12 ms·

GitHub backtracks on deprecating the trending tabs page

153 points by TowerTall 4y ago

mfrw 4y ago
Most of the folks have already mentioned on the thread; it's a pretty cool place to find something that one does not know even exists. Quote from the thread[0]: ''' Hey folks - Martin from GitHub here. Thanks for all the feedback on the Trending page. Given the feedback here, it’s clear we need to look again at the plan to deprecate this. The team is going to re-evaluate and see if we can come up with some other options. ''' [0]:https://github.com/community/community/discussions/31644#discussioncomment-3539690 https://github.com/community/community/discussions/31644#dis...
SquareWheel 4y ago
I've never seen the Trending page before, but it looks like another take on the the "Explore" page. I wonder, do people generally go to GitHub just to browse around? But if people find value in it, then who am I to say. By the way, it's deprecating. Depreciation is something else.
- thorum 4y ago
  The explore page is personalized, meaning it shows you repositories that are similar or related to ones you’ve already seen. It’s useful, but the trending page shows overall trends on GitHub and is a great way to expand your horizons and discover new things happening in the open source community.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  > By the way, it's deprecating. Depreciation is something else. This one is weird to me too. If anything, Trending trending with this news has caused its appreciation
- shakna 4y ago
  "Explore" actually came _after_ "Trending". It seemed, to me at least, that when "Explore" was originally created, it was intended to eventually replace the "Trending" page, using more personalised information. And the "Trending" page did languish, with more frequent breakages and less frequent updates, since they created the other.
- lumost 4y ago
  I like it for the more niche languages I follow such as rust/go. It's interesting to see where things are happening.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    > for the more niche languages I follow such as rust/go stares while writing Clojure
thorum 4y ago
From reading the discussion about this issue here and on Reddit, it seems like most people weren’t aware that this page even existed - but the people who do know about it find it extremely useful. So instead of removing it, how about promoting it more?
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  As someone who didn’t know it existed. I concur. It’s just a random link at the top of the page and I’ve never had any incentive to click it or look at it. But now that I see people find it useful it makes me want to check it out daily for a while to see what shows up on there.
- impulser_ 4y ago
  I think the only reason I know about it was that I believe trending was the old explore page.
dsiroker 4y ago
The most effective thing the team behind this feature did to drive adoption was to threaten to remove it. More people know about this feature now than ever would have through traditional marketing tactics.
- mfrw 4y ago
  [chuckling] I think yes; it seems they got the attention now.
- tempodox 4y ago
  Not sure how much this applies for others, but it's certainly true for me. Social media have tainted the word “trending” for me, so it's not something that I would normally click on when I see it.
polygamous_bat 4y ago
I am incredibly glad they are keeping it around for now -- for now being the key word here. From the way they worded it, doesn't seem like they were prepared for the feedback they received, in terms of (paraphrased) "the few people who used the page seem to love it". How do they not know such an important metric? Shouldn't they be able to measure the number of recurring users? Shouldn't that metric tell them that instead of shutting it down they may just need to promote it better?
- onion2k 4y ago
  I think it should be obvious that they measure lots of things and that the data says the page isn't used very much. This is a case of the data not telling you the full story. That happens sometimes. Data needs to be interpreted, and sometimes people get it wrong. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere. However... This is tech, and the way engineering teams in tech work these days means it's probably something as simple as this feature is considered low impact and not "career enhancing", so no one was willing to take on maintaining it or promoting it. The only option was to kill it. When someone saw how passionate users are about it they changed their mind.
- julienreszka 4y ago
  Lots of devs use ad blockers that block telemetry
  - kgeist 4y ago
    I'd expect such telemetry to be entirely server-side
robmoore121 4y ago
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
- ryanisnan 4y ago
  I mean, how exactly do you argue with something like "0.5% of users have visited this page in the past 12 months, and 0.3% of users have only visited once"? I don't know what their telemetry said, but generally it's something like this. This is empirical enough to say decisively "most people do not care about this feature."
  - gryn 4y ago
    if we follow that logic big red emergency stop buttons should be removed from machinery because of their low usage.
    - ryanisnan 4y ago
      Sure. But good-sense would, in the case of emergency stop buttons, tell you that despite a lack of thought or usage, they are required for safe operation. You can't make that conclusion with a webpage for content discovery.
      - gryn 4y ago
        You would need to model what kind of users you have on your website, And how they differ from one another. Do they even that that feature even exist? I'd say a lot of users ignore most of the (social) features of GitHub beside "a public remote git repo I can download"
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    I love the github trending page, but I need only to visit it 10 times a year for it to fullfill its role. Yet I go to github every day. So visits are not the proper metric to depict how useful it is. Just because I consult a doctor once a year doesn't make this appointment less useful than the pizza truck I go to every week.
Jimmc414 4y ago
Commend Github for listening to feedback.
p-e-w 4y ago
In an age where "no we are still correct and everyone who disagrees is just too myopic to see our grand design" has become the standard response to any backlash against corporate decisions, I have great respect for people who are able to simply say "we heard you, and we are reconsidering".
