15 ms·

Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button

477 points by paulasmuth 15y ago

benofsky 15y ago
This is really a problem with Github's news feed, rather than the watch button. Facebook had this problem a few years ago but put a lot of work into aggregating similar stories, etc.
- zalew 15y ago
  > This is really a problem with Github's news feed, rather than the watch button. yep. the same on BitBucket.
atjoslin 15y ago
the news feed should just bundle together news from one user.
- eekfuh 15y ago
  Exactly. I don't think a 'like' button would be of much use. I'd rather see: Al3x made 2 commits Project: [message one] Diff Project: [message two]
- scribu 15y ago
  That might make sense when you watch a user, but not when you watch a repo.
xbryanx 15y ago
Maybe you should be able to subscribe to certain types of commits, like a tag, merge, or branch operation.
deadbeef84 15y ago
Not sure I agree completely, "watch" is when you're actually interested in what's going on in the project. "Fork" is when you want to contribute with code changes. Maybe a "Like" button to show your appreciation would be nice?
StavrosK 15y ago
Why do you care so much about how many watchers you have? I don't understand the point, certainly not to go as far as bunching commits and pushing at night to keep the watchers happy...
- reinhardt 15y ago
  Exactly, I never took this "social coding" thing seriously, but this "github fan" counting takes it to a new level.
- haldean 15y ago
  Watchers are (often) the people who use the software you make, and the exact kind of people you want to keep interested in your project. They're the source of useful bug reports and feature requests, and you want to keep them involved in the project as much as possible. I completely understand OP's intent.
- pnathan 15y ago
  It serves as a mechanism to gauge interest in your project; watchers correlates to customers. at least IMO.
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    I can't buy that. Customers would be more likely to use your project if it were more active, not less.
    - uxp 15y ago
      > Customers would be more likely to use your project if it were more active, not less. Right, but if I'm a customer of your simple project, and a customer of Node.js and Homebrew, then I will never see your update and issue notifications that might actually have more relevance to me than Node or Homebrew because those two have near constant updates. On the other hand, If I'm a customer of your project that is just as popular as Node or Homebrew, I'll be receiving hundreds of notifications from your project every day. You'd be effectively spamming me. To fix this problem, we're asking if we could find a middle ground that lets the simple project with a dozen forks and 40 watchers maintain about the same level of notification real estate as the popular project with 5,000 watchers and just as many forks.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
bretthopper 15y ago
The solution is pretty simple: GitHub needs a "Fav" or "Star" button. Basically just a bookmark. There's a lot of projects I want to remember but don't necessarily care about the daily activity. And no, browser bookmarks aren't good enough. A nice faved/starred page would show stats and maybe last commit/activity. That's it.
- hydrozen 15y ago
  +1
- pooriaazimi 15y ago
  Exactly. I've asked it a couple times via email, hopefully they'll do something about it now that it's on HN front page (githubers read HN!).
- colinloretz 15y ago
  Agreed. There are many times I just want to sort favorite repositories that I want to refer to later. I've thought many times about building this using the Github API (like what Favoritizer does for Etsy) but then you would have a whole different website for browsing github.
- petercooper 15y ago
  Yes. This. I "watch" a lot of projects in lieu of favoriting them and because of how "watching" pollutes the timeline, I find the timeline totally useless. In theory I could just bookmark them using my normal system with a tag of "github" or something but the "Watched Repositories" widget is too useful to miss.
  - entropie 15y ago
    I agree. The timeline is useless. But not that watch button, because i do have all projects i find interesting in one place. Thats absolutely ok for me and works fine.
  - matthewcford 15y ago
    I'm building a browser extension that should solve this issue, basically a delicious for github. It's not up for public use yet, as i've yet to replicate the watched repos widget inline with bookmarks but next weekend I'll have a crack at it. https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/110983919160550210204/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/11098391...
haldean 15y ago
What about only publishing notifications for tags? Most people only use them to tag releases (or RCs) so the creation of a new tag might be the sort of thing people would be interested in knowing about.
mikeocool 15y ago
Yeah, agreed. I thought for a while that the Watch button would be a good way to keep track of what's going with open source projects I care about. But I've found I pretty much ignore the news feed completely, there's just way too much noise there.
- mikeocool 15y ago
  I suppose there's varying degrees to which I care about a project. I do want to know about every commit on the ones I'm actively involved in. On the other hand I'd be way more interested in like high level summaries for the projects that I'm just a user of.
may 15y ago
Or batch all commits into one update. That way it doesn't matter how much you commit, or push, it's a max of one entry per day per repo per user. Then, make tags the exception -- since they are likely being used for releases.
grayrest 15y ago
I would really appreciate it if notifications were aggregated by thread and updates by project. I generally only care that a thread/project was updated. If I'm interested, I'll go in and look at what's new. Letting me know more than once just makes it harder to actually keep track of things you care about.
- eric-hu 15y ago
  This. From the article: >Eventually I noticed, that it would only create an update for each push, not for each commit. So I began to aggregate my commits into batches to push in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, that really slows me down. He's doing what the Facebook news aggregator does by default. All pushes/commits can generate only one news feed item for a certain time frame: "Author made N changes/updates/commits" To play the devil's advocate, though, perhaps this should be a part of the learning process of using Github. It would be instructive to all watchers to see what kinds of mistakes a good dev makes (or just be reminded that a good dev makes mistakes as well).
kmfrk 15y ago
I have never used my dashboard, because I watch so many repos. I use it as a bookmark function, but it'd be great if they replaced it with "bookmark" with a default option of not "following" the updates. There are a lot of interesting projects, but I only want to follow those immediately relevant to what I am doing.
