12 ms·

Trending tabs are being deprecated due to low usage

288 points by willdr 4y ago

WiSaGaN 4y ago
I am fine with company killing apps or features that don't make money. What i don't like is that company uses corporate talk to hide the real motive to kill popular products. This has happened to CentOS after ibm taking over redhat, now we are witnessing this.
superchroma 4y ago
Unsurprising, in my usage of GitHub, I'm usually completely disinterested in what others are doing. Maybe they could occasionally feature really interesting hand-picked projects.
- yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
  I’m interested in changes that happen to open source libraries that I care about, but I don’t understand the social aspect beyond that. By the way, you mean uninterested :)
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > By the way, you mean uninterested :) From [1], 1a "not having the mind or feelings engaged" certainly sounds like GP's meaning and is the same definition given in [2] "not having the mind or feelings engaged". [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinterested https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinterested [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uninterested https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uninterested
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    You do your username proud, :D
  - dcminter 4y ago
    The word has both meanings (Shakespeare used it to mean "uninterested" so there's centuries of precedent). You were not confused. Let it go.
quyleanh 4y ago
I check this page everyday. A lot of my starred repos come from this page. For me, the Trending page is even more useful than Explore page. Still wondering why Explore page has more spotlight than Trending page.
- kungfufrog 4y ago
  Agreed, it's also how I keep my finger on the pulse of languages I enjoy that I'm not professionally using at the current moment and also to keep up with niche domain specific languages as to where and how they are being used. Boo!
- matsemann 4y ago
  Just curious, but why star them at all? I've starred 11 repos in my many years on github, to bookmark some specific projects. But others in my feed star projects daily and have over a thousand projects in their star list. I'm curious to why. Will you ever check them out again? Isn't the list now so long it's hard to find things in it?
  - zebracanevra 4y ago
    fwiw, I use github stars also as simple bookmark list, with about 100 stars. When one of my (quite obscure) repos get stars, I feel joy. I like to think starring someone else's repo has that same reaction for them, too.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I use it as both a bookmark so I can find a repo again in future, but also as a kind of "I think this project is great" thumbs up. It's pretty clear that that's a common reason for stars.
    - blooalien 4y ago
      Ya, exactly. It can help give the project author some indication that a certain number of folks are interested in their project.
  - 4y ago
p-e-w 4y ago
GitHub could never quite decide whether they want to be a social network or not. The "Trending" page (which has been useless for a long time due to the ranking algorithm rewrite several years ago) is just one example of this indecision. The way users can vote on issues with "thumbs up", "heart", "rocket", and "fanfare" emojis (instead of simply "up" and "down") is another, and the ridiculous "achievements" on user pages is yet another. They've also added and removed the "Social Coding" label several times from their front page if memory serves correctly. It's like the whole company is having a neverending identity crisis.
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  I mean it is worth playing around in that space to see if it sticks. Maybe there is an alternate universe where they stuff became really popular? You wouldn’t know unless you tried! Hopefully they didn’t invest too much into their MVP…
  - nmfisher 4y ago
    Agreed. I think all of these features/additions have been useless, but I'm not going to criticize them for trying out something new.
    - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
      I think criticizing them is fair. GitHub is a well established code repository which does something and does it well. Microsoft endlessly tinkering with the product shows a lack of stability in it's lifespan, what if you adopt a new feature they add only for it to be removed in the next cycle. But they paid 7.5 billion dollars for the website, and need to justify the salaries of dozens of VPs of marketing and PMs, so here we are.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  The social network aspect was a means to an end ("get enterprise customers"), but the needs of enterprise customers differ from the needs of open source communities. Hence the "indecision"
thomasvm 4y ago
So I guess me checking that page everyday wasn't enough to make a difference. :'(
- thuruv 4y ago
  +1 that page is usually my go-to whenever I have a bit of free time :(
robertwt7 4y ago
huh!?? don't they have amplitude to check how many users click that page? I click on that every day to see interesting projects when I'm bored and I have starred so many cool projects from there.. the product people is insane, it's an insane decision
- bongobingo1 4y ago
  > huh!?? don't they have amplitude to check how many users click that page? Yes!?? Turns out the value is "not enough". I never click on that and have starred no cool projects from there. Seems like a totally reasonable product decision from my seat.
  - throwwwaway23 4y ago
    > Seems like a totally reasonable product decision from my seat. The same probably applied to shutting down Google Reader. But it's still brought up a decade later, because it hit the "right" group of users. These changes spend a lot of the goodwill built by Github.