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  Luckily the headline for this post doesn’t contain any prejudicial language intended to disparage Microsoft for making this decision. Actually, wait a minute…
jerrygoyal 4y ago
I remember when this feature was first launched, GitHub got lot of heat from devs saying it's turning like a social media site and they didn't like it. But, apparently many devs liked this feature as well (including me). The toughest thing about product decisions is keeping different set of users happy :)
jimminy 4y ago
I do find it a little odd all the comments in this thread are focusing on it as though it was a straight telemetry/metric decision. From the update, this feels more like it was problem area for maintenance purposes, then had its telemetry assessed for decision. "The data pipeline that powers the page has historically proven problematic to maintain and so given the low usage, we decided to switch off the Trending page." The maintainers likely considered the resources and effort in maintaining it were too high. When they looked at the telemetry and saw it wasn't utilized considerably, they assessed it was better to cut it, than keep it or create an alternative. If it didn't have a cost associated with it, it would likely have never become a target.
- dunno7456 4y ago
  Since Microsoft acquisition GitHub quality seems in decline, constant outages, git pushes that doesn't goes through while status page is green and now the attempt to remove trending page... Is it the end of the original GitHub's spirit as a social coding?
  - bluehatbrit 4y ago
    Honestly, I don't really see it. GitHub's availability has never been great and it doesn't really seem worse now aside from having more features to go wrong. I haven't seen much change at all since the acquisition personally. Probably the only thing I can pick out is their dropping of Atom in favour of vscode. What have you specifically seen change since the MS acquisition that's likely from MS and not just GitHub?
  - dyml 4y ago
    I don’t agree with this statement. Im happy to see the innovation that have come out from GitHub in the last years. What im really missing and hoping for is an even more open and extensible community platform. Discussions is a good start, it would love to more innovation there.
  - tr1ll10nb1ll 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "quality is in decline". I'm pretty happy (much like others) with GitHub now more than ever. Github has been releasing new features left and right. Some of them are an unwelcome sight (think Github Badges) while others (think Github Issues) are a super productive enhancement imo.
vivegi 4y ago
People new to GitHub may want to look at the Trending / Explore pages to get a feel for the site. Those who are frequent users may skip that in the normal course of their business but drop in once in a while, if they are curious. It is okay. At least in the segment of GH users who cared about the feature, there was a significant enough outcry from GH's perspective that they chose to rollback their decision.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  People new to GitHub want to create a repository and do a git push, nothing else.
  - im3w1l 4y ago
    Ooh guessing game! Here's my entry. People new to GitHub arrive by searching for <software>. They read the readme.md and then follow the installation instructions.
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      I knew someone would comment this, but I wouldn't consider those as "GitHub users", because they are not registering, and are not interacting with anything on GitHub. They only care about the specific repository they are viewing, not the platform.
throwaway_4ever 4y ago
Another commenter already pointed out this was going to be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32682393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32682393
Scootwilli90 4y ago
[flagged]
polote 4y ago
They are incompetent honestly. If you were to discontinue this page you would at least talk to a few power users of the page and know their mind before taking the decion. They either didn't do it or did it. If they did it but backtrack now it show they don't have much confidence in their decisions, and if they didn't it, what are their pm payed for? That is pm 101
- mic47 4y ago
  > at least talk to a few This is more like how to get unrepresentative sample 101. Maybe they did and concluded it's fine to remove only to find out that general opinion is different.
- thiht 4y ago
  > They are incompetent honestly Do you have to insult them? People make mistakes all the time, taking decisions is hard. It's clear they didn't expect removing this page to be a big deal. The fact they acknowledged the issue makes them the opposite of incompetent IMO (inincompetent!)
langsoul-com 4y ago
I don't get it if nobody used it, why keep it? Don't the stats tell the truth here?
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  The stats tell whatever truth you want them to. They're used to rationalize decisions more often than inform them.
chris_wot 4y ago
What sort of telemetry are they using for this, I wonder?
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
lol I can't believe the bitchers and moaners here (and I assume elsewhere) got them to change their minds. The proper usage of github is: go to the main repo main page to get the clone URL; go to the issues page to file an issue if the projects uses them; go to the PR page to make a PR if the project uses them. Every other page may as well not exist.
Scootwilli90 4y ago
[flagged]
tpmx 4y ago
I wonder how much of that page is the result of "voting" rings/bots.
fortran77 4y ago
Ha! I'm on github nearly every day, and I never noticed the "trending" page. Just took a look at it now to see what's there. In general, I don't spend nearly enough time exploring things.
lucasyvas 4y ago
This is a perfect example of why following Telemetry blindly is a shit approach to developing a product. Anyone who has used Trending knows it's probably the best feature on the site outside of actually working with a repository. In this case, the telemetry reflects not the usefulness of the page, but a total failing to promote its use. I was actually shocked when I read the initial post because it showed a complete lack of awareness of how cornerstone this feature should be.
Kukumber 4y ago
https://github.com/ https://github.com/ 90% of what's in that page is information you literally do not want when you come visit their website People working at Github have no idea what their website is all about The "trending" culture is a death sentence to our civilization

