> Sexually explicit content - Don't post pornography. To paraphrase the U.S. Supreme Court: We'll know it when we see it.
Interesting comment in the scheme of things, since the "I'll know it when I see it" phrase is often cited as a failure of having a concrete legal definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it), which is one of the things should be avoided when possible when making a list of things which should not be done.
Hm, I would have thought the opposite - if you're a private group where everyone in the group trusts the moderators to act in good faith (or has a reasonable alternative if they don't trust the moderators), vague guidelines let you avoid being rules-lawyered, because there's nothing to be rules-lawyered, while being clear enough for participants who are also acting in good faith. (For a government, you don't have a reasonable alternative, and it's much more important to have checks and balances against one part of the government not acting in good faith.)
Whether GitHub is too big for "people have a reasonable alternative" is debatable, yes. But HN itself has vague guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), such as "Anything that good hackers would find interesting," and it seems to work pretty well in practice: people know the moderators and have a sense of whether they trust them to act in good faith.
> "[...] that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography.[2] I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
> [2] It is too late in the day to argue that the location of the line is different, and the task of ascertaining it easier, when a state rather than a federal obscenity law is involved. [...]"
So they seem to have many definitions of hard-core pornography, which are complicated by State and Federal law covering the ground twice, but are refusing to talk details of either because they have rejected the film being hard-core pornography in the broadest sense.
This seems reasonable, and a way a judge can stop some external group wasting public time and funds by needlessly going over the minutia of the laws.
Githubs use appears to be diametrically opposite to what they paraphrase.
I am getting concerned about this juvenile concept of peoples emotions being fragile eggs that could be destroyed at any given moment. Why is it the HOSTING services job to decided community guidelines?
I agree. It seems that a hosting company should just worry about what is legal/etc. This idea of being a moral police isn't good for the users or them.
Well they're hosting it, for free, so they get to decide the same way as someone hosting a party.
But it's quite obvious they see the responsibility with the project owners first, and will only step in if it escalates. A written policy can make the owner's jobs a bit easier because they can just point at it and deflect criticism to GH.
I don't think Github views their public parts purely as a hosting service for projects (with their individual communities). They want it to be seen as one platform-wide community, since a lot of the value and popularity of GitHub comes from easily being able to take part in many projects. Pure repository hosting is available in many other places as well, for network effects you need a (social) network.
A hostile commenting environment (e.g. racist or sexually explicit messages) negatively impacts the UX of the site, particularly for new users. It's bad for business.
> Why is it the HOSTING services job to decided community guidelines?
because GitHub has been trying to save their reputation after some pretty lousy things went on, leading to them deciding to bend to PC pressure.
I'm all for respecting others, and absolutely against any sort of threats of violence, harassment, etc... It's a massive problem online.
That's a ways from having people flood your project with requests to change things like master/slave terminology or the name of the project because "bro" is horrible.
The people doing this are the harassers. "This person has political views I don't like, they should be removed from the project, even though I've never heard of the project before now".
Well, people's emotions may be fragile, the point is, should we tolerate or even encourage it? Shouldn't we try to evolve into a species with a stronger heart?
I assume you're referring to Linus Torvalds? The early versions of git were very unlike git as we know it; there were a few third-party tools on top, notably Cogito, that provided the interface that resembles what we expect. It took quite a while for git to develop its own interface along the lines of Cogito, and it wasn't very popular until then.
I suspect that Linus's DVCS (as opposed to one of the many other DVCSes with extremely similar data models) succeeded in large part because Linux was an extremely active project, as opposed to because of any inherent technical superiority. I remember the early days of git, when people were using it because that's what you had to do to get Linux's VCS repo; the de-facto requirement to use some wrapper like Cogito was not a point in git's favor.
So, I'm not sure the extent to which GitHub can be fairly said to derive its success from Linus. At best, it derived its success from the network effects around git (as a result of Linux switching to it, and therefore other projects switching to it because they knew Linux and whatever VCS Linux used would be well-supported), and fixing all the things about git that didn't work well. Linus still hates most of what GitHub does that stock git doesn't do! But all of those differences are the reason that GitHub has a very successful company that, seemingly, makes a business out of running a bunch of free tools on a central server.
We had sourceforge, google code and several similar places long before github. Github pounced on the opportunity that git opened up because other hosts were slow to adapt.
So yes, without git there would be no gihub as we know it.
Invent git? Not even close, their product is good and has served as a great place to FL/OSS to thrive, I don't agree with the whole moral police thing but seriously before claiming things do a 5 minute research
Not everything has to be a social network. Host it on youtube, post it someplace else. Blog, facebook page, website with comments... Youtube seems to work fine in its current form for many content creators.
But GitHub is a social network, and that's why it succeeded over the myriad other git hosts like git.or.cz, literally every web host, etc. The product wasn't git hosting, the product was the community.
Not everything has to be a social network, but many things (including software engineering) are better if they are. Not every social network needs moderation, but many of them are better if they have it.
When everybody has a voice, you'll hear garbage like that thrown at you. It's an effect of being connected to most all of humanity. But it is inextricably linked to freedom, which many generally consider worth the good to endure the bad.
And while threats are fairly clearly defined, "harassment" is very nebulous. One person views a non-directed statement as harassing, the other doesn't, the community around that exchange might take one side, society-wide may vote differently, countries have different norms & attitudes, etc. How can everybody share a censorship system where everybody's view of what constitutes harassment is slightly different? It'll never go far enough to cover many people's definition (which is your complaint against the current system), and go too far for others. Sorry, but I think that having the world's systems catered to one person's comprehensive subjective view of "bad" (whoever it is) really is too much to ask. We should stick to those things which are more cut and dry, which won't ever be comprehensive.