Sander_Marechal 15y ago
IMO the one who watches should be able to control which updates he sees in his feed, not the project developer (which is what the article and may commenters suggest). For some projects I'm watching I'd like to see every commit, issue update, etcetera. For others I'd only be interested in new tags that are created. The project developers don't know what I'm interested in. Only I know.
bdon 15y ago
I find that what I take the # of GitHub watchers to mean (i.e. the popularity of a project) is better surfaced by the number of downloads on RubyGems.org, at least for gems. Better yet, RubyGems collects that information without any user input. It would be awesome if the # of downloads could be shown on a GitHub project page.
joedev 15y ago
This is what happens when collaboration tools are turned on their head and used as as popularity contest.
ErikRogneby 15y ago
Twitter allows you to curate lists to filter through the clutter. I think that would apply nicely here. I don't think watching is broken, I think the feed needs some love.
Eleopteryx 15y ago
I don't even really look at my feed. There's way too much going on in it for me to really keep track. I basically "watch" repos to bookmark them. "This might be useful in a project at some point; let me make sure I can find it later." Currently watching 92 repositories.
necubi 15y ago
Really, the issue is that the news feed is broken. Even following a relatively small number of people and projects (10 and 29 respectively) my news feed is dominated by the many updates (issues and commits) from a couple of popular projects. The result is that things I might be more interested in from smaller projects are effectively invisible. Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model. The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots. The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness." This is more challenging, but clearly solvable using machine learning (let us tag posts as interesting or not interesting to train the classifier). I'd love to see GitHub make the news feed more useful. It's currently the most unpleasant part of an otherwise nearly perfect experience.
- jzawodn 15y ago
  Yes. 100 times yes.
- larrywright 15y ago
  Excellently stated. Up until a week ago, I was following around 200 projects on Github. I recently went through and unfollowed almost all of them (I think I left about 5-10 that I really care about). I did all this because the news feed had become completely useless for the reasons you describe above.
- goatslacker 15y ago
  +1. Having users micromanage their commits to their repository because of fear of losing "popularity" is not the solution. Automation is the path to the future, let the computer aggregate the content for us and display a cleaner news feed.
- eli 15y ago
  Even just a really naive solution: offer me a view that shows only the most recent 2-3 updates for each project I watch. That would solve about 95% of my problems with the news feed.
snitko 15y ago
My proposition is that the watch button means you only see important updates, like when the new major version of Rails is released. The importance should still be decided by the repo maintainer though. I don't agree with bundling commits proposition, because it is not controlled by the maintainer and will not necessarily capture the stuff that is important and present it in a meaningful way.
jon6 15y ago
--quote-- So I began to aggregate my commits into batches to push in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, that really slows me down. --end quote-- How is pushing a bunch of commits that much different from pushing each commit? Slows him down.. what??
metabrew 15y ago
Yep i use watch as bookmark, and as such the feed is useless. There needs to be a Star/Fav thing, and leave watching for important stuff. I've often wanted to write and broadcast a note or short msg (not a commit), that is deemed more important than a commit, about project goings-on and updates. Would be good to announce properly when there are serious changes or new features. Perhaps done with tags, but it needs to be prominence some how, it is all lost in the commit feed atm.
jakubw 15y ago
There is a bunch of ways to distinguish important updates from the others. First, prioritize updates from projects I am or have contributed to. Second, updates from people close to me in the social graph (i.e. the people I watch on GitHub or people who belong to the same organization as I do). The frequency and size of updates should matter too - an usually silent project with a big update should have an advantage over noisy projects. Filtering out typical bugs (or commits/PRs fixing them) from the top priority ones should be fairly easy too - all the information is already there (comments, labels). Finally, you can go insane and start analyzing the actual code or even use NLP for commit messages/pull requests/bugs and make decisions based on that (for instance, prioritize projects that use similar tech as I do, changes that mention me or touch the code I've created or touched recently). No need to turn off anything, just make it smart.
- eli 15y ago
  I think you are overthinking it. We don't need a fancy AI solution to the relatively simple problem of "busy" projects drowning out quieter ones. I don't think it would work very well and, anyway, we have different ideas about what's important in an update. Just collapsing updates from busy projects by showing the few most recent updates and then cutting it off with a message like "(+ 12 other commits and 3 issues; click here to expand)" would get it most of the way there.
timsally 15y ago
Facebook faced this exact problem with its newsfeed. The solution? Do what Facebook did. Allow people to watch projects and then subscribe to various levels of activity.
amanuel 15y ago
I have two suggestions: Activate a 'quiet' mode? In quiet mode nothing is sent to people's feeds. Daily Digest mode. Daily digest would do just that. Lump all update in a day into 1 news feed. I'd be happy with either option.
dwyer 15y ago
>You can publicly watch one of their projects; this is similar to "liking" something on facebook. >If you commit "too often", people will get annoyed and unwatch you. So don't watch projects you're not interested in watching and leave the Facebook mentality at Facebook. Issue closed. I couldn't imagine not working on my projects out of fear that somebody who's feigning interest might stop feigning interest. Who thinks like this?
NARKOZ 15y ago
I'm using GitHub Feed Filter extension for Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdgbehajihicjalkc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdg...
nivertech 15y ago
Github also add "bookmark" button with list of tags. Of course one can use something like delicious for this, but built-in service is much more convenient.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- matthewcford 15y ago
  Some thing like this? https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/110983919160550210204/posts/VH9LedQMe2b https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/11098391...