153 points by TowerTall 4y ago

mfrw 4y ago

Most of the folks have already mentioned on the thread; it's a pretty cool place to find something that one does not know even exists. Quote from the thread[0]: ''' Hey folks - Martin from GitHub here. Thanks for all the feedback on the Trending page. Given the feedback here, it’s clear we need to look again at the plan to deprecate this. The team is going to re-evaluate and see if we can come up with some other options. ''' [0]:https://github.com/community/community/discussions/31644#discussioncomment-3539690 https://github.com/community/community/discussions/31644#dis...

SquareWheel 4y ago

I've never seen the Trending page before, but it looks like another take on the the "Explore" page. I wonder, do people generally go to GitHub just to browse around? But if people find value in it, then who am I to say. By the way, it's deprecating. Depreciation is something else.

thorum 4y ago
The explore page is personalized, meaning it shows you repositories that are similar or related to ones you’ve already seen. It’s useful, but the trending page shows overall trends on GitHub and is a great way to expand your horizons and discover new things happening in the open source community.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
> By the way, it's deprecating. Depreciation is something else. This one is weird to me too. If anything, Trending trending with this news has caused its appreciation
shakna 4y ago
"Explore" actually came _after_ "Trending". It seemed, to me at least, that when "Explore" was originally created, it was intended to eventually replace the "Trending" page, using more personalised information. And the "Trending" page did languish, with more frequent breakages and less frequent updates, since they created the other.
lumost 4y ago
I like it for the more niche languages I follow such as rust/go. It's interesting to see where things are happening.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > for the more niche languages I follow such as rust/go stares while writing Clojure

thorum 4y ago

From reading the discussion about this issue here and on Reddit, it seems like most people weren’t aware that this page even existed - but the people who do know about it find it extremely useful. So instead of removing it, how about promoting it more?

philliphaydon 4y ago
As someone who didn’t know it existed. I concur. It’s just a random link at the top of the page and I’ve never had any incentive to click it or look at it. But now that I see people find it useful it makes me want to check it out daily for a while to see what shows up on there.
impulser_ 4y ago
I think the only reason I know about it was that I believe trending was the old explore page.

