trem

Yeah? You should still make a decision. If you want it possible to watch, star and fork the repo from any of the sub-pages, then that stuff has to live in that top ribbon.

But then you shouldn’t duplicate it into the Code sub-page. I’d work with split buttons, where you can look at who starred and you can add your own star, all from the same UI element. It would not even take up more space, since they do already display the count in the top ribbon as well.

Apparently this is how Codeberg does it (see e.g. this repo), so this might be where I have the idea from…

I mean, yeah, it can make sense to duplicate information. That screenshot isn’t supposed to say that all of these should be deduplicated.
But you really gotta be cautious with duplication, because it makes everything else harder to find. And I would absolutely argue that GitHub has crossed the line where they duplicate too much, across the board. It feels like design-by-committee.

This is entirely anecdotal, but what really dumbfounded me while annotating that screenshot, is that I never actually read the links in that “About” section.
I’ve seen this page probably a thousand times already, but I had no idea that there’s an “Activity” link there, which actually seems like it could be useful. Nor a link to the README, to the CONTRIBUTING.md or for “Custom Properties” (whatever that is).
I had no idea how to report a repo until now, even though the link is apparently always on screen.

There’s just so much info there, and it’s presented like read-only info, not like navigation links, so I always just skipped over the lines that don’t have numbers in them. I also genuinely never tried clicking any of these lines before…

I could rant a lot about the GitHub UX, so here’s just the superficial stuff on the repository page:

Screenshot of the repository overview page. There’s a lot of duplicated information.

Red arrows mean duplicated information or duplicated navigational elements.
Green arrow means why the fuck do I have to tell our customers to click a random link in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, in order to download our software?

I mean, I can imagine very well that you can just tell from their emotions.

Like, let’s say this was their emotion timeline without superhero costume:

🧍‍♂️😃🙂😮‍💨❌

If they’d just generally be in a better mood, the emotion timeline would look like this:

🦸😁😄😃🙂😮‍💨❌

So, their mood starts higher, but there’s the same rate of decline.
Whereas, if they persevere, it’s more like this:

🦸😃🙂😮‍💨😔😑❌

So, similar starting mood as without costume, but the decline is only at the start until they hit the point where they would normally give up.
And then they muster the perseverance to continue, despite being in a bad mood from that point on.

Obviously, you’d need to formalize that, and not every kid will show the same emotions. But when averaged, I do think that gives you a scientific result.

A while ago, I also heard of a study, where they had kids do a task until the kids would give up. And when they let the kids dress up as their favorite superhero, the kids would persevere much longer.

Obviously, the kids being in a better mood can be a factor, but if I remember correctly, it was also a conclusion that the kids persevered, because they thought the superhero would persevere in this situation.
You can probably tell quite well, when their mood falls off a cliff, but they still push on, so could certainly see that being a conclusion…

Feels like a weird decision from a business point of view, too, to gut your studio right as you come up with new projects for it to tackle.

Maybe those devs aren’t needed in the early stages of these new projects and they expect to be able to rehire when they are. That’s still short-term thinking, but at this point, I would be surprised, if anything at Microsoft happened even with just this much rationale.

There’s probably one decision that they need to milk their cash cows some more, and an entirely separate decision that they need to bolster their numbers for shareholders to be happy with this quarter. And the only time those decisions crossed paths, is in some middle manager who’s told to make the impossible work…