jahewson 15y ago
This is exactly why I had to un-watch ry/node - it was drowning out my newsfeed. Perhaps collating updates from individual projects would help?
ryanto 15y ago
I wouldn't mind seeing a version of a the Github dashboard where my feed was grouped by projects. I don't think having a timeline where you see all commits of all projects sorted by time really helps. The commits in project A don't effect the commits in project B, so they do not need to be viewed in sequence or relation to each other. Let me have a dashboard where I can see all my projects then some recent/popular issues and commits to that project, keeping all projects separate. Don't add a like/favorite/bookmark button, I think that's too many options. Watch already says "I'm interested in this", so we don't need additional buttons to express the same thought.
pwim 15y ago
I don't use the watch or follow feature of github, as it seemed kind of pointless to me. The main strength of github is collaboration, not discovery. If it were up to me, I'd remove the more SNS like actions as they just seem like an afterthought.
mutewinter 15y ago
I run a website that tracks watchers on GitHub projects, http://gitego.com http://gitego.com. What I see is that it is incredibly rare for a project to lose watchers. It seems that people are using GitHub's watch feature as a bookmarking service. On a side note, GitEgo tracks two[1,2] of paulasmuth's GitHub repositories, and neither of them has "lost lost around 30 watchers by the evening." He may be referring to other projects on GitHub, but even Twitter Bootstrap[3] (the most popular GitHub project), almost never loses watchers. Granted, these projects could all be gaining just a few more watchers than they are losing per hour, but the net effect is almost always a gain each day. I think the real problem is that watching a repository doesn't engage a user in its contents. Watching commit messages fly by isn't as entertaining as reading 140 characters someone groomed for public consumption. [1]: http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric#watchers?interval=by_day http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric#watchers?interval=b... [2]: http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/recommendify#watchers?interval=by_day http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/recommendify#watchers?interval=... [3]: http://gitego.com/twitter/bootstrap#watchers?interval=by_hour http://gitego.com/twitter/bootstrap#watchers?interval=by_hou...
saghul 15y ago
Totally agree. My workaround for this at the moment is to use Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) and filter my GiHub feed which I then read with an RSS reader. Not ideal, but it gets the job done.
entropie 15y ago
No. I watch projects i find interesting. I usually dont look at the noise in my feed or something. I rarely visit github, only if i get linked to it or for browsing code. So, its totally fine (for me).
freshhawk 15y ago
It's already been mentioned but this use case for watching a project is called a bookmark. I watch projects where I actually care about and want to see the changes. Because I'm doing actual useful things and the social aspects of github help me do that. I'm not on github to engage in some kind of social network circle jerk popularity contest to collect the most "watchers". I know a lot of people are and it makes them feel really important to follow a bunch of projects and pretend they're "in the know" or part of the project just because they clicked the watch button. But every site doesn't need it's own different kind of bookmarks, that's a stupid waste of time. Other startups do it to drive viral growth or to "increase engagement" or some other BS reason. Github drives growth by being useful to developers and other collaborators. As soon as they start sacrificing power for people collaborating on code projects in order to satisfy the fanboys they risk losing their primary draw, the good projects that use github because it's useful. I doubt this will happen, although I can definitely see why they would add an in-site bookmark to appease this crowd since they apparently don't know how to use client side bookmarks.
- stock_toaster 15y ago
  My client side bookmarks tend to be a bit of a black hole (or possibly a thunderdome). Many things enter, but very few find their way back out to my eyeballs. Perhaps I have bookmark-itus. I bookmark many things I may find interesting later, or want to remember. I end up searching through my bookmarks more often than not, because there are so many of them. As to watching, I use it to get notified if a project I am interested in has updated, made changes that are meaningful to me, or has come back to life after a long silent period, or if it is something I want to look into later but don't particularly want to have the full update feed for. That last part would be fulfilled handily by an internal github 'star' or 'bookmark' system. There are stars for gists, why not projects? *note: I use pinboard.in, which is great.
  - freshhawk 15y ago
    Yeah, I think I might have been too harsh on the star idea. I absolutely have bookmark-itus, but because of that I have a good bookmark system where I can set a date or interval for it to remind me that the bookmark exists. I think I took this idea from the GTD tickler concept. I can see the use case for "tell me if this project has done something interesting (determine that magically) but I don't want to see every commit cluttering my feed" type features on github. Just don't break the feed to do it. It's clearly a secondary use case for the feed. I'm also not sure if this use case is something actually useful rather than just stimulating to users. A site using this idea and github integration along with some Zynga math to optimize the dopamine dispensing combined with twitter, HN and the rest of social news would make sure that I felt like a hacker and never actually produced anything.
matthewcford 15y ago
I'm building a repo bookmarking tool as a google chrome extension (for github). It's in early alpha at the moment as I only really get to work on it on the weekends, but it'll be ready for a public beta in 2-3 weeks. In the mean time you can checkout the video of it working or if you're feeling brave download the alpha version of the extension. https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/110983919160550210204/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/11098391... [video & download links]
city41 15y ago
Just to play devil's advocate: this does force people to be more mindful of their commits. This is a good thing. Each commit should be a cohesive, logical change to the codebase. Such that if the change is later undesired, simply reverting one commit should completely remove it. This is very good practice for when you use git at your day job. In this scenarios, your 'watchers' are your coworkers, and they will rightfully get upset if you clog the repo with a bazillion haphazard commits.
- pgroves 15y ago