  - metadaemon 4y ago
    Seems like a weird decision not to expose this in some capacity. It encourages external crawling and aggregation of content hosted on their site. Seeing that their search feature already produces abysmal results, it only further obfuscates public repositories.
stblack 4y ago
GitHub is owned by Microsoft. This sort of BS should surprise nobody. Never underestimate Microsoft’s ability and propensity to fuck things up. I remember when Skype was great, for example. We could easily cite 30 other such examples.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Whiteshadow12 4y ago
After the ranking algorithm change to the Trending page, I found I basically stopped using it (I lived on that page before the change), I found I'm more likely to find cool projects/libraries/etc here.
- tetris11 4y ago
  The rewrite was horrible. I remember before how you could find interesting projects from random developers with growing communities. Now it's side-project X from reknowned developer N, or the newly created repo from some known tech firm that somehow has 100 stars already. All the actual fresh meat got dried out. I lost interest after the rewrite.
  - mattgreenrocks 4y ago
    > Now it's side-project X from reknowned developer N, or the newly created repo from some known tech firm that somehow has 100 stars already. "Trending" on social sites always seems to translate to, "here is popular thing that should become more popular because it's already popular." The extreme preference for externally mediated measures of status never fails to amuse me.
philliphaydon 4y ago
I honestly had no idea this page existed...
- h3mb3 4y ago
  The same. Although, you would think GitHub had the resources to keep maintaining this page even for just public image purposes among the power users / enthusiast who maybe care more. Seems like they are tuning town the social media aspect in their marketing too.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Same here. For the first time ever, I clicked through the explore section today and found nothing of interest there. They could remove the whole explore section and I would never have noticed.
bottlepalm 4y ago
Maybe like once a month I'll check out that page. I like to go programming language by language to see what's popular in each. Very sad.
kumarm 4y ago
Trending Repo's used to work great years back. I haven't used it after it stopped being useful at all.
tuncaydelibasi 4y ago
It was my favorite
yosito 4y ago
It's almost certainly not due to low usage, but due to some Microsoft PM getting a promotion by making big changes.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Yeah how much effort is it really to maintain it?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
favorited 4y ago
The trending page is pretty much the only reason I go to GitHub these days. Weirdly, I've been low-key worried about it ever since they added the "Spoken Language" dropdown, which AFAICT is the only real change from the last few years. It's not that I think being able to search by spoken language is bad or anything, it just screams of a middle manager trying to "solve" the important problem of a few people being confused about how the "language" filter referred to the programming language, and the solution was "let's add another button!"
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I always assumed it was to add a way to filter out those Chinese repos that are starred by a million people but aren't actually code project.
- notduncansmith 4y ago
  I have run across several projects I wanted to use but whose main documentation was not in a language I spoke well enough. It would be nice to only show repositories documented in languages I know well enough to interpret reasonable demands.
  - favorited 4y ago
    Totally agree! Documented language is a great filter feature. I want more filters, not fewer. The fact that this is the only filter they’ve added in years, and it is next to a different “language” drop-down doesn’t suggest that they’re really interested in making filtering actually helpful — but that they’re trying to solve one specific label being a source of confusion by adding another button.
- stanislavb 4y ago
  May I suggest giving a try to https://www.libhunt.com https://www.libhunt.com ? A project of mine that tracks project mentions (in real time) on Hacker News and Reddit to determine trending repos.
  - 4y ago
sergiotapia 4y ago
The feature is hidden behind Explore -> Trending. Make it the first menu nav navigation item and people _will_ use it. It's useful. They want to remove it because it's probably expensive to run?
eurasiantiger 4y ago
Again removing heavy features.
35mm 4y ago
You can get the most popular repos via the API. It’s ranked by number of stars, rather than a ‘trending’ algorithm however: https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1&sort=stars https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1&sort...
someperson 4y ago
Link: https://github.com/trending?since=daily https://github.com/trending?since=daily
picsao 4y ago
oleg_antonyan 4y ago
Where is this page? Never knew it exists and cannot find it now
- mrweasel 4y ago
  There's a lot of "hidden" stuff on Github. I'm not really sure why, the default page when you're logged in and go to github.com is pretty much useless. They could put some of the functionality there. Maybe you can change it, I don't can't figure it out. Why is "Following" the default, I never need to know that. I never used the "Trending" but it could be one of these cases where companies are measuring something, decides it's not being used, but fail to consider why that might be. Personally I don't see it being particularly relevant, but many seem to enjoy it. To navigate to the "tab", which is just a page really. Click on "Explore" and then it's in the middle of the page, under the black menu. Or go here: https://github.com/trending https://github.com/trending