YouTube comments on channels with predominantly a fixed followerbase can be nice environments, but they never provided the tools to moderate larger comment sections and form communities. (+ of course moderating larger communities in "a bad neighborhood" is a lot of work, and many channels have very limited resources)
AFAIK YouTube ranking also prioritizes controversial comments, which increases interactions (metrics!) but also highlights bad stuff.
Does anyone know what stopped YouTube from being able to make comments a friendly, welcoming environment?
Do we have any reason to suspect they even tried? Maybe it's because they just slapped comment functionality onto their pages to increase user engagement?
The whole slicing of society into those deemed "offensive" and "acceptable" is a problem in and of itself. These policies are not a solution to them, it's catering to the problem. Niemoller's poem is an example of a divisive society being its own divide-and-conquer downfall.
Illegal behavior is illegal behavior, and if someone's behavior reaches that level, it should be taken up with the police against the perpetrator.
That seems like a good recipe for big government. If society can't trust that private institutions can avoid undesirable behavior, the only recourse is to make everything offensive illegal.
So, conversely, if we don't want to live in that world, it is appropriate and beneficial for private institutions to have some standards of acceptable behavior beyond mere legality.
"the only recourse is to make everything offensive illegal."
Alternatively, you could recognize that there is no right to not be offended.
There are ~7 billion other people out there, a solid majority of whom likely hold one or more views that you would find offensive (and who find one or more of your views offensive in turn).
Sure. I have no right to not be offended, I acknowledge that. I do have freedom of association, though, and I absolutely have the right not to associate with those that offend me, patronize businesses that welcome people who offend me, etc. In turn, people who find my views offensive are, of course, free not to associate with me, not to patronize businesses that welcome me, etc., and I steadfastly support their rights to do so!
How do you reconcile that with your upstream comment "If society can't trust that private institutions can avoid undesirable behavior, the only recourse is to make everything offensive illegal"?
That statement seems to imply that there is a mandate for 3rd parties to provide systems free of "undesirable behavior" from particular perspectives. Freedom of association means no, there isn't. Demanding private institutions provide freedom from offensiveness implies a perceived right not to be offended.
Or you (and they) could just suck it up and stop demanding that everyone else behave in the way that you, personally, have decided is the "correct" way. If it doesn't actively "pick your pocket or break your leg", why not let it go?
I don't have a right to not be offended, but I may have an expectation that my source code platform not subject me to death threats from other users. Very few platforms would allow that.
I feel like this is a bit of a strawman. Github didn't say they would take action against anything that might offend anyone. They were pretty specific: no death threats, impersonating other users, etc.
If your platform connects you to arbitrary users worldwide, why wouldn't you expect to get garbage from any joe blow that happens upon your project and feels like saying something stupid? What are these other platforms outside the "very few" that somehow prevent that?
Besides, the best you can do is take action after the fact, not avoid being subjected to it, unless you cut yourself off or have weird vetting barriers between you and others, instead of an open communication platform.
If you're getting credible death threats, your recourse should be to the police. I'm trying to get my head around the idea that the appropriate entity to handle a death threat should be the hosting platform, and I'm failing.
I anticipate someone making a big deal over nothing (like what triggered the whole code of conduct thing in the first place) will trigger one of the clauses and I or the project may be removed.
I anticipate that my account could be removed because of the actions of another contributor on a project, even if I had no involvement.
And a simply don't like the idea of it. They are selling a product, I want to buy the product, I don't want to be forced into their political philosophy for it.
HN is a forum and doesn't host anything I would care about losing, github is (was) a service I paid for. We discuss some contentious subjects on HN but github will be preventing contributions from people with wrongthink, which I don't care about.
>You seem to be making some big assumptions about how these guidelines will be enforced.
Oh please. We all know what kind of rancid and toxic people are spearheading these kinds of seemingly innocuous initiatives.
>I see no evidence they will delete your paid accounts because you think or express ideas that are merely contentious or unpopular.
Yeah. Because I am going to take the risk and potentially disrupt the workflow of three high-volume OSS projects I maintain. The time I assumed benevolence from Github is long over. Time to move my shit to a reliable service like Gitlab.
Judging by his comment, it doesn't seem he's advocating for forcing a private entity (or at least this particular one) to do anything "against their will". Instead, he's moving his business elsewhere because of a policy he disagrees with -- a non-aggressive response of voting with one's wallet. Do you believe this equates to forcing Github to take actions against their will?
It's not the majority of the time, but I've see policies against 'bullying and harassment' used to silence anything but. That might be what is worrying OP.
By and large I agree that none of these things have any relevance to software development. (And Github shouldn't be forced to tolerate anything, not sure where that came from.) But a couple edge cases may be relevant:
> Hate speech and discrimination
Gender as an entry field. People have a variety of views on this one. I imagine that the prevailing view is going to call certain other views "hate speech" no matter how politely expressed. It is up to Github if they want to take this stance on it, but it is understandably going to get them called the "PC Police" should it ever come up.
> Sexually explicit content
I understand not bringing this into discussions for no reason. But what if someone is developing a Leisure Suit Larry clone? I think implementing a NSFW warning for viewing a project is perfectly reasonable by almost anybody's standards. But disallowing it entirely will preclude such projects from Github. But again, totally understandable if Github decides that it's not the place for such things.
Metasploit has been hosted at GitHub for few years and they never seemed to have a problem with that. Are they going to kick them now? Why should they care?