  I agree this is the underlying issue but I disagree with your solution. One of the last big problems none of the popular SCM's has really fixed is separating commits that are "checkpoints" for the developer from those that should be used as documentation of the project history (e.g. "Closes bug X"). There are times I end up doing a commit just to switch from my laptop to desktop. In Mercurial I end up with a million commits with the message "merge" b/c I really just did a pull of someone else's code and it forces you to do a commit just to get synchronized with the master (even with no meaningful conflicts). I wish I could nuke all those ugly checkpoint commits and bundle them into a single commit with an intelligent comment when I push to the main server, but that's just not the standard workflow.
  - kenmazy 15y ago
    git rebase -i can handle your last request (interactively combine/remove/move history). In fact, git can also handle your second wish by having simply creating a "sync" branch pointing to that extra commit, then when you switch to between your laptop and desktop, pull the sync branch, check out the commit (apply it to your working directory), then switch back to the master branch and continue working (the commit never appears in the master branch). Git rebase would handle the "forced commit on merge with no meaningful conflicts". hope I don't sound like too much of a fanboy :)
    - mattbriggs 15y ago
      +1, git rebase -i is amazing for this
mutant 15y ago
I disagree with post almost entirely. This idea of "like" validation is flawed. Your true validation is recognition from the community, a "watcher" doesn't equate to a pat on the back, anymore than a "like" does. It's an inconsequential empty token. We need to get away from this notion of a like means anything more than an twitch response to something. It doesn't mean a person will ever return to your page if the project (or page or whatever) ever does anything again. Gaming the like/watch system is so easy, folks typically know this is hardly an indicator of usefulness except in rare circumstances. My $.02.
nathan_f77 15y ago
Yes, I agree with this completely. It got so annoying that I either needed to start un-watching repos, or just ignore the news feed, and I chose the latter. If only there was a way to just 'star' projects without having them take over the news feed...
blantonl 15y ago
sounds to me like a "check this box to post to subscribed watch lists" would fix this?
tlrobinson 15y ago
Likewise, I don't use the news feed because I watch too many projects that have too high volume. I have the same problem with RSS. I feel like this is a generic problem that needs solving.
xyzzyb 15y ago
I'd rather see the watch button replaced with a Google Reader style interface for projects. Let me see that Rails has 97 unread commits, Twitter Bootstrap 32 unread, and little forgotten project has 2. "Little Forgotten Project has two updates? Cool! I'd forgotten all about that neat idea, let's see what they've been up to."
kmax12 15y ago
github is awesome: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641704 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641704
groby_b 15y ago
You don't collect watchers. People watch your project because it's interesting to them and they are _actively_ involved. If it is, it doesn't matter how often you update, only the quality of your updates matters. It's not twitter, stop playing the "follower count" game.
talove 15y ago
Maybe the problem is how much value that you put on the amount of watchers you have? Is it somehow a bad thing that someone doesn't want to see all of your updates. Would those people somehow serve value to you had you not annoyed them and they just kept watching. In my opinion as git being a tool to transparently see any and every thing changing. If you some how want less than that, perhaps you shouldn't subscribe to (aka watch) a "repository." Ultimately, maybe the right thing for github to do would be to group nearby commits, but still summarize them and easily let you dive into them. This is code after all and almost any time I've updated a dependency, it's been because of the small details. In my accounts of the companies I've worked for, subscribing to the repositories we use, seeing every commit has served a lot of value. Just watching because it's some popular repository did not.
oshow 15y ago
This Chrome Extension allows you to filter the flood of notifications, although you need re-watch/follow settings. http://nothub.org/ http://nothub.org/
spullara 15y ago
Github has terrible management for this and even for notifications. I'm a member a large organization with popular projects and the entire UI has become completely useless. I think a Mute button for people, projects and issues would work great. I'd have no problem clearing out things that way.
georgeg 15y ago
I wanted to say this very thing and am glad you have stated it very well. I have un-followed projects because the news feed became too noisy.
rplnt 15y ago
I was expecting that author would want to literally fix the button. It always bugs me like it is designed: [watch] [fork] [watchers] [forks] With this I often click "watchers" when I want to watch a repository. To me, much better solution would be something like this: [watch | watchers] [ fork | forks]
vseloved 15y ago
Actually watch button really does what it should: let's you keep track of the project. If you want like button, just ask for it instead.
alpb 15y ago
Like facebook, watch button can have options when hovered.
scottschulthess 15y ago
I think the issue is people use the Watch button like bookmarks.
Pythondj 15y ago
How about a "Deploy" button instead, Yes I like to "Watch, and "Share" is oh so social, but what would be much more useful is a "Deploy" button that would take requirement.txt, config.pl, manifest.yml and all those other artifacts, read them, and help me get the app running on the server, the instance or cloud. I can deal with the constant notifications that come with "watching" a github repository - what I want is a simpler path to Deployment.
gpambrozio 15y ago
My solution to this was to use watching as a way to bookmark interesting repos. But since searching for those was impossible I created GH2Evernote, a service that gets the readme of all your watched repos and adds it to a notebook in your Evernote account. This makes watching repos useful again, at least for me. I agree that this is broken and I never, ever look at my stream in GitHub. But now I'm making good use of my watched repos. It's open to all now and it's free: http://www.gustavo.eng.br/gh2evernote/ http://www.gustavo.eng.br/gh2evernote/
purephase 15y ago
I'd love it if they added Gist support for Organizations. Much easier to manage config files that way.
rsanchez1 15y ago
I'm so glad someone else noticed this. I started out watching a few essential projects I used on a daily basis, and added the feed to my Google Reader. Eventually I started using the "watch" button as a "like" button and my feed became unmanageable. I just stopped watching the feed. I wish there was some way to have only some of those items show up in my feed.

