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Can we talk about GitHub's recent censorship instead of flagging it here on HN?

39 points by aarongray 8y ago

Yesterday I posted a link to a tweet with evidence that GitHub was censoring repos critical of the Microsoft acquisition. I think this is relevant news because just two days ago, the new CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman said, "I’m not asking for your trust, but I’m committed to earning it." and that "We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud." Source: https://natfriedman.github.io/hello/ And then yesterday GitHub started cracking down on free speech and censoring people who are critical of the Microsoft acquisition. So, I thought this was worth sharing. It made it into the top 20 on HN rapidly, but then it disappeared suddenly because some people flagged it. Proof: https://i.imgur.com/KyQjvWM.jpg So now we have HN readers censoring a story about GitHub censoring people who are protesting the Microsoft acquisition. So I just wanted to share this story and see if a more productive, open discussion could come of it instead of people censoring each other all over the place. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

hmyr0 8y ago
Thank for for posting this. I posted a similar link which gained 70+ upvotes within minutes before being deleted with no explanation.
- dang 8y ago
  Your post was flagged by users, as is explained by the annotation [flagged].
  - falcon620 8y ago
    That flagging scheme of yours allows a subgroup, in this case likely C# devs whose careers are aligned with the success of Microsoft to very efficiently silence any dissent. I don't think this is something that has caught you by surprise, so why do you allow it?
    - dang 8y ago
      You've simply imagined this: "likely C# devs whose careers are aligned with the success of Microsoft". Once you frame it that way, it sounds terrible, but there's no evidence for it and the data I looked at doesn't support it. Your question "why do you allow it" has a similar framing. The answer is that we don't allow it. The much more common case is that users don't want to see things that are clearly off topic for HN, such as teacup internet dramas. As I explained above, the overwhelming verdict of HN users is that there's nothing serious in this story. If they thought otherwise, it would certainly be on HN's front page. That's the flagging system working as intended.
      - falcon620 8y ago
        I disagree. I think lots of valuable stories are being buried by organized niche interests. I hope to be able expose some of this.
Assossa 8y ago
I have not heard of any censorship happening on GitHub. Can you provide some more details and proof?
- firloop 8y ago
  A repo critical of the acquisition was removed from the Github “trending” page. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17251255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17251255 This doesn’t bother me that much, as the repo itself was unaffected and I expect a trending page to have some sort of bias/editorship.
  - lostmsu 8y ago
    IMO, the statement is far from being trusted, not the least because it is unclear if the trend dried up on its own. The title in both cases is clickbait'y.
    - hmyr0 8y ago
      It didn't. I witnessed the repository (previously #1) suddenly disappear, despite it still gaining stars significantly faster than the other trending repositories. Another repository, 'deno', had been on Trending for a significantly longer time, so it's unlikely that the anti-Microsoft repository was automatically removed to make room for other repositories.
falcon620 8y ago
This is the new standard on HN. People can bury news if they are organized. I agree that this is madness. I have seen the moderators defending this kind of behavior (with "it's out of our hands" type reasoning), which frankly makes me shake my head and wish for a HN successor. Once you have a sufficiently large group of organized followers - in this particular case pretty much all of the "career C# developers" (there's a lot of them) chimed in by flagging posts that got negative traction to the whole Github-MSFT thing. Edit: Your post was just flagged by the career microsoft people. Let's regroup at https://www.reddit.com/r/hnresistance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hnresistance/ (I just created that subreddit).
- dang 8y ago
  The HN standard is the same as it's been for 10 years, and nobody is 'organized' except possibly the people trying to promote this story (to judge by the prevalence of new accounts in these threads).
  - falcon620 8y ago
    Ok, in plain words, please try to justify why a gaggle of XYZ lang devs should be able to effectively silence a topic they think goes against their personal agenda by pressing the "flag" link once per user? I don't to see how this kind of binary treshold-based flagging makes any sense in a healthy discussion environment. I've seen it being abused so many times now.
    - dang 8y ago
      I answered this already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258458 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258458.
  - hmyr0 8y ago
    Given that the first submission had over 70 points after a few minutes, I don't think this is the case. I do think that people are interested in this story, otherwise it would not have become so popular. Some people did not think the submission was interesting or insightful, and that's OK. But the right way to express that is by downvoting, not by flagging.
dang 8y ago
Your problem is that you're trying to promote a story that the community just doesn't agree with you about. This is clear from the comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245018 as well as the other threads you guys have posted about this. The comments are nearly unanimous, and now users are starting to react against your over-promotion of the story (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245116). When people post things that HN users consider off topic or against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), users flag the posts. You can call this censorship if you like—one person's flagging is another's censorship, depending on how they feel about the topic—but HN has had this flagging system for many years and it's a core part of how the community functions. The flags are not coming from some sort of Microsoft or Github brigade. How do I know that? First because stories like this, where some users are trying to drum up drama but most who look at the issue don't agree with them, always get flagged. And second because I checked the accounts of the flaggers and they are longstanding community members with no history of activity around this issue. If the community felt you had a case that this was a MS/GH censorship scandal, the story would be all over the HN front page and there would be nothing that flaggers or moderators could do about it. Your problem is not that there's a gang of flaggers censoring you. You just don't have the community on your side. (Also, no moderators touched any of these stories, except to unkill them so they could re-open for comments.)
- aarongray 8y ago
  Hey Daniel, thanks for chiming in, and for unflagging this. I can't speak for anyone other than myself, but my desire in sharing these stories was to start a respectful conversation based upon open dialogue - to help this community - not tear it apart. I also don't want to start a flamewar or delve into conspiracy theories. Its too bad that these posts have been buried now due to how the algorithm works, but I appreciate you taking the time to talk about it and to unflag it. So anyway, just wanted to say thanks.
  - geoah 8y ago
    It really isn't because of how the algorithm works, it's as dang said; people don't agree with what you are promoting.
anythingbotB 8y ago
get the Microsoft board to mutilate their children