This in particular angers me because it's so broad IMO and antithetical to open source and security research. This smells like political pressure and censorship. Like the beginning of the end for GitHub...
Most of those are crimes or torts, and should be dealt with by the legal system (the real one, where there are things like rules of evidence, a presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, etc.), not by some kangaroo court made up of the perpetually outraged.
No matter what the written policy says, they will have to tolerate threats of violence done in the name of political correctness. I remember the huge Twitter outrage from the well-connected social justice activists in the tech community driving policies like this when Twitter banned someone for threatening violence against a celebrity in the name of social justice, the anger that Twitter didn't understand this was important activism, forcing them to back down. It's politically impossible to act otherwise. Even Twitter probably only broke the unspoken rule by accident - a bunch of conservatives subsequently sent the same person threats, and most likely someone didn't bother checking everyone's political affiliation before banning.
I would like to better understand your point of view. What in particular about the guidelines inclines you to move? Why do you think GitHub shouldn't be doing it?
I doubt that these were issues, more likely they put these in place to declare some sort of allegiance to certain groups. These groups seem to be more about policing people because the position of moral authority gives them some sort of high than solving actual issues (but that might require expending energy, time and resources so they stick to policing people online).
The fact that there are guidelines. I want my ISP to be a dumb pipe and not a content provider, filterer, etc, In the same way I want github to be a dumb service host.
We are redefining words to the point of parody. There's nothing dangerous about writing software or interacting with people who do.
Sometimes you have to wonder how people get through the day. Humans are resilient creatures, but they can't be the more and more we try and shield ourselves from everything.
"Unsafe" now means that someone in some "space" said words that revealed they aren't part of your in-group. How can you possibly feel safe unless all of the people in the "space" regularly signal that they affirm everything you believe and identify with?
What's wrong with striving to create a community where people aren't subjected to malicious, abusive members? Isn't that why pretty much every online community (HN included) sometimes bans accounts?
"Malicious and abusive" are also labels generously applied to people solely based on extrapolating from their broad social or political beliefs, or seemingly any hint of countercultural view to the local norm.
Do you really want people thoughtcrimed out of technical communities having committed no ill within the community itself?
And with any scheme like this, are you fine if these weapons are turned on you, and not just your preferred undesirables, with the same level of subjectivity but wielded by someone else? Say some non-github post of yours was taken out of context and caused a massive stink.
This attempt to codify morals, ethics, and general good behavior into quippy, hot-topic, vague buzzwords is not a structure to build inclusive communities. It's a structure to have everybody walking on egg shells, hoping they aren't accidentally unaware of this week's trending sensitivity outrage, which can be pointed at as enforceable through the Guidelines.
Which specific parts of the guidelines do you object to? You think people should be allowed to impersonate other users or send death threats? If those are "thought crimes" then yes, I don't want them in my community.
"If you think that someone else might interpret the content you post as a threat, or as promoting violence or terrorism, stop."
Arbitrary, subjective policing by anybody who wants to pitch in that they don't like you or what you're saying, or even who they think you are because of external stuff that has never been on github, no matter how non-threatening you've been. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior.
- "Hate speech and discrimination"
"Just realize that talking about these or other sensitive topics can make others feel unwelcome, or perhaps even unsafe, if approached in an aggressive or insulting manner."
Again, this is undefined and the existence of inflicting "hate" is left to the sole interpretation of 3rd parties (ie, not you and not github). As respectful and non-insulting as anybody can get, can and does still invite others to place their own meaning into otherwise innocuous words. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior.
- "Bullying and harassment"
"In general, if your actions are unwanted and you continue to engage in them, there's a good chance you are headed into bullying or harassment territory."
Again, solely left up to random 3rd parties to determine what's "unwanted" from you personally. If you're a maintainer and your development actions are repeatedly unwanted by some users, can they claim you're bullying them according to the guidelines? If there are 2-way disputes, and both are "unwanted" by the other, what does this guideline even mean? Any legitimate argument between two firm sides can be claimed to be bullying, if either side decides to bring that in and try to escalate to silence the other. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior. This is not good to have for a site which should host legitimate technical discourse.
The others:
- "Sexually explicit content"
"We'll know it when we see it."
This is worded unclearly, and appeal to authority doesn't fix that. Any application of it will certainly bring arguments over the artistic quality of the content, and technical development of what inevitable stuff is going to be coming through VR. Also, does purely textual content constitute "sexually explicit" or "pornography"? It's vague, but at least it's more about the content itself, as opposed to somebody's subjective reception of the content, as in the case of the other problematic issues. Also it leaves the actual classification of the content up to the hosting site, not to the whims of random passers-by.
- "Impersonation" - has this been a problem? Since it relates to github's data and technical presentation, it makes sense. In any case, it is intentionally false communication which makes it defensible to remove from a site often used to hold canonical data. It focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
- "Doxxing and invasion of privacy" - straightforward. should be handled through legal systems, but I don't think those are in place yet. Plus, it focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
- "Active malware or exploits" - testable, applicable specifically to github's content and role as a software repository. Focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
By the way, your whole rhetorical "You think people should be allowed to ..." is a prejudiced view of others, making inappropriate and uninformed judgment, placing words in others' mouths (could be construed as impersonating what I might say if one only read your reply?), associating me with potentially illegal behaviors, is not acceptable dis...
Because there is no github community. It is a platform, a content carrier. Individual repository owners are already given tools to moderate their own repos, why does one need additional rules beyond that?
Don't forget about the time github forced a repo to change because of the word "retard".