477 points by paulasmuth 15y ago

This is really a problem with Github's news feed, rather than the watch button. Facebook had this problem a few years ago but put a lot of work into aggregating similar stories, etc.

zalew 15y ago
> This is really a problem with Github's news feed, rather than the watch button. yep. the same on BitBucket.

atjoslin 15y ago

the news feed should just bundle together news from one user.

eekfuh 15y ago
Exactly. I don't think a 'like' button would be of much use. I'd rather see: Al3x made 2 commits Project: [message one] Diff Project: [message two]
scribu 15y ago
That might make sense when you watch a user, but not when you watch a repo.

xbryanx 15y ago

Maybe you should be able to subscribe to certain types of commits, like a tag, merge, or branch operation.

deadbeef84 15y ago

Not sure I agree completely, "watch" is when you're actually interested in what's going on in the project. "Fork" is when you want to contribute with code changes. Maybe a "Like" button to show your appreciation would be nice?

StavrosK 15y ago

Why do you care so much about how many watchers you have? I don't understand the point, certainly not to go as far as bunching commits and pushing at night to keep the watchers happy...

reinhardt 15y ago
Exactly, I never took this "social coding" thing seriously, but this "github fan" counting takes it to a new level.
haldean 15y ago
Watchers are (often) the people who use the software you make, and the exact kind of people you want to keep interested in your project. They're the source of useful bug reports and feature requests, and you want to keep them involved in the project as much as possible. I completely understand OP's intent.
pnathan 15y ago
It serves as a mechanism to gauge interest in your project; watchers correlates to customers. at least IMO.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  I can't buy that. Customers would be more likely to use your project if it were more active, not less.
  - uxp 15y ago
    > Customers would be more likely to use your project if it were more active, not less. Right, but if I'm a customer of your simple project, and a customer of Node.js and Homebrew, then I will never see your update and issue notifications that might actually have more relevance to me than Node or Homebrew because those two have near constant updates. On the other hand, If I'm a customer of your project that is just as popular as Node or Homebrew, I'll be receiving hundreds of notifications from your project every day. You'd be effectively spamming me. To fix this problem, we're asking if we could find a middle ground that lets the simple project with a dozen forks and 40 watchers maintain about the same level of notification real estate as the popular project with 5,000 watchers and just as many forks.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

bretthopper 15y ago

The solution is pretty simple: GitHub needs a "Fav" or "Star" button. Basically just a bookmark. There's a lot of projects I want to remember but don't necessarily care about the daily activity. And no, browser bookmarks aren't good enough. A nice faved/starred page would show stats and maybe last commit/activity. That's it.

hydrozen 15y ago
+1
pooriaazimi 15y ago
Exactly. I've asked it a couple times via email, hopefully they'll do something about it now that it's on HN front page (githubers read HN!).
colinloretz 15y ago
Agreed. There are many times I just want to sort favorite repositories that I want to refer to later. I've thought many times about building this using the Github API (like what Favoritizer does for Etsy) but then you would have a whole different website for browsing github.
petercooper 15y ago
Yes. This. I "watch" a lot of projects in lieu of favoriting them and because of how "watching" pollutes the timeline, I find the timeline totally useless. In theory I could just bookmark them using my normal system with a tag of "github" or something but the "Watched Repositories" widget is too useful to miss.
- entropie 15y ago
  I agree. The timeline is useless. But not that watch button, because i do have all projects i find interesting in one place. Thats absolutely ok for me and works fine.
- matthewcford 15y ago
  I'm building a browser extension that should solve this issue, basically a delicious for github. It's not up for public use yet, as i've yet to replicate the watched repos widget inline with bookmarks but next weekend I'll have a crack at it. https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/110983919160550210204/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/11098391...

haldean 15y ago

What about only publishing notifications for tags? Most people only use them to tag releases (or RCs) so the creation of a new tag might be the sort of thing people would be interested in knowing about.

mikeocool 15y ago

Yeah, agreed. I thought for a while that the Watch button would be a good way to keep track of what's going with open source projects I care about. But I've found I pretty much ignore the news feed completely, there's just way too much noise there.

mikeocool 15y ago
I suppose there's varying degrees to which I care about a project. I do want to know about every commit on the ones I'm actively involved in. On the other hand I'd be way more interested in like high level summaries for the projects that I'm just a user of.

may 15y ago

Or batch all commits into one update. That way it doesn't matter how much you commit, or push, it's a max of one entry per day per repo per user. Then, make tags the exception -- since they are likely being used for releases.

grayrest 15y ago

I would really appreciate it if notifications were aggregated by thread and updates by project. I generally only care that a thread/project was updated. If I'm interested, I'll go in and look at what's new. Letting me know more than once just makes it harder to actually keep track of things you care about.

eric-hu 15y ago
This. From the article: >Eventually I noticed, that it would only create an update for each push, not for each commit. So I began to aggregate my commits into batches to push in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, that really slows me down. He's doing what the Facebook news aggregator does by default. All pushes/commits can generate only one news feed item for a certain time frame: "Author made N changes/updates/commits" To play the devil's advocate, though, perhaps this should be a part of the learning process of using Github. It would be instructive to all watchers to see what kinds of mistakes a good dev makes (or just be reminded that a good dev makes mistakes as well).

kmfrk 15y ago

I have never used my dashboard, because I watch so many repos. I use it as a bookmark function, but it'd be great if they replaced it with "bookmark" with a default option of not "following" the updates. There are a lot of interesting projects, but I only want to follow those immediately relevant to what I am doing.

