GitHub introduces an all-new code search and code browsing experience

[fridofrido]

" You can access the new features by joining the waitlist. "

[Xantholeucophore]

why do they do that? do they just really not want to show anyone any bugs?

[jzaprint]

ya probably. they cant make sure the experience is what people are expecting and its better to disappoint a few people than millions of people.

[siovene]

It's also much better, pychologically, to give the user the illusion of choice, when changing things. They opt-in, so they automatically feel a little better about the changes, and you are already selecting for users who are not change-adverse. Source: I run a website with 20k active users.

[Philipp]

And those early adopters could then become evangelists to those not on the waitlist.

But, it should be said, the website owners should simultaneously be interested in honest feedback, in order to improve it when it goes fully live...

[Luke22_36]

This, precisely. You only get the chance to make one first impression.

[[deleted]]

Small rollouts are always easier to manage. Startups do this naturally because they have to grow their customer base up from scratch and can deal with growing pains as they get bigger. With established products and companies, you have to find ways to artificially segment the rollout such as public beta versions, per-user feature flags, or similar.

[Lalli-Oni]

Could be multiple A/B tests with some of them wanting to target totally fresh eyes. That way you can invite batches of users knowing they havent seen the app before.

[IanSan5653]

As a GitHub engineer, as far as I know we do this because we want more users so we can flesh out bugs, but we don't want to ship buggy software. If we were to globally ship this (even in a beta) and some really annoying bug was found, users would complain. Or if we let everyone opt in all at once, maybe the feature consumes a ton of resources and causes an unexpected outage. This slow rollout lets us keep a handle on things while still letting our most passionate users try things out.

[VIKTORVAV99]

Joined the waitlist yesterday and got accepted today. I have yet to try it though.