I was uneasy before but now this confirms it. I'll be moving my open source projects to Gitlab. And if they start with this monkey business I'll just host my own Gitlab instance.
These discussions frequently suffer from an invasion of strawmen destined for destruction. So it's probably a good idea to take a look at the actual list of behavior that is addressed:
- Threats of violence
- Hate speech and discrimination
- Bullying and harassment
- Impersonation
- Doxxing and invasion of privacy
- Sexually explicit content
- Active malware or exploits
Now most people will be up in arms about #2, "hate speech and discrimination". I'm sure agreement is much higher for their rejection of "Active malware or exploits".
I'd just like to submit that many people who spend a lot of time online have a distorted view of what is meant with "hate speech and discrimination". I know quite a few activists from what's probably the "left fringe", and I have never found any among them that fit the prevalent stereotype of a "PC Police". Instead, I've seen quite a few examples of the harm that can be done by discrimination (fresh example: a group of 10 people at a conference, and the police chooses to stop-and-frisk the only black guy. Twice. In front of his colleagues, while wearing a Cisco T-shirt and the conference badge).
And that makes my assumption suddenly seem wrong: some malware is, except in rare cases, some lost time or monetary damage, but probably not enough to meaningfully change your life.
Discrimination hits individuals. Possibly only a small percentage, and I have honestly no idea what it feels like. But I'm inclined to trust people, especially because it doesn't cost me anything. I'll rename master/slave, I'll sign community guidelines, I'll try to be a mentor, and when anybody wants to censor certain words in old books I'll calmly explain why that's a stupid idea.
>many people who spend a lot of time online have a distorted view of what is meant with "hate speech and discrimination"
That is exactly the problem.
There are a lot of people from a privileged upper middle-class background who have never experienced (or even seen) real discrimination, and as a result have a very warped frame of reference what "Hate speech and discrimination" means.
These are the people who will be in charge of enforcing the rules.
Wow okay so apparently this thread is already full of people (who, let's be honest, are probably white cis het males) who think that community guidelines are bullshit.
But I know that other people trying to develop software on github sometimes get slowed down because of assholes being assholes. How do I know this? Because when people tell me about their experiences, I listen.
All community guidelines do are provide a less wishy-washy tool for dealing with the assholes. If you really think "threats of violence, hate speech, bullying, harassment, impersonation, invasions of privacy, sexually explicit content, or active malware" has a place in software development, then you might have a legit grievance here. But if not, buck the fuck up and help make this a better space for everyone.
These guidelines are first and foremost community guidelines
The only thing that bothers me about these guidelines are that they're pretending to be about "community." Github is private company with ultimate control of what they host. They should own their actions. It is patronizing that they frame it as anything else.
They have a userbase, and are soliciting feedback a draft of rules they will dictate to that userbase. I do not belong to a community by having a github account. I use a tool that happens to be externally hosted. I'm not even a community member on all the project's I've contributed to, some were just a commit or two.
I hate this phony sense of connectedness and uniformity everyone wants to project onto me based on my vocation and website usership. We're more like strangers sharing a subway car. Nothing more. Stop telling me who to be. Stop telling me we're friends/community/family, or that we share any other personal connection.
One of the first guidelines, "Assume no malice", is one I take to heart, and wish it was applied by people here to this announcement.
Maybe you've never experienced any problems with the open source community. Personally, I know I never had. Even if most of us have positive experiences, there are some people who don't. These guidelines are trying to make it so less people have a bad experience in the future.
Having community guidelines doesn't kill a community. Hacker News itself has guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and I don't think we've suffered because of it. While the language of GitHub's guidelines is different, the goals seem very much the same.
Let's assume that GitHub is acting in good faith here, and trying to make things better for the community.
wtf do you do with that? who is making the complaint? are they part of the community? can non-community members sabotage a community by making this type of complaint? If no, why not? Their grievance from a moral standpoint is just as legitimate. But if so, then it means that my actions in a personal arena will spill over to my github account? And how do you prove that the person in the personal account was me, and not just a person with the same user name on a different platform? or a sock puppet designed to get me banned?
There is no higher-level of refereeing that is going to make this easy. Ultimately, I predict that any enforcement of this policy by github will be arbitrary and capricious. And if it's not enforced, then it's just a waste of air.
I really doubt that they are solving a bigger problem (based on my own experience using GH) than they are creating, but I wish them the best of luck..
If you believe the press reports, letting the community figure out how to deal with abuse on its own seems to have had a negative impact on Twitter's value.
It shouldn't really be a job of random private companies to police the Internet.
It used to be the case that postal and telecommunication services were neutral and not responsible for their users. If you have an issue with what somebody sent to you or published you go to court and have it resolved legally and by qualified people.
BTW, are there any laws regulating this kind of things? It certainly would be very unfortunate if companies were allowed to use "community guidelines" as an excuse for unjust discrimination. Can I make them actually responsible for their decisions and sue them for kicking out somebody they shouldn't or for failing to kick somebody they should?
>It shouldn't really be a job of random private companies to police the Internet.
They aren't policing the internet, they're policing their users of their service. If Github wanted to moderate the content on other people's websites I agree that would be weird and problematic.
> Can I make them actually responsible for their decisions and sue them for kicking out somebody they shouldn't or for failing to kick somebody they should?
I'm having a hard time understanding what you're getting at. Who do you think Github is going to discriminate against? "Internet Trolls" are not a protected class. The government does not require private companies to have to do business with anyone (a good thing!).
> Who do you think Github is going to discriminate against?
Anyone at all. I don't think GitHub will be better than any random project maintainer whom now they want to override.