Sander_Marechal 15y ago

IMO the one who watches should be able to control which updates he sees in his feed, not the project developer (which is what the article and may commenters suggest). For some projects I'm watching I'd like to see every commit, issue update, etcetera. For others I'd only be interested in new tags that are created. The project developers don't know what I'm interested in. Only I know.

bdon 15y ago

I find that what I take the # of GitHub watchers to mean (i.e. the popularity of a project) is better surfaced by the number of downloads on RubyGems.org, at least for gems. Better yet, RubyGems collects that information without any user input. It would be awesome if the # of downloads could be shown on a GitHub project page.

joedev 15y ago

This is what happens when collaboration tools are turned on their head and used as as popularity contest.

ErikRogneby 15y ago

Twitter allows you to curate lists to filter through the clutter. I think that would apply nicely here. I don't think watching is broken, I think the feed needs some love.

Eleopteryx 15y ago

I don't even really look at my feed. There's way too much going on in it for me to really keep track. I basically "watch" repos to bookmark them. "This might be useful in a project at some point; let me make sure I can find it later." Currently watching 92 repositories.

necubi 15y ago

Really, the issue is that the news feed is broken. Even following a relatively small number of people and projects (10 and 29 respectively) my news feed is dominated by the many updates (issues and commits) from a couple of popular projects. The result is that things I might be more interested in from smaller projects are effectively invisible. Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model. The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots. The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness." This is more challenging, but clearly solvable using machine learning (let us tag posts as interesting or not interesting to train the classifier). I'd love to see GitHub make the news feed more useful. It's currently the most unpleasant part of an otherwise nearly perfect experience.

jzawodn 15y ago
Yes. 100 times yes.
larrywright 15y ago
Excellently stated. Up until a week ago, I was following around 200 projects on Github. I recently went through and unfollowed almost all of them (I think I left about 5-10 that I really care about). I did all this because the news feed had become completely useless for the reasons you describe above.
goatslacker 15y ago
+1. Having users micromanage their commits to their repository because of fear of losing "popularity" is not the solution. Automation is the path to the future, let the computer aggregate the content for us and display a cleaner news feed.
eli 15y ago
Even just a really naive solution: offer me a view that shows only the most recent 2-3 updates for each project I watch. That would solve about 95% of my problems with the news feed.

snitko 15y ago

My proposition is that the watch button means you only see important updates, like when the new major version of Rails is released. The importance should still be decided by the repo maintainer though. I don't agree with bundling commits proposition, because it is not controlled by the maintainer and will not necessarily capture the stuff that is important and present it in a meaningful way.

jon6 15y ago

--quote-- So I began to aggregate my commits into batches to push in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, that really slows me down. --end quote-- How is pushing a bunch of commits that much different from pushing each commit? Slows him down.. what??

metabrew 15y ago

Yep i use watch as bookmark, and as such the feed is useless. There needs to be a Star/Fav thing, and leave watching for important stuff. I've often wanted to write and broadcast a note or short msg (not a commit), that is deemed more important than a commit, about project goings-on and updates. Would be good to announce properly when there are serious changes or new features. Perhaps done with tags, but it needs to be prominence some how, it is all lost in the commit feed atm.

jakubw 15y ago

There is a bunch of ways to distinguish important updates from the others. First, prioritize updates from projects I am or have contributed to. Second, updates from people close to me in the social graph (i.e. the people I watch on GitHub or people who belong to the same organization as I do). The frequency and size of updates should matter too - an usually silent project with a big update should have an advantage over noisy projects. Filtering out typical bugs (or commits/PRs fixing them) from the top priority ones should be fairly easy too - all the information is already there (comments, labels). Finally, you can go insane and start analyzing the actual code or even use NLP for commit messages/pull requests/bugs and make decisions based on that (for instance, prioritize projects that use similar tech as I do, changes that mention me or touch the code I've created or touched recently). No need to turn off anything, just make it smart.

eli 15y ago
I think you are overthinking it. We don't need a fancy AI solution to the relatively simple problem of "busy" projects drowning out quieter ones. I don't think it would work very well and, anyway, we have different ideas about what's important in an update. Just collapsing updates from busy projects by showing the few most recent updates and then cutting it off with a message like "(+ 12 other commits and 3 issues; click here to expand)" would get it most of the way there.

timsally 15y ago

Facebook faced this exact problem with its newsfeed. The solution? Do what Facebook did. Allow people to watch projects and then subscribe to various levels of activity.

amanuel 15y ago

I have two suggestions: Activate a 'quiet' mode? In quiet mode nothing is sent to people's feeds. Daily Digest mode. Daily digest would do just that. Lump all update in a day into 1 news feed. I'd be happy with either option.

dwyer 15y ago

>You can publicly watch one of their projects; this is similar to "liking" something on facebook. >If you commit "too often", people will get annoyed and unwatch you. So don't watch projects you're not interested in watching and leave the Facebook mentality at Facebook. Issue closed. I couldn't imagine not working on my projects out of fear that somebody who's feigning interest might stop feigning interest. Who thinks like this?