chaosprint 4y ago
I rarely use this page because often I find it recommends some big projects rather than interesting small projects. Why do I need to see the React repo again and again? The algorithm for deciding what is trending is to blame.
- bhrgunatha 4y ago
  Absolutely. Many here are saying how much they like the feature. I'd much prefer a "similar repos/projects/people" once I'm visiting a project or person I've _chosen_ to view. I've already expressed my interest by visiting, why not exploit that?
kyleee 4y ago
most things where organic growth can shine through seem to get nerfed and/or closed down. they made it worse years ago, and will now close it even though it's a great view into what's happening on github, great for fosterting what little spontaneous community/interaction exists on github, and enjoyed by many people. but as others have alluded to, this will send some PM's kid(s) to college or help with the mortgage on their 2nd or 3rd property and should be a reminder that it's not great to rely on a company (especially a big co. with a wild track record like microsoft) for services, especially where important things like community or source code management are concerned
meibo 4y ago
Shame, having my repos show up there felt really validating - and judging from the amount of people that ended up being interested, it must've had some kind of userbase.
HunOL 4y ago
Sad news. For me it was ritual on Friday mornings check trending repos for the past week. Thanks to it I found out about few nice projects.
yewenjie 4y ago
ITT people are mentioning the old ranking algorithm for Trending repos. Is there any way today to access something like that? Also, how do you discover new and interesting projects in these days?
darkhorn 4y ago
I think they want you to subscribe to email updates to explore new interesting repositories. Probably they are going to use it for marketing too. That might be the reason of the deprication of the page.
ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago
That's a shame. I admit that I hardly ever look at this page but when I do rediscover it every few months I always stumble into a load of great projects. I was just looking at the list and saw this - https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking - anyone missing the rending feature might like that
ARandomerDude 4y ago
[x] Embrace [x] Extend [-] Destroy The harder open source is to discover, the harder it will be to use. This is M$FT, after all.
lobsterz 4y ago
https://trends.now.sh/ https://trends.now.sh/
BurningPenguin 4y ago
I didn't even know it existed until now, but i already found some interesting "awesome" list. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted This is exactly what i was searching a few weeks ago.
mg 4y ago
Sounds like a fun weekend project to replicate it? The GitHub search API seems to provide everything that is needed. It returns 30 repos per query and allows 30 * 60 * 24 = 43200 queries per day. So one could track the top 43200 * 30 = 1296000 repos. That is enough to track all repos with more then 20 stars: https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1000&sort=stars https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1000&s... But maybe it has already been done? This looks like it: https://ossinsight.io/#trending-repos https://ossinsight.io/#trending-repos
- jonas-w 4y ago
  When logged in, with an api key, you have 5000 requests per hour.
- whoibrar 4y ago
  Wow this is interesting, thanks for posting.
- zegl 4y ago
  I spent the afternoon building something similar to the trending page (starting with tracking github actions, will add more features over the weekend): https://trendy.dev/ https://trendy.dev/
MarcoZavala 4y ago
bowsamic 4y ago
That is really weird. It's clearly a very popular feature. Part of me thinks that their metrics are broken for some reason and that this has been incorrectly flagged as low usage
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
I love the trending tab, but I visit them only 10 times a month. It's enought for me to get the benefit of it. I suspect lany use it this way. Obviously compared to other tabs, it's going to be very low traffic. But in this case, traffic is a bad metric.
zegl 4y ago
I've been a big fan of the trending page, and have found many cool projects from there, as well as been very happy when my project has made it to the list, which usually brings on a big wave of new users! As someone who's building apps and actions to run on GitHub, I've always found the discoverability of apps to be lacking. The marketplace is nothing but a big list of things, in seemingly random order. Compare this to the Slack App "store" which has a much better discoverability and feel to it. I which it had reviews, trends, new highlights etc, to make it easier to discover new apps, and for app developers like myself to get a chance to attract more users.
- zegl 4y ago
  Just started building something, let me present: trendy.dev! For now it's just a list of actions, sorted by stars. I'm planning to add a few more features, to keep track of currently popular actions, and of course, repositories that are currently getting a lot of traction! https://trendy.dev/ https://trendy.dev/
Aeolun 4y ago
Why deprecate this at all? It’s not like the logic around trending repositoriesis likely to change in the next 10 years or so. If they do this it must be for some other reason than upkeep.
- andirk 4y ago
  I and others are guessing it's a Digg-style sabotage in favor of ad-driven, corporate-friendly traffic sculpting. Worked great for Digg, right?
andirk 4y ago
Ah yes. The act of learning about something awesome by the message saying it's going away.
- laxd 4y ago
  Hah, this concept sounds like something you'd find named in Meaning of Liff.