But if you really need specifics and finger pointing, what about the fact that GitHub hired the troll who, with no affiliation with the project whatsoever, spammed Opal's issue tracker about private opinions that one member expressed outside of the project and outside of GitHub and demanded his removal from the project? See link in the top post here for details.
Will they start removing such spam once the guidelines are in place? Will they ban the troll? Maybe fire her from the job?
It would be nice to have a law against being a jerk if we had some foolproof way to enforce it. But the definition of being a jerk varies, and it's utterly impractical.
Therefore, society at large uses societal feedback to soft-punish people who misbehave: you can say whatever you want, but you will have to deal with how others react to your behavior.
It's an imperfect system, but it's the best we have found.
Github should be the same: step in when there are egregious issues where the law is broken (threats, stalking, subpoenas, hacking, etc), but otherwise let the individual development communities regulate themselves (like they did for the repo in the original comment).
Sometimes you will agree with how something was handled; sometimes you will disagree with how something was handled. But it will be handled by the individuals it affects.
An alternative available to GH might be to have an impartial entity available to provide objective input, if the community asks for it: "Ok GH community guideline arbitrator panel - this is what happened, with the primary documentation of the exchange being this pull request, this email exchange, and this glitter bomb which is photographed in the office where it went off.
Please give us a 3rd-person opinion (by a group of people who often think about these issues and are deft in handling them effectively) since we are obviously emotional about it by virtue of our involvement.
I'm just spitballing, but that would allow github to demonstrate their commitment to diversity without making rules that will be enforced subjectively and inconsistently.
The problem is that everyone's been treating GitHub as a utility, not as a community. Imagine if my water company told me that I needed to be nice to my neighbors, and if I didn't, they'd turn off my water. I don't want my version control hosting provider be a community, I just want them to keep the servers running.
Ah yes because open source is a spigot you turn on that deserves to be awesome for free.
I'm one of the top (50? 25 now?) Devs on GitHub. It's a community, not some place I want people asking for support to be shoveling shit down my well. I want a place where I'm happy to drink your water, not one where I'm like "why the fuck did they fling a bug in it."
I for one am excited for these sorts of changes and will be happy to keep paying for the newsletters to fund them.
As an individual you have to tolerate people you don't like. But as a group you don't have to tolerate behavior that's damaging to the group as a whole. A community doesn't have to accept everyone into it; its members can agree that they all must hold a shared standard of behavior as a condition for membership.
That's what's going on here. You've said elsewhere that you don't think github should be a community or encourage community behavior. That's fine, you can move along. Plenty of us do want to collaborate with others in a community environment, and setting standards of behavior is a necessary condition for that. So I'm happy with this change.
And in reality it gets used to suppress personal views that have no bearing on the community. The pretend they're protecting the community while actually harming in.
An open source project is a community, but GitHub shouldn't be. Open source projects use lots of tools and services to help keep the community together. Version control, issue tracking, IRC/Slack, mailing lists, web hosting. Each of these are tools that the actual community (the open source project) uses. The project's leaders are free to adopt (or not) codes of conduct, licenses, and community norms. Some communities can be welcoming to newbies, others may require that one prove themselves before they are fully accepted. It's not the place for a site like github to mandate community norms for open source projects. Github itself is only one small piece of what makes an open source project tick, and they are overreaching with trying to control open source projects that happen to choose them to handle version control.
I take issue with GH asserting itself as a community and proclaiming to speak for its users. Is Walmart a community? Is Chipotle a community? Shouldn't community members get a voice in the decision making? This particular notion of community is absurd.
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[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadInteresting comment in the scheme of things, since the "I'll know it when I see it" phrase is often cited as a failure of having a concrete legal definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it), which is one of the things should be avoided when possible when making a list of things which should not be done.
Whether GitHub is too big for "people have a reasonable alternative" is debatable, yes. But HN itself has vague guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), such as "Anything that good hackers would find interesting," and it seems to work pretty well in practice: people know the moderators and have a sense of whether they trust them to act in good faith.
Here is a (likely incomplete) list of GitHub competitors:
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting
AFAIK bitbucket and GitLab are the serious contenders, both with large, serious users and projects.
Edit: By this I mean, no GitHub is not too big for "people to have a reasonable alternative"
> "[...] that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography.[2] I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
> [2] It is too late in the day to argue that the location of the line is different, and the task of ascertaining it easier, when a state rather than a federal obscenity law is involved. [...]"
So they seem to have many definitions of hard-core pornography, which are complicated by State and Federal law covering the ground twice, but are refusing to talk details of either because they have rejected the film being hard-core pornography in the broadest sense.
This seems reasonable, and a way a judge can stop some external group wasting public time and funds by needlessly going over the minutia of the laws.
Githubs use appears to be diametrically opposite to what they paraphrase.
But it's quite obvious they see the responsibility with the project owners first, and will only step in if it escalates. A written policy can make the owner's jobs a bit easier because they can just point at it and deflect criticism to GH.
So is thought-policing your customers.
Personally, I nuked my Github account months ago.
Dueling anecdotes!
because GitHub has been trying to save their reputation after some pretty lousy things went on, leading to them deciding to bend to PC pressure.
I'm all for respecting others, and absolutely against any sort of threats of violence, harassment, etc... It's a massive problem online.
That's a ways from having people flood your project with requests to change things like master/slave terminology or the name of the project because "bro" is horrible.
Citation Needed. I suspect the number of real threats are approximately the same as the number of people that have really fucked my mum.