dsiroker 4y ago

The most effective thing the team behind this feature did to drive adoption was to threaten to remove it. More people know about this feature now than ever would have through traditional marketing tactics.

mfrw 4y ago
[chuckling] I think yes; it seems they got the attention now.
tempodox 4y ago
Not sure how much this applies for others, but it's certainly true for me. Social media have tainted the word “trending” for me, so it's not something that I would normally click on when I see it.

polygamous_bat 4y ago

I am incredibly glad they are keeping it around for now -- for now being the key word here. From the way they worded it, doesn't seem like they were prepared for the feedback they received, in terms of (paraphrased) "the few people who used the page seem to love it". How do they not know such an important metric? Shouldn't they be able to measure the number of recurring users? Shouldn't that metric tell them that instead of shutting it down they may just need to promote it better?

onion2k 4y ago
I think it should be obvious that they measure lots of things and that the data says the page isn't used very much. This is a case of the data not telling you the full story. That happens sometimes. Data needs to be interpreted, and sometimes people get it wrong. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere. However... This is tech, and the way engineering teams in tech work these days means it's probably something as simple as this feature is considered low impact and not "career enhancing", so no one was willing to take on maintaining it or promoting it. The only option was to kill it. When someone saw how passionate users are about it they changed their mind.
julienreszka 4y ago
Lots of devs use ad blockers that block telemetry
- kgeist 4y ago
  I'd expect such telemetry to be entirely server-side

robmoore121 4y ago

The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.

ryanisnan 4y ago
I mean, how exactly do you argue with something like "0.5% of users have visited this page in the past 12 months, and 0.3% of users have only visited once"? I don't know what their telemetry said, but generally it's something like this. This is empirical enough to say decisively "most people do not care about this feature."
- gryn 4y ago
  if we follow that logic big red emergency stop buttons should be removed from machinery because of their low usage.
  - ryanisnan 4y ago
    Sure. But good-sense would, in the case of emergency stop buttons, tell you that despite a lack of thought or usage, they are required for safe operation. You can't make that conclusion with a webpage for content discovery.
    - gryn 4y ago
      You would need to model what kind of users you have on your website, And how they differ from one another. Do they even that that feature even exist? I'd say a lot of users ignore most of the (social) features of GitHub beside "a public remote git repo I can download"
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  I love the github trending page, but I need only to visit it 10 times a year for it to fullfill its role. Yet I go to github every day. So visits are not the proper metric to depict how useful it is. Just because I consult a doctor once a year doesn't make this appointment less useful than the pizza truck I go to every week.

Jimmc414 4y ago

Commend Github for listening to feedback.

p-e-w 4y ago

In an age where "no we are still correct and everyone who disagrees is just too myopic to see our grand design" has become the standard response to any backlash against corporate decisions, I have great respect for people who are able to simply say "we heard you, and we are reconsidering".

AmericanChopper 4y ago
Luckily the headline for this post doesn’t contain any prejudicial language intended to disparage Microsoft for making this decision. Actually, wait a minute…

jerrygoyal 4y ago

I remember when this feature was first launched, GitHub got lot of heat from devs saying it's turning like a social media site and they didn't like it. But, apparently many devs liked this feature as well (including me). The toughest thing about product decisions is keeping different set of users happy :)

jimminy 4y ago

I do find it a little odd all the comments in this thread are focusing on it as though it was a straight telemetry/metric decision. From the update, this feels more like it was problem area for maintenance purposes, then had its telemetry assessed for decision. "The data pipeline that powers the page has historically proven problematic to maintain and so given the low usage, we decided to switch off the Trending page." The maintainers likely considered the resources and effort in maintaining it were too high. When they looked at the telemetry and saw it wasn't utilized considerably, they assessed it was better to cut it, than keep it or create an alternative. If it didn't have a cost associated with it, it would likely have never become a target.