  - baq 4y ago
    Actually it’s just a normal day at Google
ovyan 4y ago
Since there are less and less ways to discover cool repos, recently I’ve made an open source extension to get recommendations on GitHub. You can check it out https://indexstorm.com/git-rec https://indexstorm.com/git-rec
- yewenjie 4y ago
  Just installed it and am already loving it! I tested it on a repo for which I thought I knew all the available alternatives but was surprised to find multiple new ones! And I am saying as a person who has always hated recommender systems at shopping sites/social media. Thank you so much for creating this.
revskill 4y ago
I see this is a good thing though. I'm not sure, but trending tabs allow for growth hacking with tricks to get on the top by spammers. What i prefer, is personalized trending profile instead.
- AlfeG 4y ago
  Trending is only way to observe trends outside of personalized or curated bubble. Not a lot of spam happen in trending tabs.
  - revskill 4y ago
    I mean, spam trick to get to the top.
scanr 4y ago
Oh no. I visit the trending tab almost daily. Any suggestions for alternatives?
Lorin 4y ago
The social aspect of GitHub is the only reason I'm considering it over GitLab for a new open source project. Reducing discovery seems like it could be harmful - they should really provide readers rough comparative traffic to better justify this..
boesboes 4y ago
Goodbye sweet trending page, I hardly knew ye Never knew it existed tbh
fedeb95 4y ago
I've literally never opened that tab. And probably the majority of people not using it doesn't comment here either
- jacooper 4y ago
  Personally i didn't know it even existed
  - malfist 4y ago
    Same here. I checked it out because of this page. I also didn't know the explore tab was a thing. There's a social media aspect to github?
    - jacooper 4y ago
      Its one of the main differentiators of GitHub from the competition.
      - fedeb95 4y ago
        for me personally the only thing I evaluate this type of services against is: - is it free for my personal projects? - how many interesting libraries I may use are there? - does it offer a free tier of pipelines and things like that? - can I make private projects for free? All the rest is noise. This is just me though.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pryelluw 4y ago
Just because some feature has low usage does not mean you should deprecate it. The whole point of GitHub is to provide discoverability to what others are doing. If anything they should improve upon the feature.
gwbas1c 4y ago
> Due to low usage of Trending Repositories and Trending Developers, this tab will no longer be available I've never used this tab. (Just opened it for the first time.) It's cool, and I'm disappointed to see it go. BUT: We should spend a minute thinking about the counter argument. Little and unused features can add cruft to a codebase, and significantly impede development. It's possible that hooks for corner cases and features can be so complicated that working around them becomes more burdensome than supporting the important use cases. Case in point: When I was lead on Syncplicity, we had a corner case where a given folder on disk could be in multiple synchronized folders in the cloud. (Long story.) The problem was this corner case made many use cases, in the desktop client, significantly more complicated and bug-prone than needed. (What happens if you have different permissions to the same file?) There was a point where I put my foot down (as lead) and said we couldn't support the corner case anymore. This lead to almost a year of two branches of the product, and daily merge conflicts between both branches. I had to put my foot down again (as lead) and push that we had to ship the version of the product that didn't have the corner case and stop working on two branches. This makes me wonder if Github needs to cut back on corner cases and other little-used features in order to fix some maintainability issues?
- baq 4y ago
  GitHub has had so many issues this year people lost count, me included. Of course this points to operations/SRE issues. OTOH if a feature not being widely used was grounds for its removal, they should turn excel into a list editor.
- danielamitay 4y ago
  The main issue is the conflating of usage and value. The persona/user group that consumes the Trending pages are likely users who themselves contribute to open source, and thus are part of a flywheel that drives more code contribution overall. (e.g. how 1% of users post on reddit vs 99% consume) Not all usage is made equally. This scenario reminds me of a funny story posted on HN a while ago: https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi (TL;DR; if you take this "usage based" feature removal logic to it's conclusion, a lot of important keys would be removed from computers/keyboards).
CheeseWong 4y ago
Hi, guys. I'd like to improve the sorting rules of the Trending Repos for OSSInsight. Give me some advice plz. https://github.com/pingcap/ossinsight/issues/778 https://github.com/pingcap/ossinsight/issues/778
mattgreenrocks 4y ago
I think I agree here. GitHub calls itself social coding, but trending fits in poorly with that. When I hit a problem that I think might be solved by open source, telling me that the TypeScript repo is trending gives me exactly zero information. If we're honest, the Trending tab often seems to mean, "these projects went viral on HN/social media." And I'm not sure why they deserve extra attention, but it follows the general trend of social media being obsessed with perpetuating the Matthew Effect.
pensatoio 4y ago
I spend so much time exploring repos related to work or personal projects. I literally do not have time at the end of my day where I think to myself, "you know what, I really want to find some more repos to star and never look at again."