NARKOZ 15y ago

I'm using GitHub Feed Filter extension for Chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdgbehajihicjalkc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdg...

nivertech 15y ago

Github also add "bookmark" button with list of tags. Of course one can use something like delicious for this, but built-in service is much more convenient.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
matthewcford 15y ago
Some thing like this? https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/110983919160550210204/posts/VH9LedQMe2b https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/11098391...

jahewson 15y ago

This is exactly why I had to un-watch ry/node - it was drowning out my newsfeed. Perhaps collating updates from individual projects would help?

ryanto 15y ago

I wouldn't mind seeing a version of a the Github dashboard where my feed was grouped by projects. I don't think having a timeline where you see all commits of all projects sorted by time really helps. The commits in project A don't effect the commits in project B, so they do not need to be viewed in sequence or relation to each other. Let me have a dashboard where I can see all my projects then some recent/popular issues and commits to that project, keeping all projects separate. Don't add a like/favorite/bookmark button, I think that's too many options. Watch already says "I'm interested in this", so we don't need additional buttons to express the same thought.

pwim 15y ago

I don't use the watch or follow feature of github, as it seemed kind of pointless to me. The main strength of github is collaboration, not discovery. If it were up to me, I'd remove the more SNS like actions as they just seem like an afterthought.

mutewinter 15y ago

I run a website that tracks watchers on GitHub projects, http://gitego.com http://gitego.com. What I see is that it is incredibly rare for a project to lose watchers. It seems that people are using GitHub's watch feature as a bookmarking service. On a side note, GitEgo tracks two[1,2] of paulasmuth's GitHub repositories, and neither of them has "lost lost around 30 watchers by the evening." He may be referring to other projects on GitHub, but even Twitter Bootstrap[3] (the most popular GitHub project), almost never loses watchers. Granted, these projects could all be gaining just a few more watchers than they are losing per hour, but the net effect is almost always a gain each day. I think the real problem is that watching a repository doesn't engage a user in its contents. Watching commit messages fly by isn't as entertaining as reading 140 characters someone groomed for public consumption. [1]: http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric#watchers?interval=by_day http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric#watchers?interval=b... [2]: http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/recommendify#watchers?interval=by_day http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/recommendify#watchers?interval=... [3]: http://gitego.com/twitter/bootstrap#watchers?interval=by_hour http://gitego.com/twitter/bootstrap#watchers?interval=by_hou...

saghul 15y ago

Totally agree. My workaround for this at the moment is to use Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/) and filter my GiHub feed which I then read with an RSS reader. Not ideal, but it gets the job done.

entropie 15y ago

No. I watch projects i find interesting. I usually dont look at the noise in my feed or something. I rarely visit github, only if i get linked to it or for browsing code. So, its totally fine (for me).

freshhawk 15y ago

It's already been mentioned but this use case for watching a project is called a bookmark. I watch projects where I actually care about and want to see the changes. Because I'm doing actual useful things and the social aspects of github help me do that. I'm not on github to engage in some kind of social network circle jerk popularity contest to collect the most "watchers". I know a lot of people are and it makes them feel really important to follow a bunch of projects and pretend they're "in the know" or part of the project just because they clicked the watch button. But every site doesn't need it's own different kind of bookmarks, that's a stupid waste of time. Other startups do it to drive viral growth or to "increase engagement" or some other BS reason. Github drives growth by being useful to developers and other collaborators. As soon as they start sacrificing power for people collaborating on code projects in order to satisfy the fanboys they risk losing their primary draw, the good projects that use github because it's useful. I doubt this will happen, although I can definitely see why they would add an in-site bookmark to appease this crowd since they apparently don't know how to use client side bookmarks.

stock_toaster 15y ago
My client side bookmarks tend to be a bit of a black hole (or possibly a thunderdome). Many things enter, but very few find their way back out to my eyeballs. Perhaps I have bookmark-itus. I bookmark many things I may find interesting later, or want to remember. I end up searching through my bookmarks more often than not, because there are so many of them. As to watching, I use it to get notified if a project I am interested in has updated, made changes that are meaningful to me, or has come back to life after a long silent period, or if it is something I want to look into later but don't particularly want to have the full update feed for. That last part would be fulfilled handily by an internal github 'star' or 'bookmark' system. There are stars for gists, why not projects? *note: I use pinboard.in, which is great.
- freshhawk 15y ago
  Yeah, I think I might have been too harsh on the star idea. I absolutely have bookmark-itus, but because of that I have a good bookmark system where I can set a date or interval for it to remind me that the bookmark exists. I think I took this idea from the GTD tickler concept. I can see the use case for "tell me if this project has done something interesting (determine that magically) but I don't want to see every commit cluttering my feed" type features on github. Just don't break the feed to do it. It's clearly a secondary use case for the feed. I'm also not sure if this use case is something actually useful rather than just stimulating to users. A site using this idea and github integration along with some Zynga math to optimize the dopamine dispensing combined with twitter, HN and the rest of social news would make sure that I felt like a hacker and never actually produced anything.

matthewcford 15y ago

I'm building a repo bookmarking tool as a google chrome extension (for github). It's in early alpha at the moment as I only really get to work on it on the weekends, but it'll be ready for a public beta in 2-3 weeks. In the mean time you can checkout the video of it working or if you're feeling brave download the alpha version of the extension. https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/110983919160550210204/posts https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110983919160550210204/11098391... [video & download links]

city41 15y ago

Just to play devil's advocate: this does force people to be more mindful of their commits. This is a good thing. Each commit should be a cohesive, logical change to the codebase. Such that if the change is later undesired, simply reverting one commit should completely remove it. This is very good practice for when you use git at your day job. In this scenarios, your 'watchers' are your coworkers, and they will rightfully get upset if you clog the repo with a bazillion haphazard commits.