dunno7456 4y ago
Since Microsoft acquisition GitHub quality seems in decline, constant outages, git pushes that doesn't goes through while status page is green and now the attempt to remove trending page... Is it the end of the original GitHub's spirit as a social coding?
- bluehatbrit 4y ago
  Honestly, I don't really see it. GitHub's availability has never been great and it doesn't really seem worse now aside from having more features to go wrong. I haven't seen much change at all since the acquisition personally. Probably the only thing I can pick out is their dropping of Atom in favour of vscode. What have you specifically seen change since the MS acquisition that's likely from MS and not just GitHub?
- dyml 4y ago
  I don’t agree with this statement. Im happy to see the innovation that have come out from GitHub in the last years. What im really missing and hoping for is an even more open and extensible community platform. Discussions is a good start, it would love to more innovation there.
- tr1ll10nb1ll 4y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "quality is in decline". I'm pretty happy (much like others) with GitHub now more than ever. Github has been releasing new features left and right. Some of them are an unwelcome sight (think Github Badges) while others (think Github Issues) are a super productive enhancement imo.

vivegi 4y ago

People new to GitHub may want to look at the Trending / Explore pages to get a feel for the site. Those who are frequent users may skip that in the normal course of their business but drop in once in a while, if they are curious. It is okay. At least in the segment of GH users who cared about the feature, there was a significant enough outcry from GH's perspective that they chose to rollback their decision.

iLoveOncall 4y ago
People new to GitHub want to create a repository and do a git push, nothing else.
- im3w1l 4y ago
  Ooh guessing game! Here's my entry. People new to GitHub arrive by searching for <software>. They read the readme.md and then follow the installation instructions.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    I knew someone would comment this, but I wouldn't consider those as "GitHub users", because they are not registering, and are not interacting with anything on GitHub. They only care about the specific repository they are viewing, not the platform.

throwaway_4ever 4y ago

Another commenter already pointed out this was going to be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32682393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32682393

Scootwilli90 4y ago

[flagged]

polote 4y ago

They are incompetent honestly. If you were to discontinue this page you would at least talk to a few power users of the page and know their mind before taking the decion. They either didn't do it or did it. If they did it but backtrack now it show they don't have much confidence in their decisions, and if they didn't it, what are their pm payed for? That is pm 101

mic47 4y ago
> at least talk to a few This is more like how to get unrepresentative sample 101. Maybe they did and concluded it's fine to remove only to find out that general opinion is different.
thiht 4y ago
> They are incompetent honestly Do you have to insult them? People make mistakes all the time, taking decisions is hard. It's clear they didn't expect removing this page to be a big deal. The fact they acknowledged the issue makes them the opposite of incompetent IMO (inincompetent!)

langsoul-com 4y ago

I don't get it if nobody used it, why keep it? Don't the stats tell the truth here?

marginalia_nu 4y ago
The stats tell whatever truth you want them to. They're used to rationalize decisions more often than inform them.

chris_wot 4y ago

What sort of telemetry are they using for this, I wonder?

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago

lol I can't believe the bitchers and moaners here (and I assume elsewhere) got them to change their minds. The proper usage of github is: go to the main repo main page to get the clone URL; go to the issues page to file an issue if the projects uses them; go to the PR page to make a PR if the project uses them. Every other page may as well not exist.

Scootwilli90 4y ago

[flagged]

tpmx 4y ago

I wonder how much of that page is the result of "voting" rings/bots.

fortran77 4y ago

Ha! I'm on github nearly every day, and I never noticed the "trending" page. Just took a look at it now to see what's there. In general, I don't spend nearly enough time exploring things.

lucasyvas 4y ago

This is a perfect example of why following Telemetry blindly is a shit approach to developing a product. Anyone who has used Trending knows it's probably the best feature on the site outside of actually working with a repository. In this case, the telemetry reflects not the usefulness of the page, but a total failing to promote its use. I was actually shocked when I read the initial post because it showed a complete lack of awareness of how cornerstone this feature should be.

Kukumber 4y ago

https://github.com/ https://github.com/ 90% of what's in that page is information you literally do not want when you come visit their website People working at Github have no idea what their website is all about The "trending" culture is a death sentence to our civilization