9 ms·

Introducing GitHub Community Guidelines

76 points by edmorley 10y ago

minimaxir 10y ago
> 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 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.
- darawk 10y ago
  True, but that became the legal standard precisely because it was so hard to define.
- geofft 10y ago
  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 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.
  - Normal_gaussian 10y ago
    > Whether GitHub is too big for "people to have a reasonable alternative" is debatable, yes Here is a (likely incomplete) list of GitHub competitors: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting 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"
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  If you follow their link (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15356452945994377133#p197 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=153564529459943...) the pertinent quote is > "[...] 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.
mrits 10y ago
Step 1: invent git. Step 2: have one of the most successful companies benefit from your work Step 3: Get banned by that company because you are an ass
- brockers 10y ago
  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?
  - anderber 10y ago
    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.
    - eli 10y ago
      Do you think they should allow spam?
      - flukus 10y ago
        Spam is illegal. It's also a lot less subjective.
        eli 10y ago
        Spamming github issues is illegal? Under what law? Certainly it's subjective what constitutes spam.
        flukus 10y ago
        They allow spamming github issues. The biggest spamming case I've ever seen was from the person that likely wrote these community guidelines.
  - 10y ago
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Building good, strong, communities is hard. Does anyone know what stopped YouTube from being able to make comments a friendly, welcoming environment?
- throwaway98237 10y ago
  Just a guess, but, because it was a Google effort? Google may get software and systems (and even hardware now), but Google has failed spectacularly when it comes to social.
  - flukus 10y ago
    It wasn't a google effort though. I don't think it's even changed substantially from when google bought them, except for the whole google plus thing.
    - throwaway98237 10y ago
      It's Google's property, Google can make whatever changes it'd like, so it's Google's responsibility.
      - flukus 10y ago
        I agree, just pointing out that youtube wasn't a "google effort".
- thescribe 10y ago
  Maybe I don't want a community, I want a place to host software, or a place to host videos.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    I'd like to be able to post a video without having fear of harassment and threats. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
flukus 10y ago
Time to move my (paid) account to gitlab or somewhere similar then. I want github to host my projects, not to be the PC police.
- eli 10y ago
  Do you anticipate your use of github being affected by these guidelines? Or just the idea of them offends you?
  - white-flame 10y ago
    First they came for those I deemed offensive, and I did not speak out— Because I did not deem myself offensive. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
    - heartbreak 10y ago
      You seem to have missed that eli was suggesting that you find Guthub's new policies...offensive.
      - white-flame 10y ago
        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.
        geofft 10y ago
        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.
adamnemecek 10y ago
Was this really a problem on github?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
aaron-lebo 10y ago
> Building software should be safe for everyone. 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.
- sergiotapia 10y ago
  Search for "virtue signaling".
- psyc 10y ago
  "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?
  - qb45 10y ago
    You realize that the Internet is a foam of echo-chamber bubbles and sorta try to live with that.
- eli 10y ago
  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?
  - flukus 10y ago
    I've seen no evidence that it's something we need to strive for and not something we already have.
  - white-flame 10y ago
    "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.
sergiotapia 10y ago
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.
- tf2manu994 10y ago
  If anyone else is planning to leave, consider doing this: git remote set-url --add --push origin https://gitlab.com/name/repo.git git remote set-url --add --push origin https://github.com/name/repo.git git remote set-url --add --push origin https://bitbucket.com/name/repo.git This way when you git push, it pushes simultaneously to all 3.
matt4077 10y ago
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.
- qb45 10y ago
  Pretty much the only points which make sense are threats of violence and impersonation. Maybe invasion of privacy. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712648 while providing hosting for years to famous projects like https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework Not that I think they should take MS down, of course.
- zyx321 10y ago
  >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.
joshkpeterson 10y ago
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.
forgottenpass 10y ago
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.
asdffderty 10y ago
SJWs ruining everything.
carterehsmith 10y ago
Yup. 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"
- markdog12 10y ago
  Note that you can self-host with Gitlab, and it's pretty awesome.
pwim 10y ago
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 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.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  > Let's assume that GitHub is acting in good faith here 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.
appleflaxen 10y ago
I have no idea why github wants to be the referee for these issues. 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 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..
- eli 10y ago
  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. If GH isn't referee who else will be one?
  - tf2manu994 10y ago
    To be honest, the repo maintainers. Unless someone is doxxing, I see no reason for gh to step in.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - qb45 10y ago
    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?
sremani 10y ago
I am convinced the key moment for all this, is the Sexual harassment case and subsequent Public relation moves GitHub made. let no crisis go to waste. Indeed! Tip of my hat to "Warriors".
cameldrv 10y ago
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.
- josegonzalez 10y ago
  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.
  - flukus 10y ago
    In a community you have to put up with people you don't like and/or people with beliefs you don't like. Github is failing on the latter.
    - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 10y ago
      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.
      - flukus 10y ago
        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.
dreamdu5t 10y ago
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.
- cmrx64 10y ago
  > Shouldn't community members get a voice in the decision making? They _are_ asking for feedback, after all...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
balupton 10y ago
Reading the comments here, psychoanalyst Jordan Peterson's lecture series critiquing political correctness could not be more needed right now: - fear of political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPgjg201w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPgjg201w0 - skepticism on political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7YGGCE9es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7YGGCE9es - the political correctness game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2u62u4entc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2u62u4entc A 10 minute summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDg8sP_atIA&feature=youtu.be&list=PLYVl5EnzwqsRPSBKIn6qMatpxWopxs1eB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDg8sP_atIA&feature=youtu.be...