288 points by willdr 4y ago

I am fine with company killing apps or features that don't make money. What i don't like is that company uses corporate talk to hide the real motive to kill popular products. This has happened to CentOS after ibm taking over redhat, now we are witnessing this.

superchroma 4y ago

Unsurprising, in my usage of GitHub, I'm usually completely disinterested in what others are doing. Maybe they could occasionally feature really interesting hand-picked projects.

yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
I’m interested in changes that happen to open source libraries that I care about, but I don’t understand the social aspect beyond that. By the way, you mean uninterested :)
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > By the way, you mean uninterested :) From [1], 1a "not having the mind or feelings engaged" certainly sounds like GP's meaning and is the same definition given in [2] "not having the mind or feelings engaged". [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinterested https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinterested [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uninterested https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/uninterested
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  You do your username proud, :D
- dcminter 4y ago
  The word has both meanings (Shakespeare used it to mean "uninterested" so there's centuries of precedent). You were not confused. Let it go.

quyleanh 4y ago

I check this page everyday. A lot of my starred repos come from this page. For me, the Trending page is even more useful than Explore page. Still wondering why Explore page has more spotlight than Trending page.

kungfufrog 4y ago
Agreed, it's also how I keep my finger on the pulse of languages I enjoy that I'm not professionally using at the current moment and also to keep up with niche domain specific languages as to where and how they are being used. Boo!
matsemann 4y ago
Just curious, but why star them at all? I've starred 11 repos in my many years on github, to bookmark some specific projects. But others in my feed star projects daily and have over a thousand projects in their star list. I'm curious to why. Will you ever check them out again? Isn't the list now so long it's hard to find things in it?
- zebracanevra 4y ago
  fwiw, I use github stars also as simple bookmark list, with about 100 stars. When one of my (quite obscure) repos get stars, I feel joy. I like to think starring someone else's repo has that same reaction for them, too.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I use it as both a bookmark so I can find a repo again in future, but also as a kind of "I think this project is great" thumbs up. It's pretty clear that that's a common reason for stars.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    Ya, exactly. It can help give the project author some indication that a certain number of folks are interested in their project.
- 4y ago

p-e-w 4y ago

GitHub could never quite decide whether they want to be a social network or not. The "Trending" page (which has been useless for a long time due to the ranking algorithm rewrite several years ago) is just one example of this indecision. The way users can vote on issues with "thumbs up", "heart", "rocket", and "fanfare" emojis (instead of simply "up" and "down") is another, and the ridiculous "achievements" on user pages is yet another. They've also added and removed the "Social Coding" label several times from their front page if memory serves correctly. It's like the whole company is having a neverending identity crisis.

spookthesunset 4y ago
I mean it is worth playing around in that space to see if it sticks. Maybe there is an alternate universe where they stuff became really popular? You wouldn’t know unless you tried! Hopefully they didn’t invest too much into their MVP…
- nmfisher 4y ago
  Agreed. I think all of these features/additions have been useless, but I'm not going to criticize them for trying out something new.
  - SQueeeeeL 4y ago
    I think criticizing them is fair. GitHub is a well established code repository which does something and does it well. Microsoft endlessly tinkering with the product shows a lack of stability in it's lifespan, what if you adopt a new feature they add only for it to be removed in the next cycle. But they paid 7.5 billion dollars for the website, and need to justify the salaries of dozens of VPs of marketing and PMs, so here we are.
TAForObvReasons 4y ago
The social network aspect was a means to an end ("get enterprise customers"), but the needs of enterprise customers differ from the needs of open source communities. Hence the "indecision"

thomasvm 4y ago

So I guess me checking that page everyday wasn't enough to make a difference. :'(

thuruv 4y ago
+1 that page is usually my go-to whenever I have a bit of free time :(

robertwt7 4y ago

huh!?? don't they have amplitude to check how many users click that page? I click on that every day to see interesting projects when I'm bored and I have starred so many cool projects from there.. the product people is insane, it's an insane decision

bongobingo1 4y ago
> huh!?? don't they have amplitude to check how many users click that page? Yes!?? Turns out the value is "not enough". I never click on that and have starred no cool projects from there. Seems like a totally reasonable product decision from my seat.
- throwwwaway23 4y ago
  > Seems like a totally reasonable product decision from my seat. The same probably applied to shutting down Google Reader. But it's still brought up a decade later, because it hit the "right" group of users. These changes spend a lot of the goodwill built by Github.
- metadaemon 4y ago
  Seems like a weird decision not to expose this in some capacity. It encourages external crawling and aggregation of content hosted on their site. Seeing that their search feature already produces abysmal results, it only further obfuscates public repositories.

