7 ms·

I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

by wapz 10y ago

quadrangle 10y ago
They made a code-of-conduct. It pandered too strongly to the list-every-under-privileged-class attitude including explicitly rejecting the concept of "reverse discrimination" and so the reactionary folks who want to insist they aren't sexist and hate any moralizing or politics that challenge them etc. got up in arms. It was all a stupid side-show and had nothing to do with anything that matters to GitHub's basic services or business model. Most people never noticed either way.
- jolux 10y ago
  The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    Yes, I read the thread thrice still didn't understand how that makes github political, especially when the company makes $ on enterprise customers. Is the opal project managed by Github?
    - flukus 10y ago
      They hired the professional victim to prosecute anyone that dares to disagree with SJW rightthink. A contributor was forced to leave the project. All over issues that had nothing to do with the project. That's an issue.
      - jolux 10y ago
        Again, do you have evidence that this is actually happening? All I see is a lot of hay made over an issue that the project itself resolved (as well it should have been) from which point it launches into conspiracy theories about what's going to happen now that Coraline is in their employ. She was hired in February, a good 10 months ago. Has anything else happened as you suggest it would to cause concern in this vein since then, or is this all just speculation?
        flukus 10y ago
        It's not an isolated incident, there was also the code of conduct that makes it clear where GitHub is heading, and that is getting coding mixed up with politics.
        jolux 10y ago
        What? This? https://github.com/blog/2039-adopting-the-open-code-of-conduct https://github.com/blog/2039-adopting-the-open-code-of-condu... That's from July 2015, a full seven months before she was hired.
        flukus 10y ago
        I never said she was responsible for it, but the same line of thinking behind that is what allowed a professional bully to get hired in the first place.
        jolux 10y ago
        Professional bully? She's a Ruby developer, and a damned good one at that by all accounts. Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming). If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics? I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it. You may be the only person in the whole world without any political opinions whatsoever. I realize that's difficult and I applaud your intellectual independence.
        flukus 10y ago
        > If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics? Because she has chased away other good developers by bullying them and is now in a position of authority. > I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it. What? We had exactly that for decades, code hosts that were completely neutral on politics. I don't care if people disagree with me, as long as it has nothing to do with the projects. In fact, it's what made the open source world special, no one gave a fuck who you were as long as you produced good code. Now it's been invaded by people that think meritocracy is a bad idea. Your building up quite a straw man there.
  - madawan 10y ago
    Well they lost /our/ business over it. For us it was a clear signal we're better of just hosting our own damn repositories.
    - jolux 10y ago
      GitHub is a corporation. The Opal open source project is not. The maintainers in that thread who side against the "SJWs" still readily acknowledge that corporations have different obligations to political correctness than open source projects do. Lest we forget that even if you disagree with this, the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate, or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
      - rootlocus 10y ago
        > the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit. > Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate Immaculate? There's no black and white here. > or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant. Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.
        electric_sheep 10y ago
        I thought it was accepted wisdom at this point that software is people. Caring about people doesn't strike me as incompatible with caring about software --- indeed, for projects which demand collaboration between individuals (i.e. non-trivial complexity), I'd think it would be essential.
  - flukus 10y ago
    I won't claim it's solely responsible, I don't even know if it's significant at all. But I did start moving projects over to gitlab and downgraded my account. The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.
    - jolux 10y ago
      >The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying. Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread. Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.
      - flukus 10y ago
        Dis you miss the part where they hired the professional victim to help spread her politics?
        jolux 10y ago
        Where is she spreading her politics through GitHub?
        flukus 10y ago
        With more bullshit like the diversity hiring spree theyre going on. But the internal politics doesn't worry me as much of the fact that they hired a professional bully that can influence who is allowed to use GitHub.
        10y ago
  - StreamBright 10y ago
    On the other hand do you have any insight they are not losing a large sum of this money because paying customers are leaving for platforms that are not politicised?
    - jolux 10y ago
      Any platform can and will be "politicized." Mediums that allow unbridled communication between humans are always political to a varying degree. "Politics" is really just a word for structured disagreement, it happens and is happening everywhere. And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't. What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.
