I think the respectful solution is to show it as "you starred X, it's private now, you can unstar if you like" (make sure if the name changes privately then the new name isn't shown).
Such a solution is not only good in the case of mistakes like this, it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list.
> it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list.
It's honestly hilarious how the definition of 'gaslight' has expanded so dramatically in the past few years that it now means 'anything that confuses me'.
For future reference, here's what it actually means [1]:
> Psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator
The origin of “gaslight” is a movie where a husband surreptitiously removes objects from the room, dims and brightens the lights, etc. and pretends the changes were just the wife’s imagination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)#Plot
Removing bookmarks from someone’s list without notification seems at least broadly comparable (in both cases, the victim is confused and might question their own memory, because the state of the world changed in an incongruous way), though it is the action of an emotionless machine with a programming bug rather than a malicious human.
> albeit the action of an emotionless machine with a programming bug rather than a malicious human
Yes, if you remove a major part of the definition (intent) then it can fit whatever you want it to fit. Like Gino D'Acampo most famously said [1], if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.
I think it’s a fair use of the term. I’d maybe feel differently if there was a better term to use for “non-intentional gaslighting”, but afaik there isn’t really.
How about we coin a term today, "LEDlighting"? (Pronounced Led-Lighting).
"When a digital platform's state is altered in an opaque way without input on the user's behalf that directly commanded it to, and as a result causes them to question reality in the form of either their memory, the actual state of the system itself, or whether or not the system was intentionally made to do it by an unseen human."
Shadowbans, whether you think they're a good form of moderation or not, would be an example of LEDlighting.
In a game if the chat system stops working but the rest of the game works and everyone thinks they have been muted for some unknown infraction of the rules by an overreaching moderator, that's also LEDlighting.
Sure, to really count as "gaslighting" there has to be a deliberate attempt to make someone doubt their own sanity. I think we can rule out malicious intent in this case. However, when you save a link to something and then later come back to find the service acting like the link never even existed, as opposed to telling you that it was removed, that can feel pretty similar even if it's not intentional.
A user's list of starred repos shouldn't be silently abridged just because one of the repos was removed or made private. A placeholder should be left indicating that the repo was once starred but is currently unavailable.
This is something I always found annoying about Google Play Music also; when they removed a track from their service it would just silently disappear without a trace from your playlists, so unless you saved a copy of the list somewhere and compared them you might not even know to look for it elsewhere. You're just left vaguely wondering why that song never comes up in the shuffle any more. YT Music is a bit better about this—they generally leave a grayed-out placeholder. Sometimes the metadata is lacking but you can at least see where it was and know that a track was removed.
Because if the star is merely hidden then the repo can come back later. If you don't want any association with that repo any more, it's bad that it can put itself back into your starred list.
I think the respectful solution is to show it as "you starred X, it's private now, you can unstar if you like" (make sure if the name changes privately then the new name isn't shown).
Such a solution is not only good in the case of mistakes like this, it also doesn't gaslight the person that starred a repo only for it to disappear from their list.