stblack 4y ago

GitHub is owned by Microsoft. This sort of BS should surprise nobody. Never underestimate Microsoft’s ability and propensity to fuck things up. I remember when Skype was great, for example. We could easily cite 30 other such examples.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Whiteshadow12 4y ago

After the ranking algorithm change to the Trending page, I found I basically stopped using it (I lived on that page before the change), I found I'm more likely to find cool projects/libraries/etc here.

tetris11 4y ago
The rewrite was horrible. I remember before how you could find interesting projects from random developers with growing communities. Now it's side-project X from reknowned developer N, or the newly created repo from some known tech firm that somehow has 100 stars already. All the actual fresh meat got dried out. I lost interest after the rewrite.
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  > Now it's side-project X from reknowned developer N, or the newly created repo from some known tech firm that somehow has 100 stars already. "Trending" on social sites always seems to translate to, "here is popular thing that should become more popular because it's already popular." The extreme preference for externally mediated measures of status never fails to amuse me.

philliphaydon 4y ago

I honestly had no idea this page existed...

h3mb3 4y ago
The same. Although, you would think GitHub had the resources to keep maintaining this page even for just public image purposes among the power users / enthusiast who maybe care more. Seems like they are tuning town the social media aspect in their marketing too.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Same here. For the first time ever, I clicked through the explore section today and found nothing of interest there. They could remove the whole explore section and I would never have noticed.

bottlepalm 4y ago

Maybe like once a month I'll check out that page. I like to go programming language by language to see what's popular in each. Very sad.

kumarm 4y ago

Trending Repo's used to work great years back. I haven't used it after it stopped being useful at all.

tuncaydelibasi 4y ago

It was my favorite

yosito 4y ago

It's almost certainly not due to low usage, but due to some Microsoft PM getting a promotion by making big changes.

IshKebab 4y ago
Yeah how much effort is it really to maintain it?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

favorited 4y ago

The trending page is pretty much the only reason I go to GitHub these days. Weirdly, I've been low-key worried about it ever since they added the "Spoken Language" dropdown, which AFAICT is the only real change from the last few years. It's not that I think being able to search by spoken language is bad or anything, it just screams of a middle manager trying to "solve" the important problem of a few people being confused about how the "language" filter referred to the programming language, and the solution was "let's add another button!"

IshKebab 4y ago
I always assumed it was to add a way to filter out those Chinese repos that are starred by a million people but aren't actually code project.
notduncansmith 4y ago
I have run across several projects I wanted to use but whose main documentation was not in a language I spoke well enough. It would be nice to only show repositories documented in languages I know well enough to interpret reasonable demands.
- favorited 4y ago
  Totally agree! Documented language is a great filter feature. I want more filters, not fewer. The fact that this is the only filter they’ve added in years, and it is next to a different “language” drop-down doesn’t suggest that they’re really interested in making filtering actually helpful — but that they’re trying to solve one specific label being a source of confusion by adding another button.
stanislavb 4y ago
May I suggest giving a try to https://www.libhunt.com https://www.libhunt.com ? A project of mine that tracks project mentions (in real time) on Hacker News and Reddit to determine trending repos.
- 4y ago

sergiotapia 4y ago

The feature is hidden behind Explore -> Trending. Make it the first menu nav navigation item and people _will_ use it. It's useful. They want to remove it because it's probably expensive to run?

eurasiantiger 4y ago

Again removing heavy features.

35mm 4y ago

You can get the most popular repos via the API. It’s ranked by number of stars, rather than a ‘trending’ algorithm however: https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1&sort=stars https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1&sort...

someperson 4y ago

Link: https://github.com/trending?since=daily https://github.com/trending?since=daily

picsao 4y ago

oleg_antonyan 4y ago

Where is this page? Never knew it exists and cannot find it now

mrweasel 4y ago
There's a lot of "hidden" stuff on Github. I'm not really sure why, the default page when you're logged in and go to github.com is pretty much useless. They could put some of the functionality there. Maybe you can change it, I don't can't figure it out. Why is "Following" the default, I never need to know that. I never used the "Trending" but it could be one of these cases where companies are measuring something, decides it's not being used, but fail to consider why that might be. Personally I don't see it being particularly relevant, but many seem to enjoy it. To navigate to the "tab", which is just a page really. Click on "Explore" and then it's in the middle of the page, under the black menu. Or go here: https://github.com/trending https://github.com/trending

chaosprint 4y ago

I rarely use this page because often I find it recommends some big projects rather than interesting small projects. Why do I need to see the React repo again and again? The algorithm for deciding what is trending is to blame.

