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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
by 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 agoif we follow that logic big red emergency stop buttons should be removed from machinery because of their low usage.
- ryanisnan 4y agoSure. 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 agoYou 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 agoI 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.
- ryanisnan 4y agoThis is bad logic. Almost everyone goes to the doctor in a year. And again, what is the importance of a doctor’s office. I once used a security tool that looked at the world in a very narrow sense. Despite being a general purpose tool, it would often flag really bad false-positives like “this security group allows all ingress!”, while applied to zero resources, while completely missing other, real, consequential issues. My point is, you have to pull your head up, look at the real world and the context of your decision, and use your judgement. These aren’t philosophical mind teasers.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoIt's not bad logic, it's an imperfect analogy which you are taking at face value instead of understanding the point that something can be useful even if infrequently used. Wether or not it applies at this case is not determined, but it does underline the fact using only visit metrics for this particular page does not give the whole story. Which is congruent with the reaction the announcement got.
- ryanisnan 4y agoTo be clear, I don’t know what telemetry they are using, I only used percentage of users who visited as an example. It does sound like, of the small group of folks who use it, they do enjoy it. Sounds like GitHub has to find a way to either expand that pool, or decrease the maintenance cost of the feature, or it’s possibly not worth it.
- OJFord 4y ago> This is bad logic. Almost everyone goes to the doctor in a year. They do? I'm not even making a point about developing countries and access to healthcare, I assume 'everyone' was implicitly 'everyone here' or in developed countries or whatever. But I would be incredibly surprised if that's true here in the UK. Is it an artefact of US health insurance that you can typically claim a 'check-up' per year (so why not even if not needed, you paid for it) or even that it's insisted on for the validity of the policy (ensure you don't have something expensive developing) or something?
- baq 4y ago0.5% of 100M is still a lot, right?
- a_c 4y agoUnderstand your audience, then back it up with metrics. Otherwise we will easily exclude audience e.g. those who need accessibility support