    - shadowmint 10y ago
      Suggestion: Something may be causing something. Counter Argument: There's no proof of that. Counter Counter Argument: Ah, but is there any evidence that 'Something' is *not* causing it. No, you see, that's not how logic works. You provide evidence for something; not the absence of evidence for it not happening. There's even a name for it. It's called: argumentum ad ignorantiam (guess what that translates as), also known as an appeal to ignorance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
  - shrewduser 10y ago
    but on the other hand they got rid of their meritocracy rug and removed it from their companies list of values over politics. so there might be something to it honestly.
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    yup. I hope it was clear in my wording that your reply is just the conclusion you should have.
    - jolux 10y ago
      Definitely. I was shocked to see you were the only person rejecting the consensus on this and thus felt inclined to agree.
      - quadrangle 10y ago
        Damnit. I was hoping to cut this off before it continued, but apparently the whiners about this got up-voted to being the highest answers here. The person asking what happened didn't need to know any of this, they just needed to know that there was some inconsequential brouhaha they could ignore. Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.
        jolux 10y ago
        It's not the nerd that's the problem per se, it's the reflexive rejection of other people's lived experience and the rush to label marginalized people asking not to be marginalized further as bullying that appalls me. You can disagree with the politics but when it comes to name calling the discussion is long over.
        quadrangle 10y ago
        Indeed "nerd" isn't the problem, it's just that nerd-pride type of idea comes from two aspects: (A) that there's a history of being marginalized such that people in these circles can feel defensive and (B) there's a definite white-guy cultural thing all tied into the "nerd" identity such that people who identify that way aren't comfortable with the idea that tech could be potentially dominated by the sorts of people who are culturally ill-fit to that identity. The identity politics isn't nonsense. There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.
- noir_lord 10y ago
  > Most people never noticed either way. Noticed, didn't give a shit. Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online. When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.
  - shadowmint 10y ago
    Totally. A few people making a lot of noise. Any suggestion this had a material impact on githubs business is pure speculation.
  - lmm 10y ago
    This is always the way though. Things like being fired for political opinions or detained without trial are always stuff that probably won't affect you as long as you keep your head down and act as a good citizen, and the people who got in trouble were probably pretty bad people. There's some line about how anyone who cares about freedom has to spend their life defending scoundrels.
flukus 10y ago
Opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity". That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC police more than a service provider. I want a dumb service provider. I don't know if google has cleared out their "fake news" but the top hits on the subject are from heavily biased sources (geekfeminism.com and breitbart).
- gottam 10y ago
  this makes me wonder how many of their hires actually add value rather than just consuming company resources
- gragas 10y ago
  Wow, I didn't know the higher ups at GitHub were that unethical.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- wapz 10y ago
  Thanks for the info and specific link. I definitely never heard of this.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cabalamat 10y ago
  Do we know if Gitlab has a position on Opalgate? because if Github continues to be fully SJW-converged in a heavy handed and obnoxious way, that may be an obvious place for people to migrate to.
  - flukus 10y ago
xiaoma 10y ago
Hard to tell. I've heard some pretty bad things involving internal power disputes but externally it mostly looks like dealing with anti-PC trolls harshly, while hiring a few bigoteers. Nothing looks unreasonable in isolation but there is a clear left-leaning bias. There was the bruhaha over banning someone from the whole site for using the triggering eggplant emoji: https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421850624 https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421... https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3syfzb/socjus_github_project_nodejs_bans_user_for/ https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...
josteink 10y ago
> I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened? They suddenly decided to be a PC/feminist stronghold, with the associated reverse-logic, claiming words like "meritocracy" were actually oppressing and not empowering, and what not. http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/ http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/ After that stance was lost, you would every now and then read about just another piece about Github where PC politics were being inserted as Github policy. https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ It's been a gradual, but noticeable process. You may or may not agree with the means/politics itself, but there should be no question that Github itself has been getting increasingly political recent years. And when you do that, you are bound to alienate someone. I, like many others, would prefer Github to remain a dumb/neutral service-provider. That's what I use it for. I don't need it to throw a political platform in my face.