Plus it's hardly right that you can threaten someone just because "lol it's the internet brah"
Unless we lock down the internet and give up anonymity then it's something we have to accept.
I suspect that Linus's DVCS (as opposed to one of the many other DVCSes with extremely similar data models) succeeded in large part because Linux was an extremely active project, as opposed to because of any inherent technical superiority. I remember the early days of git, when people were using it because that's what you had to do to get Linux's VCS repo; the de-facto requirement to use some wrapper like Cogito was not a point in git's favor.
So, I'm not sure the extent to which GitHub can be fairly said to derive its success from Linus. At best, it derived its success from the network effects around git (as a result of Linux switching to it, and therefore other projects switching to it because they knew Linux and whatever VCS Linux used would be well-supported), and fixing all the things about git that didn't work well. Linus still hates most of what GitHub does that stock git doesn't do! But all of those differences are the reason that GitHub has a very successful company that, seemingly, makes a business out of running a bunch of free tools on a central server.
So yes, without git there would be no gihub as we know it.
Google may get software and systems (and even hardware now), but Google has failed spectacularly when it comes to social.
That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Not everything has to be a social network, but many things (including software engineering) are better if they are. Not every social network needs moderation, but many of them are better if they have it.
And while threats are fairly clearly defined, "harassment" is very nebulous. One person views a non-directed statement as harassing, the other doesn't, the community around that exchange might take one side, society-wide may vote differently, countries have different norms & attitudes, etc. How can everybody share a censorship system where everybody's view of what constitutes harassment is slightly different? It'll never go far enough to cover many people's definition (which is your complaint against the current system), and go too far for others. Sorry, but I think that having the world's systems catered to one person's comprehensive subjective view of "bad" (whoever it is) really is too much to ask. We should stick to those things which are more cut and dry, which won't ever be comprehensive.
AFAIK YouTube ranking also prioritizes controversial comments, which increases interactions (metrics!) but also highlights bad stuff.
Do we have any reason to suspect they even tried? Maybe it's because they just slapped comment functionality onto their pages to increase user engagement?
Because I did not deem myself offensive.
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.
Illegal behavior is illegal behavior, and if someone's behavior reaches that level, it should be taken up with the police against the perpetrator.
So, conversely, if we don't want to live in that world, it is appropriate and beneficial for private institutions to have some standards of acceptable behavior beyond mere legality.
Alternatively, you could recognize that there is no right to not be offended.
There are ~7 billion other people out there, a solid majority of whom likely hold one or more views that you would find offensive (and who find one or more of your views offensive in turn).
That statement seems to imply that there is a mandate for 3rd parties to provide systems free of "undesirable behavior" from particular perspectives. Freedom of association means no, there isn't. Demanding private institutions provide freedom from offensiveness implies a perceived right not to be offended.
I feel like this is a bit of a strawman. Github didn't say they would take action against anything that might offend anyone. They were pretty specific: no death threats, impersonating other users, etc.
Besides, the best you can do is take action after the fact, not avoid being subjected to it, unless you cut yourself off or have weird vetting barriers between you and others, instead of an open communication platform.
eli's right, somebody should suggest adding "community guidelines" to this "offensive" blacklist and see how they resolve the paradox ;)
I anticipate that my account could be removed because of the actions of another contributor on a project, even if I had no involvement.
And a simply don't like the idea of it. They are selling a product, I want to buy the product, I don't want to be forced into their political philosophy for it.
I see no evidence they will delete your paid accounts because you think or express ideas that are merely contentious or unpopular.
Github and some recent hires they've made have a history of this.
Oh please. We all know what kind of rancid and toxic people are spearheading these kinds of seemingly innocuous initiatives.
>I see no evidence they will delete your paid accounts because you think or express ideas that are merely contentious or unpopular.
Yeah. Because I am going to take the risk and potentially disrupt the workflow of three high-volume OSS projects I maintain. The time I assumed benevolence from Github is long over. Time to move my shit to a reliable service like Gitlab.
- Threats of violence
- Hate speech and discrimination
- Bullying and harassment
- Impersonation
- Doxxing and invasion of privacy
- Sexually explicit content
- Active malware or exploits
It's not the majority of the time, but I've see policies against 'bullying and harassment' used to silence anything but. That might be what is worrying OP.
Someone might link to one of my tweets from 2010 where "I want cloning to be legalized" (that's not me, just same username).
> Hate speech and discrimination
Gender as an entry field. People have a variety of views on this one. I imagine that the prevailing view is going to call certain other views "hate speech" no matter how politely expressed. It is up to Github if they want to take this stance on it, but it is understandably going to get them called the "PC Police" should it ever come up.
> Sexually explicit content
I understand not bringing this into discussions for no reason. But what if someone is developing a Leisure Suit Larry clone? I think implementing a NSFW warning for viewing a project is perfectly reasonable by almost anybody's standards. But disallowing it entirely will preclude such projects from Github. But again, totally understandable if Github decides that it's not the place for such things.
> Active malware or exploits
Metasploit has been hosted at GitHub for few years and they never seemed to have a problem with that. Are they going to kick them now? Why should they care?
Give me a break.
We are redefining words to the point of parody. There's nothing dangerous about writing software or interacting with people who do.
Sometimes you have to wonder how people get through the day. Humans are resilient creatures, but they can't be the more and more we try and shield ourselves from everything.
Do you really want people thoughtcrimed out of technical communities having committed no ill within the community itself?
And with any scheme like this, are you fine if these weapons are turned on you, and not just your preferred undesirables, with the same level of subjectivity but wielded by someone else? Say some non-github post of yours was taken out of context and caused a massive stink.