bhrgunatha 4y ago
Absolutely. Many here are saying how much they like the feature. I'd much prefer a "similar repos/projects/people" once I'm visiting a project or person I've _chosen_ to view. I've already expressed my interest by visiting, why not exploit that?

kyleee 4y ago

most things where organic growth can shine through seem to get nerfed and/or closed down. they made it worse years ago, and will now close it even though it's a great view into what's happening on github, great for fosterting what little spontaneous community/interaction exists on github, and enjoyed by many people. but as others have alluded to, this will send some PM's kid(s) to college or help with the mortgage on their 2nd or 3rd property and should be a reminder that it's not great to rely on a company (especially a big co. with a wild track record like microsoft) for services, especially where important things like community or source code management are concerned

meibo 4y ago

Shame, having my repos show up there felt really validating - and judging from the amount of people that ended up being interested, it must've had some kind of userbase.

HunOL 4y ago

Sad news. For me it was ritual on Friday mornings check trending repos for the past week. Thanks to it I found out about few nice projects.

yewenjie 4y ago

ITT people are mentioning the old ranking algorithm for Trending repos. Is there any way today to access something like that? Also, how do you discover new and interesting projects in these days?

darkhorn 4y ago

I think they want you to subscribe to email updates to explore new interesting repositories. Probably they are going to use it for marketing too. That might be the reason of the deprication of the page.

ElCapitanMarkla 4y ago

That's a shame. I admit that I hardly ever look at this page but when I do rediscover it every few months I always stumble into a load of great projects. I was just looking at the list and saw this - https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking https://github.com/EvanLi/Github-Ranking - anyone missing the rending feature might like that

ARandomerDude 4y ago

[x] Embrace [x] Extend [-] Destroy The harder open source is to discover, the harder it will be to use. This is M$FT, after all.

lobsterz 4y ago

https://trends.now.sh/ https://trends.now.sh/

BurningPenguin 4y ago

I didn't even know it existed until now, but i already found some interesting "awesome" list. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted This is exactly what i was searching a few weeks ago.

mg 4y ago

Sounds like a fun weekend project to replicate it? The GitHub search API seems to provide everything that is needed. It returns 30 repos per query and allows 30 * 60 * 24 = 43200 queries per day. So one could track the top 43200 * 30 = 1296000 repos. That is enough to track all repos with more then 20 stars: https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1000&sort=stars https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=stars:%3E1000&s... But maybe it has already been done? This looks like it: https://ossinsight.io/#trending-repos https://ossinsight.io/#trending-repos

jonas-w 4y ago
When logged in, with an api key, you have 5000 requests per hour.
whoibrar 4y ago
Wow this is interesting, thanks for posting.
zegl 4y ago
I spent the afternoon building something similar to the trending page (starting with tracking github actions, will add more features over the weekend): https://trendy.dev/ https://trendy.dev/

MarcoZavala 4y ago

bowsamic 4y ago

That is really weird. It's clearly a very popular feature. Part of me thinks that their metrics are broken for some reason and that this has been incorrectly flagged as low usage

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

I love the trending tab, but I visit them only 10 times a month. It's enought for me to get the benefit of it. I suspect lany use it this way. Obviously compared to other tabs, it's going to be very low traffic. But in this case, traffic is a bad metric.

zegl 4y ago

I've been a big fan of the trending page, and have found many cool projects from there, as well as been very happy when my project has made it to the list, which usually brings on a big wave of new users! As someone who's building apps and actions to run on GitHub, I've always found the discoverability of apps to be lacking. The marketplace is nothing but a big list of things, in seemingly random order. Compare this to the Slack App "store" which has a much better discoverability and feel to it. I which it had reviews, trends, new highlights etc, to make it easier to discover new apps, and for app developers like myself to get a chance to attract more users.

zegl 4y ago
Just started building something, let me present: trendy.dev! For now it's just a list of actions, sorted by stars. I'm planning to add a few more features, to keep track of currently popular actions, and of course, repositories that are currently getting a lot of traction! https://trendy.dev/ https://trendy.dev/

Aeolun 4y ago

Why deprecate this at all? It’s not like the logic around trending repositoriesis likely to change in the next 10 years or so. If they do this it must be for some other reason than upkeep.

andirk 4y ago
I and others are guessing it's a Digg-style sabotage in favor of ad-driven, corporate-friendly traffic sculpting. Worked great for Digg, right?

andirk 4y ago

Ah yes. The act of learning about something awesome by the message saying it's going away.

laxd 4y ago
Hah, this concept sounds like something you'd find named in Meaning of Liff.
- baq 4y ago
  Actually it’s just a normal day at Google

ovyan 4y ago

Since there are less and less ways to discover cool repos, recently I’ve made an open source extension to get recommendations on GitHub. You can check it out https://indexstorm.com/git-rec https://indexstorm.com/git-rec

yewenjie 4y ago
Just installed it and am already loving it! I tested it on a repo for which I thought I knew all the available alternatives but was surprised to find multiple new ones! And I am saying as a person who has always hated recommender systems at shopping sites/social media. Thank you so much for creating this.

revskill 4y ago

I see this is a good thing though. I'm not sure, but trending tabs allow for growth hacking with tricks to get on the top by spammers. What i prefer, is personalized trending profile instead.