I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

by wapz 10y ago

I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

They made a code-of-conduct. It pandered too strongly to the list-every-under-privileged-class attitude including explicitly rejecting the concept of "reverse discrimination" and so the reactionary folks who want to insist they aren't sexist and hate any moralizing or politics that challenge them etc. got up in arms. It was all a stupid side-show and had nothing to do with anything that matters to GitHub's basic services or business model. Most people never noticed either way.

jolux 10y ago
The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Yes, I read the thread thrice still didn't understand how that makes github political, especially when the company makes $ on enterprise customers. Is the opal project managed by Github?
  - flukus 10y ago
    They hired the professional victim to prosecute anyone that dares to disagree with SJW rightthink. A contributor was forced to leave the project. All over issues that had nothing to do with the project. That's an issue.
    - jolux 10y ago
      Again, do you have evidence that this is actually happening? All I see is a lot of hay made over an issue that the project itself resolved (as well it should have been) from which point it launches into conspiracy theories about what's going to happen now that Coraline is in their employ. She was hired in February, a good 10 months ago. Has anything else happened as you suggest it would to cause concern in this vein since then, or is this all just speculation?
      - flukus 10y ago
        It's not an isolated incident, there was also the code of conduct that makes it clear where GitHub is heading, and that is getting coding mixed up with politics.
        jolux 10y ago
        What? This? https://github.com/blog/2039-adopting-the-open-code-of-conduct https://github.com/blog/2039-adopting-the-open-code-of-condu... That's from July 2015, a full seven months before she was hired.
        flukus 10y ago
        I never said she was responsible for it, but the same line of thinking behind that is what allowed a professional bully to get hired in the first place.
        jolux 10y ago
        Professional bully? She's a Ruby developer, and a damned good one at that by all accounts. Even if you choose to categorize her as a "bully," it's very evident that "bullying" is a hobby of hers and not related to how well she does her job (programming). If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics? I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it. You may be the only person in the whole world without any political opinions whatsoever. I realize that's difficult and I applaud your intellectual independence.
        flukus 10y ago
        > If her contributions to community management software are valuable, what does it matter her politics? Because she has chased away other good developers by bullying them and is now in a position of authority. > I reiterate that if you are looking for a place to host your code where a) nobody has political opinions or b) everybody agrees with you about everything, you will never find it. What? We had exactly that for decades, code hosts that were completely neutral on politics. I don't care if people disagree with me, as long as it has nothing to do with the projects. In fact, it's what made the open source world special, no one gave a fuck who you were as long as you produced good code. Now it's been invaded by people that think meritocracy is a bad idea. Your building up quite a straw man there.
- madawan 10y ago
  Well they lost /our/ business over it. For us it was a clear signal we're better of just hosting our own damn repositories.
  - jolux 10y ago
    GitHub is a corporation. The Opal open source project is not. The maintainers in that thread who side against the "SJWs" still readily acknowledge that corporations have different obligations to political correctness than open source projects do. Lest we forget that even if you disagree with this, the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate, or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.
    - rootlocus 10y ago
      > the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit. > Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate Immaculate? There's no black and white here. > or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant. Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.
      - electric_sheep 10y ago
        I thought it was accepted wisdom at this point that software is people. Caring about people doesn't strike me as incompatible with caring about software --- indeed, for projects which demand collaboration between individuals (i.e. non-trivial complexity), I'd think it would be essential.
- flukus 10y ago
  I won't claim it's solely responsible, I don't even know if it's significant at all. But I did start moving projects over to gitlab and downgraded my account. The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.
  - jolux 10y ago
    >The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying. Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread. Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.
    - flukus 10y ago
      Dis you miss the part where they hired the professional victim to help spread her politics?
      - jolux 10y ago
        Where is she spreading her politics through GitHub?
        flukus 10y ago
        With more bullshit like the diversity hiring spree theyre going on. But the internal politics doesn't worry me as much of the fact that they hired a professional bully that can influence who is allowed to use GitHub.
        10y ago
- StreamBright 10y ago
  On the other hand do you have any insight they are not losing a large sum of this money because paying customers are leaving for platforms that are not politicised?
  - jolux 10y ago
    Any platform can and will be "politicized." Mediums that allow unbridled communication between humans are always political to a varying degree. "Politics" is really just a word for structured disagreement, it happens and is happening everywhere. And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't. What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.
  - shadowmint 10y ago
    Suggestion: Something may be causing something. Counter Argument: There's no proof of that. Counter Counter Argument: Ah, but is there any evidence that 'Something' is *not* causing it. No, you see, that's not how logic works. You provide evidence for something; not the absence of evidence for it not happening. There's even a name for it. It's called: argumentum ad ignorantiam (guess what that translates as), also known as an appeal to ignorance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
- shrewduser 10y ago
  but on the other hand they got rid of their meritocracy rug and removed it from their companies list of values over politics. so there might be something to it honestly.
- quadrangle 10y ago
  yup. I hope it was clear in my wording that your reply is just the conclusion you should have.
  - jolux 10y ago
    Definitely. I was shocked to see you were the only person rejecting the consensus on this and thus felt inclined to agree.
    - quadrangle 10y ago
      Damnit. I was hoping to cut this off before it continued, but apparently the whiners about this got up-voted to being the highest answers here. The person asking what happened didn't need to know any of this, they just needed to know that there was some inconsequential brouhaha they could ignore. Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.
      - jolux 10y ago
        It's not the nerd that's the problem per se, it's the reflexive rejection of other people's lived experience and the rush to label marginalized people asking not to be marginalized further as bullying that appalls me. You can disagree with the politics but when it comes to name calling the discussion is long over.
        quadrangle 10y ago
        Indeed "nerd" isn't the problem, it's just that nerd-pride type of idea comes from two aspects: (A) that there's a history of being marginalized such that people in these circles can feel defensive and (B) there's a definite white-guy cultural thing all tied into the "nerd" identity such that people who identify that way aren't comfortable with the idea that tech could be potentially dominated by the sorts of people who are culturally ill-fit to that identity. The identity politics isn't nonsense. There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.
noir_lord 10y ago
> Most people never noticed either way. Noticed, didn't give a shit. Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online. When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.
- shadowmint 10y ago
  Totally. A few people making a lot of noise. Any suggestion this had a material impact on githubs business is pure speculation.
- lmm 10y ago
  This is always the way though. Things like being fired for political opinions or detained without trial are always stuff that probably won't affect you as long as you keep your head down and act as a good citizen, and the people who got in trouble were probably pretty bad people. There's some line about how anyone who cares about freedom has to spend their life defending scoundrels.

