the warning look more scary and involving more (mechanical) steps – such as two confirmations instead of one. Well, that's pattern matchable and subject to desensitization. Like the article states, it's more efficient to instead show what you're about to remove, i.e. a summary of the content as opposed to an identifier, then you get both novelty and proportional scariness, depending on how "big" it is. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Proven 5y ago

necovek 5y ago

I am surprised so many people treat losing stars as "dangerous": I can certainly emphatize with the designer coming up with this pop-up while looking at a sample project with 12 stars. Considering this project was out of ordinary in having 54k stars (article mentions being in top 80), they should not be surprised that their case is not top of mind. Sure, it would be nice to highlight the most destructive of actions, but they already had to type out full project path as confirmation. I do believe it would be better if Github allowed restoring data in the next few days (soft deletes ftw) once they hit this issue themselves in the past. And Github support should have recognized that this project is a special, out of ordinary project, and afforded it some engineering time to restore everything.

Conan_Kudo 5y ago
> I am surprised so many people treat losing stars as "dangerous": I can certainly emphatize with the designer coming up with this pop-up while looking at a sample project with 12 stars. Lots and lots of websites and companies use the number of stargazers as a strangely important metric for success, so losing them can be really bad.