This attempt to codify morals, ethics, and general good behavior into quippy, hot-topic, vague buzzwords is not a structure to build inclusive communities. It's a structure to have everybody walking on egg shells, hoping they aren't accidentally unaware of this week's trending sensitivity outrage, which can be pointed at as enforceable through the Guidelines.
- "Threats of violence"
"If you think that someone else might interpret the content you post as a threat, or as promoting violence or terrorism, stop."
Arbitrary, subjective policing by anybody who wants to pitch in that they don't like you or what you're saying, or even who they think you are because of external stuff that has never been on github, no matter how non-threatening you've been. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior.
- "Hate speech and discrimination"
"Just realize that talking about these or other sensitive topics can make others feel unwelcome, or perhaps even unsafe, if approached in an aggressive or insulting manner."
Again, this is undefined and the existence of inflicting "hate" is left to the sole interpretation of 3rd parties (ie, not you and not github). As respectful and non-insulting as anybody can get, can and does still invite others to place their own meaning into otherwise innocuous words. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior.
- "Bullying and harassment"
"In general, if your actions are unwanted and you continue to engage in them, there's a good chance you are headed into bullying or harassment territory."
Again, solely left up to random 3rd parties to determine what's "unwanted" from you personally. If you're a maintainer and your development actions are repeatedly unwanted by some users, can they claim you're bullying them according to the guidelines? If there are 2-way disputes, and both are "unwanted" by the other, what does this guideline even mean? Any legitimate argument between two firm sides can be claimed to be bullying, if either side decides to bring that in and try to escalate to silence the other. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior. This is not good to have for a site which should host legitimate technical discourse.
The others:
- "Sexually explicit content"
"We'll know it when we see it."
This is worded unclearly, and appeal to authority doesn't fix that. Any application of it will certainly bring arguments over the artistic quality of the content, and technical development of what inevitable stuff is going to be coming through VR. Also, does purely textual content constitute "sexually explicit" or "pornography"? It's vague, but at least it's more about the content itself, as opposed to somebody's subjective reception of the content, as in the case of the other problematic issues. Also it leaves the actual classification of the content up to the hosting site, not to the whims of random passers-by.
- "Impersonation" - has this been a problem? Since it relates to github's data and technical presentation, it makes sense. In any case, it is intentionally false communication which makes it defensible to remove from a site often used to hold canonical data. It focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
- "Doxxing and invasion of privacy" - straightforward. should be handled through legal systems, but I don't think those are in place yet. Plus, it focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
- "Active malware or exploits" - testable, applicable specifically to github's content and role as a software repository. Focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
By the way, your whole rhetorical "You think people should be allowed to ..." is a prejudiced view of others, making inappropriate and uninformed judgment, placing words in others' mouths (could be construed as impersonating what I might say if one only read your reply?), associating me with potentially illegal behaviors, is not acceptable dis...
I was uneasy before but now this confirms it. I'll be moving my open source projects to Gitlab. And if they start with this monkey business I'll just host my own Gitlab instance.
- Threats of violence
- Hate speech and discrimination
- Bullying and harassment
- Impersonation
- Doxxing and invasion of privacy
- Sexually explicit content
- Active malware or exploits
Now most people will be up in arms about #2, "hate speech and discrimination". I'm sure agreement is much higher for their rejection of "Active malware or exploits".
I'd just like to submit that many people who spend a lot of time online have a distorted view of what is meant with "hate speech and discrimination". I know quite a few activists from what's probably the "left fringe", and I have never found any among them that fit the prevalent stereotype of a "PC Police". Instead, I've seen quite a few examples of the harm that can be done by discrimination (fresh example: a group of 10 people at a conference, and the police chooses to stop-and-frisk the only black guy. Twice. In front of his colleagues, while wearing a Cisco T-shirt and the conference badge).
And that makes my assumption suddenly seem wrong: some malware is, except in rare cases, some lost time or monetary damage, but probably not enough to meaningfully change your life.
Discrimination hits individuals. Possibly only a small percentage, and I have honestly no idea what it feels like. But I'm inclined to trust people, especially because it doesn't cost me anything. I'll rename master/slave, I'll sign community guidelines, I'll try to be a mentor, and when anybody wants to censor certain words in old books I'll calmly explain why that's a stupid idea.
Exploits and NSFW is just silly and the rest is asking for abuse.
> I'm sure agreement is much higher for their rejection of "Active malware or exploits".
Not really, especially when they use it as an excuse to censor lists of malware-infested websites
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712648
while providing hosting for years to famous projects like
https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework
Not that I think they should take MS down, of course.
That is exactly the problem.
There are a lot of people from a privileged upper middle-class background who have never experienced (or even seen) real discrimination, and as a result have a very warped frame of reference what "Hate speech and discrimination" means.
These are the people who will be in charge of enforcing the rules.
But I know that other people trying to develop software on github sometimes get slowed down because of assholes being assholes. How do I know this? Because when people tell me about their experiences, I listen.
All community guidelines do are provide a less wishy-washy tool for dealing with the assholes. If you really think "threats of violence, hate speech, bullying, harassment, impersonation, invasions of privacy, sexually explicit content, or active malware" has a place in software development, then you might have a legit grievance here. But if not, buck the fuck up and help make this a better space for everyone.
The only thing that bothers me about these guidelines are that they're pretending to be about "community." Github is private company with ultimate control of what they host. They should own their actions. It is patronizing that they frame it as anything else.
