Dear Github, please fix the Watch-Button

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

--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??

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?

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.

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

I run a website that tracks watchers on GitHub projects, 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=b...

[2]: http://gitego.com/paulasmuth/recommendify#watchers?interval=...

[3]: http://gitego.com/twitter/bootstrap#watchers?interval=by_hou...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm using GitHub Feed Filter extension for Chrome

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jcpkhafkpnaljjbgdg...

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/110983919160550210204/11098391... [video & download links]

>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?

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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.

Totally agree. My workaround for this at the moment is to use Yahoo 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Like facebook, watch button can have options when hovered.

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

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

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.