AlfeG 4y ago
Trending is only way to observe trends outside of personalized or curated bubble. Not a lot of spam happen in trending tabs.
- revskill 4y ago
  I mean, spam trick to get to the top.

scanr 4y ago

Oh no. I visit the trending tab almost daily. Any suggestions for alternatives?

Lorin 4y ago

The social aspect of GitHub is the only reason I'm considering it over GitLab for a new open source project. Reducing discovery seems like it could be harmful - they should really provide readers rough comparative traffic to better justify this..

boesboes 4y ago

Goodbye sweet trending page, I hardly knew ye Never knew it existed tbh

fedeb95 4y ago

I've literally never opened that tab. And probably the majority of people not using it doesn't comment here either

jacooper 4y ago
Personally i didn't know it even existed
- malfist 4y ago
  Same here. I checked it out because of this page. I also didn't know the explore tab was a thing. There's a social media aspect to github?
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Its one of the main differentiators of GitHub from the competition.
    - fedeb95 4y ago
      for me personally the only thing I evaluate this type of services against is: - is it free for my personal projects? - how many interesting libraries I may use are there? - does it offer a free tier of pipelines and things like that? - can I make private projects for free? All the rest is noise. This is just me though.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pryelluw 4y ago

Just because some feature has low usage does not mean you should deprecate it. The whole point of GitHub is to provide discoverability to what others are doing. If anything they should improve upon the feature.

gwbas1c 4y ago

> Due to low usage of Trending Repositories and Trending Developers, this tab will no longer be available I've never used this tab. (Just opened it for the first time.) It's cool, and I'm disappointed to see it go. BUT: We should spend a minute thinking about the counter argument. Little and unused features can add cruft to a codebase, and significantly impede development. It's possible that hooks for corner cases and features can be so complicated that working around them becomes more burdensome than supporting the important use cases. Case in point: When I was lead on Syncplicity, we had a corner case where a given folder on disk could be in multiple synchronized folders in the cloud. (Long story.) The problem was this corner case made many use cases, in the desktop client, significantly more complicated and bug-prone than needed. (What happens if you have different permissions to the same file?) There was a point where I put my foot down (as lead) and said we couldn't support the corner case anymore. This lead to almost a year of two branches of the product, and daily merge conflicts between both branches. I had to put my foot down again (as lead) and push that we had to ship the version of the product that didn't have the corner case and stop working on two branches. This makes me wonder if Github needs to cut back on corner cases and other little-used features in order to fix some maintainability issues?

baq 4y ago
GitHub has had so many issues this year people lost count, me included. Of course this points to operations/SRE issues. OTOH if a feature not being widely used was grounds for its removal, they should turn excel into a list editor.
danielamitay 4y ago
The main issue is the conflating of usage and value. The persona/user group that consumes the Trending pages are likely users who themselves contribute to open source, and thus are part of a flywheel that drives more code contribution overall. (e.g. how 1% of users post on reddit vs 99% consume) Not all usage is made equally. This scenario reminds me of a funny story posted on HN a while ago: https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/48-i-have-no-capslock.gmi (TL;DR; if you take this "usage based" feature removal logic to it's conclusion, a lot of important keys would be removed from computers/keyboards).

CheeseWong 4y ago

Hi, guys. I'd like to improve the sorting rules of the Trending Repos for OSSInsight. Give me some advice plz. https://github.com/pingcap/ossinsight/issues/778 https://github.com/pingcap/ossinsight/issues/778

mattgreenrocks 4y ago

I think I agree here. GitHub calls itself social coding, but trending fits in poorly with that. When I hit a problem that I think might be solved by open source, telling me that the TypeScript repo is trending gives me exactly zero information. If we're honest, the Trending tab often seems to mean, "these projects went viral on HN/social media." And I'm not sure why they deserve extra attention, but it follows the general trend of social media being obsessed with perpetuating the Matthew Effect.

pensatoio 4y ago

I spend so much time exploring repos related to work or personal projects. I literally do not have time at the end of my day where I think to myself, "you know what, I really want to find some more repos to star and never look at again."