76 points by edmorley 10y ago

> 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 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.

darawk 10y ago
True, but that became the legal standard precisely because it was so hard to define.
geofft 10y ago
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 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.
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  > Whether GitHub is too big for "people to have a reasonable alternative" is debatable, yes Here is a (likely incomplete) list of GitHub competitors: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting 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"
Normal_gaussian 10y ago
If you follow their link (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15356452945994377133#p197 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=153564529459943...) the pertinent quote is > "[...] 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.

mrits 10y ago

Step 1: invent git. Step 2: have one of the most successful companies benefit from your work Step 3: Get banned by that company because you are an ass

brockers 10y ago
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?
- anderber 10y ago
  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.
  - eli 10y ago
    Do you think they should allow spam?
    - flukus 10y ago
      Spam is illegal. It's also a lot less subjective.
      - eli 10y ago
        Spamming github issues is illegal? Under what law? Certainly it's subjective what constitutes spam.
        flukus 10y ago
        They allow spamming github issues. The biggest spamming case I've ever seen was from the person that likely wrote these community guidelines.
- 10y ago

WhitneyLand 10y ago

Building good, strong, communities is hard. Does anyone know what stopped YouTube from being able to make comments a friendly, welcoming environment?

throwaway98237 10y ago
Just a guess, but, because it was a Google effort? Google may get software and systems (and even hardware now), but Google has failed spectacularly when it comes to social.
- flukus 10y ago
  It wasn't a google effort though. I don't think it's even changed substantially from when google bought them, except for the whole google plus thing.
  - throwaway98237 10y ago
    It's Google's property, Google can make whatever changes it'd like, so it's Google's responsibility.
    - flukus 10y ago
      I agree, just pointing out that youtube wasn't a "google effort".
thescribe 10y ago
Maybe I don't want a community, I want a place to host software, or a place to host videos.
- serge2k 10y ago
  I'd like to be able to post a video without having fear of harassment and threats. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.

flukus 10y ago

Time to move my (paid) account to gitlab or somewhere similar then. I want github to host my projects, not to be the PC police.

eli 10y ago
Do you anticipate your use of github being affected by these guidelines? Or just the idea of them offends you?
- white-flame 10y ago
  First they came for those I deemed offensive, and I did not speak out— Because I did not deem myself offensive. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.
  - heartbreak 10y ago
    You seem to have missed that eli was suggesting that you find Guthub's new policies...offensive.
    - white-flame 10y ago
      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.
      - geofft 10y ago
        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.

adamnemecek 10y ago

Was this really a problem on github?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

aaron-lebo 10y ago

> Building software should be safe for everyone. 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.

sergiotapia 10y ago
Search for "virtue signaling".
psyc 10y ago
"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?
- qb45 10y ago
  You realize that the Internet is a foam of echo-chamber bubbles and sorta try to live with that.
eli 10y ago
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?
- flukus 10y ago
  I've seen no evidence that it's something we need to strive for and not something we already have.
- white-flame 10y ago
  "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.

sergiotapia 10y ago

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.

tf2manu994 10y ago
If anyone else is planning to leave, consider doing this: git remote set-url --add --push origin https://gitlab.com/name/repo.git git remote set-url --add --push origin https://github.com/name/repo.git git remote set-url --add --push origin https://bitbucket.com/name/repo.git This way when you git push, it pushes simultaneously to all 3.

matt4077 10y ago

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.

qb45 10y ago
Pretty much the only points which make sense are threats of violence and impersonation. Maybe invasion of privacy. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712648 while providing hosting for years to famous projects like https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework Not that I think they should take MS down, of course.
zyx321 10y ago
>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.

joshkpeterson 10y ago

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.

forgottenpass 10y ago

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.

asdffderty 10y ago

SJWs ruining everything.

carterehsmith 10y ago

Yup. 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"

markdog12 10y ago
Note that you can self-host with Gitlab, and it's pretty awesome.

pwim 10y ago

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 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.

alphapapa 10y ago
> Let's assume that GitHub is acting in good faith here 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.

appleflaxen 10y ago

I have no idea why github wants to be the referee for these issues. 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 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..

eli 10y ago
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. If GH isn't referee who else will be one?
- tf2manu994 10y ago
  To be honest, the repo maintainers. Unless someone is doxxing, I see no reason for gh to step in.
- deleted 10y ago
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- qb45 10y ago
  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?

sremani 10y ago

I am convinced the key moment for all this, is the Sexual harassment case and subsequent Public relation moves GitHub made. let no crisis go to waste. Indeed! Tip of my hat to "Warriors".

cameldrv 10y ago

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.

josegonzalez 10y ago
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.
- flukus 10y ago
  In a community you have to put up with people you don't like and/or people with beliefs you don't like. Github is failing on the latter.
  - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 10y ago
    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.
    - flukus 10y ago
      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.

dreamdu5t 10y ago

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.

cmrx64 10y ago
> Shouldn't community members get a voice in the decision making? They _are_ asking for feedback, after all...

deleted 10y ago

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balupton 10y ago

Reading the comments here, psychoanalyst Jordan Peterson's lecture series critiquing political correctness could not be more needed right now: - fear of political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPgjg201w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPgjg201w0 - skepticism on political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7YGGCE9es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7YGGCE9es - the political correctness game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2u62u4entc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2u62u4entc A 10 minute summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDg8sP_atIA&feature=youtu.be&list=PLYVl5EnzwqsRPSBKIn6qMatpxWopxs1eB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDg8sP_atIA&feature=youtu.be...