pgroves 15y ago
I agree this is the underlying issue but I disagree with your solution. One of the last big problems none of the popular SCM's has really fixed is separating commits that are "checkpoints" for the developer from those that should be used as documentation of the project history (e.g. "Closes bug X"). There are times I end up doing a commit just to switch from my laptop to desktop. In Mercurial I end up with a million commits with the message "merge" b/c I really just did a pull of someone else's code and it forces you to do a commit just to get synchronized with the master (even with no meaningful conflicts). I wish I could nuke all those ugly checkpoint commits and bundle them into a single commit with an intelligent comment when I push to the main server, but that's just not the standard workflow.
- kenmazy 15y ago
  git rebase -i can handle your last request (interactively combine/remove/move history). In fact, git can also handle your second wish by having simply creating a "sync" branch pointing to that extra commit, then when you switch to between your laptop and desktop, pull the sync branch, check out the commit (apply it to your working directory), then switch back to the master branch and continue working (the commit never appears in the master branch). Git rebase would handle the "forced commit on merge with no meaningful conflicts". hope I don't sound like too much of a fanboy :)
  - mattbriggs 15y ago
    +1, git rebase -i is amazing for this

mutant 15y ago

I disagree with post almost entirely. This idea of "like" validation is flawed. Your true validation is recognition from the community, a "watcher" doesn't equate to a pat on the back, anymore than a "like" does. It's an inconsequential empty token. We need to get away from this notion of a like means anything more than an twitch response to something. It doesn't mean a person will ever return to your page if the project (or page or whatever) ever does anything again. Gaming the like/watch system is so easy, folks typically know this is hardly an indicator of usefulness except in rare circumstances. My $.02.

nathan_f77 15y ago

Yes, I agree with this completely. It got so annoying that I either needed to start un-watching repos, or just ignore the news feed, and I chose the latter. If only there was a way to just 'star' projects without having them take over the news feed...

blantonl 15y ago

sounds to me like a "check this box to post to subscribed watch lists" would fix this?

tlrobinson 15y ago

Likewise, I don't use the news feed because I watch too many projects that have too high volume. I have the same problem with RSS. I feel like this is a generic problem that needs solving.

xyzzyb 15y ago

I'd rather see the watch button replaced with a Google Reader style interface for projects. Let me see that Rails has 97 unread commits, Twitter Bootstrap 32 unread, and little forgotten project has 2. "Little Forgotten Project has two updates? Cool! I'd forgotten all about that neat idea, let's see what they've been up to."

kmax12 15y ago

github is awesome: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641704 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641704

groby_b 15y ago

You don't collect watchers. People watch your project because it's interesting to them and they are _actively_ involved. If it is, it doesn't matter how often you update, only the quality of your updates matters. It's not twitter, stop playing the "follower count" game.

talove 15y ago

Maybe the problem is how much value that you put on the amount of watchers you have? Is it somehow a bad thing that someone doesn't want to see all of your updates. Would those people somehow serve value to you had you not annoyed them and they just kept watching. In my opinion as git being a tool to transparently see any and every thing changing. If you some how want less than that, perhaps you shouldn't subscribe to (aka watch) a "repository." Ultimately, maybe the right thing for github to do would be to group nearby commits, but still summarize them and easily let you dive into them. This is code after all and almost any time I've updated a dependency, it's been because of the small details. In my accounts of the companies I've worked for, subscribing to the repositories we use, seeing every commit has served a lot of value. Just watching because it's some popular repository did not.

oshow 15y ago

This Chrome Extension allows you to filter the flood of notifications, although you need re-watch/follow settings. http://nothub.org/ http://nothub.org/

spullara 15y ago

Github has terrible management for this and even for notifications. I'm a member a large organization with popular projects and the entire UI has become completely useless. I think a Mute button for people, projects and issues would work great. I'd have no problem clearing out things that way.

georgeg 15y ago

I wanted to say this very thing and am glad you have stated it very well. I have un-followed projects because the news feed became too noisy.

rplnt 15y ago

I was expecting that author would want to literally fix the button. It always bugs me like it is designed: [watch] [fork] [watchers] [forks] With this I often click "watchers" when I want to watch a repository. To me, much better solution would be something like this: [watch | watchers] [ fork | forks]

vseloved 15y ago

Actually watch button really does what it should: let's you keep track of the project. If you want like button, just ask for it instead.

alpb 15y ago

Like facebook, watch button can have options when hovered.

scottschulthess 15y ago

I think the issue is people use the Watch button like bookmarks.

Pythondj 15y ago

How about a "Deploy" button instead, Yes I like to "Watch, and "Share" is oh so social, but what would be much more useful is a "Deploy" button that would take requirement.txt, config.pl, manifest.yml and all those other artifacts, read them, and help me get the app running on the server, the instance or cloud. I can deal with the constant notifications that come with "watching" a github repository - what I want is a simpler path to Deployment.

gpambrozio 15y ago

My solution to this was to use watching as a way to bookmark interesting repos. But since searching for those was impossible I created GH2Evernote, a service that gets the readme of all your watched repos and adds it to a notebook in your Evernote account. This makes watching repos useful again, at least for me. I agree that this is broken and I never, ever look at my stream in GitHub. But now I'm making good use of my watched repos. It's open to all now and it's free: http://www.gustavo.eng.br/gh2evernote/ http://www.gustavo.eng.br/gh2evernote/

purephase 15y ago

I'd love it if they added Gist support for Organizations. Much easier to manage config files that way.

rsanchez1 15y ago

I'm so glad someone else noticed this. I started out watching a few essential projects I used on a daily basis, and added the feed to my Google Reader. Eventually I started using the "watch" button as a "like" button and my feed became unmanageable. I just stopped watching the feed. I wish there was some way to have only some of those items show up in my feed.