They have a userbase, and are soliciting feedback a draft of rules they will dictate to that userbase. I do not belong to a community by having a github account. I use a tool that happens to be externally hosted. I'm not even a community member on all the project's I've contributed to, some were just a commit or two.
I hate this phony sense of connectedness and uniformity everyone wants to project onto me based on my vocation and website usership. We're more like strangers sharing a subway car. Nothing more. Stop telling me who to be. Stop telling me we're friends/community/family, or that we share any other personal connection.
I am doing some dependency analysis, so as to identify weak points for our business, e.g. DRP and so on.
So far, the creakiest points we identified are Github and NPM.
Github makes judgments on what is good and what is not, so they may shut down my dependency. Not good.
NPM is the same. Any random person amongst the 5,000 dependencies can withdraw their approval, and kill my dependency. Not good.
So I will recommend just removing both.
Github ->> Just host your own Git
NPM ->> Yarn or whoever understands "stability"
Maybe you've never experienced any problems with the open source community. Personally, I know I never had. Even if most of us have positive experiences, there are some people who don't. These guidelines are trying to make it so less people have a bad experience in the future.
Having community guidelines doesn't kill a community. Hacker News itself has guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and I don't think we've suffered because of it. While the language of GitHub's guidelines is different, the goals seem very much the same.
Let's assume that GitHub is acting in good faith here, and trying to make things better for the community.
This is not happening in a vacuum. I guess you haven't heard of "OpalGate."
> and trying to make things better for the community.
"Better" is in the eye of the beholder.
There is a 2nd+ level comment by oridecon down-thread with a perfect example:
> I wouldn't want to be the person deciding where issues like this fits: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
wtf do you do with that? who is making the complaint? are they part of the community? can non-community members sabotage a community by making this type of complaint? If no, why not? Their grievance from a moral standpoint is just as legitimate. But if so, then it means that my actions in a personal arena will spill over to my github account? And how do you prove that the person in the personal account was me, and not just a person with the same user name on a different platform? or a sock puppet designed to get me banned?
There is no higher-level of refereeing that is going to make this easy. Ultimately, I predict that any enforcement of this policy by github will be arbitrary and capricious. And if it's not enforced, then it's just a waste of air.
I really doubt that they are solving a bigger problem (based on my own experience using GH) than they are creating, but I wish them the best of luck..
If GH isn't referee who else will be one?
Unless someone is doxxing, I see no reason for gh to step in.
It used to be the case that postal and telecommunication services were neutral and not responsible for their users. If you have an issue with what somebody sent to you or published you go to court and have it resolved legally and by qualified people.
BTW, are there any laws regulating this kind of things? It certainly would be very unfortunate if companies were allowed to use "community guidelines" as an excuse for unjust discrimination. Can I make them actually responsible for their decisions and sue them for kicking out somebody they shouldn't or for failing to kick somebody they should?
They aren't policing the internet, they're policing their users of their service. If Github wanted to moderate the content on other people's websites I agree that would be weird and problematic.
> Can I make them actually responsible for their decisions and sue them for kicking out somebody they shouldn't or for failing to kick somebody they should?
I'm having a hard time understanding what you're getting at. Who do you think Github is going to discriminate against? "Internet Trolls" are not a protected class. The government does not require private companies to have to do business with anyone (a good thing!).
Anyone at all. I don't think GitHub will be better than any random project maintainer whom now they want to override.
But if you really need specifics and finger pointing, what about the fact that GitHub hired the troll who, with no affiliation with the project whatsoever, spammed Opal's issue tracker about private opinions that one member expressed outside of the project and outside of GitHub and demanded his removal from the project? See link in the top post here for details.
Will they start removing such spam once the guidelines are in place? Will they ban the troll? Maybe fire her from the job?
Therefore, society at large uses societal feedback to soft-punish people who misbehave: you can say whatever you want, but you will have to deal with how others react to your behavior.
It's an imperfect system, but it's the best we have found.
Github should be the same: step in when there are egregious issues where the law is broken (threats, stalking, subpoenas, hacking, etc), but otherwise let the individual development communities regulate themselves (like they did for the repo in the original comment).
Sometimes you will agree with how something was handled; sometimes you will disagree with how something was handled. But it will be handled by the individuals it affects.
An alternative available to GH might be to have an impartial entity available to provide objective input, if the community asks for it: "Ok GH community guideline arbitrator panel - this is what happened, with the primary documentation of the exchange being this pull request, this email exchange, and this glitter bomb which is photographed in the office where it went off.
Please give us a 3rd-person opinion (by a group of people who often think about these issues and are deft in handling them effectively) since we are obviously emotional about it by virtue of our involvement.
I'm just spitballing, but that would allow github to demonstrate their commitment to diversity without making rules that will be enforced subjectively and inconsistently.
let no crisis go to waste. Indeed! Tip of my hat to "Warriors".
I'm one of the top (50? 25 now?) Devs on GitHub. It's a community, not some place I want people asking for support to be shoveling shit down my well. I want a place where I'm happy to drink your water, not one where I'm like "why the fuck did they fling a bug in it."
I for one am excited for these sorts of changes and will be happy to keep paying for the newsletters to fund them.
That's what's going on here. You've said elsewhere that you don't think github should be a community or encourage community behavior. That's fine, you can move along. Plenty of us do want to collaborate with others in a community environment, and setting standards of behavior is a necessary condition for that. So I'm happy with this change.
They _are_ asking for feedback, after all...
- fear of political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPgjg201w0 - skepticism on political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7YGGCE9es - the political correctness game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2u62u4entc
A 10 minute summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDg8sP_atIA&feature=youtu.be...