dang 8y ago
Yes, some users upvoted it and other users flagged it. The flags greatly outweighed the upvotes, and that represents the community verdict on the topic. This is how HN's system has always worked. There is no evidence of abuse, and the comments users posted, disagreeing that the story was serious, are clear evidence of what the bulk of the community thinks of it. Indignation posts routinely get lots of upvotes. That's a weakness of the upvoting system, not evidence of a good submission. This is one of the reasons why HN needs flags in the first place. Since this whole discussion is a non-story—HN working the way it has worked for over ten years—I don't think further comments are likely to add anything new.
- falcon620 8y ago
  > The flags outweighed the upvotes. Are you saying there were more flags than upvotes and that this is the trigger for the non-linear movement to page 3?
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Are you saying there were more flags than upvotes Flags, I'm pretty sure, weigh more heavily than upvotes, on a per-item basis.
- hmyr0 8y ago
  Thanks for your reply. I'm relatively new to HN, so please excuse my ignorance if I'm misunderstanding how the site works, but it seems like currently there is significant feature overlap between downvoting and flagging, and in addition downvoting requires karma. This seems to incentivize flagging of submissions even if they are not "spam or off-topic" as described in the site guidelines. I don't believe this was some kind of Microsoft-coordinated operation to censor criticism on HN, but I am surprised by how a few flags can silence such a popular submission. I also do not consider the submission an "indignation post" or a "fanatic and paranoid dramatization" as it was referred to in a comment. I shared the link with the intent to make people aware of the removal of the repository from Trending, no more than that. I believe that GitHub is well within its rights to remove content from Trending, and I did not at any point complain or attempt to incite a flame war against Microsoft. My intention was simply to make people aware to allow them to make their own decisions about whether or not to continue using GitHub. Regarding "over-promotion" of the story, I posted the original link shortly after I noticed the repository disappearing from Trending. I don't think anyone else posted it before, but if they did, I likely didn't see it because it was also flagged.
  - tomhoward 8y ago
    There’s no downvoting on stories at any karma level. Only comments. On stories, users can either upvote if they like the story or flag it if they think it’s the wrong type of content for HN. So, no overlap. You might consider that dang has been an avid and respected user of HN since it began over 10 years ago, and has worked on it as his primary occupation for 6 years, so by now he knows a thing or two about what kinds of content, functionality and conduct are conducive to a healthy community.
    - hmyr0 8y ago
      In that case, maybe it would be beneficial to add that functionality and to encourage users to downvote instead of flagging. Currently, spam, malware and warez are treated the same as submissions some people consider uninteresting, and while that does eliminate many controversial topics that could've led to debates, it also removes an entire class of content that many people do find relevant and interesting. I have no doubt that dang knows what he is talking about, and arguably flagging on Hacker News is very effective at combating spam. However, no system is perfect, and neither is Hacker News[1]. I believe that the majority of HN users is mature enough to have sensible discussions even about controversial issues, and that showing submissions that most people like won't lead to an unhealthy community, even if a small number of people do not find the submission interesting. [1]: https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html https://drewdevault.com/2017/09/13/Analyzing-HN.html
      - tomhoward 8y ago
        Before you comment or think too much more about this topic, it might be helpful to (re-)familiarise yourself with the guidelines about what is on-topic vs off-topic on HN [1] In particular, what is on-topic is: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. [...] If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. That's it. Anything is allowed, and is embraced by the community, as long as it is intellectually interesting and cultivates interesting discussions, and people flag things that that are repetitive and lead to boring, predictable discussions. Remember that the topic that triggered this discussion was Github's decision to remove from trending, a repo that was trending only due to activist campaigning, not due to being an interesting software project. There has been no shortage of discussion about the MS/Github deal in the past week; there have been multiple stories about it on the front page at almost any time since the acquisition speculation began. For this particular micro-drama to be deemed below the standard of intellectual curiosity that HN expects, does not indicate any failure that needs to be remedied. Can you not believe that after so many years of observing and guiding this community, that dang has developed a good sense of what the majority of the community wants and how best to keep it healthy? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html