flukus 10y ago

Opalgate: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity". That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC police more than a service provider. I want a dumb service provider. I don't know if google has cleared out their "fake news" but the top hits on the subject are from heavily biased sources (geekfeminism.com and breitbart).

gottam 10y ago
this makes me wonder how many of their hires actually add value rather than just consuming company resources
gragas 10y ago
Wow, I didn't know the higher ups at GitHub were that unethical.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
wapz 10y ago
Thanks for the info and specific link. I definitely never heard of this.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cabalamat 10y ago
Do we know if Gitlab has a position on Opalgate? because if Github continues to be fully SJW-converged in a heavy handed and obnoxious way, that may be an obvious place for people to migrate to.
- flukus 10y ago

xiaoma 10y ago

Hard to tell. I've heard some pretty bad things involving internal power disputes but externally it mostly looks like dealing with anti-PC trolls harshly, while hiring a few bigoteers. Nothing looks unreasonable in isolation but there is a clear left-leaning bias. There was the bruhaha over banning someone from the whole site for using the triggering eggplant emoji: https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421850624 https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421... https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3syfzb/socjus_github_project_nodejs_bans_user_for/ https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...

josteink 10y ago

> I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened? They suddenly decided to be a PC/feminist stronghold, with the associated reverse-logic, claiming words like "meritocracy" were actually oppressing and not empowering, and what not. http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/ http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/ After that stance was lost, you would every now and then read about just another piece about Github where PC politics were being inserted as Github policy. https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/ It's been a gradual, but noticeable process. You may or may not agree with the means/politics itself, but there should be no question that Github itself has been getting increasingly political recent years. And when you do that, you are bound to alienate someone. I, like many others, would prefer Github to remain a dumb/neutral service-provider. That's what I use it for. I don't need it to throw a political platform in my face.