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There can sometimes be a fine line between "enabling" and "meddling" I mean, surely you can't expect a site like GitHub with thousands of projects happening ev

by qop 8y ago

There can sometimes be a fine line between "enabling" and "meddling" I mean, surely you can't expect a site like GitHub with thousands of projects happening every day to be able to keep track of each one and make sure that something bad isnt being done with the project.

txcwpalpha 8y ago
What? Yes you surely can expect that. That's what moderation is. That's what every site on the internet that allows user-submitted content does. Thats what Twitter does, YouTube does, Facebook does, Reddit does, and HN does. That's what GitHub does. GitHub is ultimately responsible for everything that is hosted on their site, and so of course they track each one and monitor them for violations of their policies. If they couldn't do that, they wouldn't be in business.
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  Then how comes that gitlab is still hosting this content? Do the have a different policy? Or is it they just didn't notice?
  - txcwpalpha 8y ago
    GitLab isn't still hosting the content. They too have taken it down.
- ben_w 8y ago
  Your examples are explicitly social sites (networking or forums) where moderation is done by the general public seeing and responding to content. GitHub has a slightly different dynamic, being work focused, and there being no reason for most people to delve into random repositories and flag inappropriate ones. Heck, even the underlying tech assumes problems fixed with patches rather than repository deletion, so if anthing it’s half way between Wikipedia and Geocities.
  - txcwpalpha 8y ago
    >Your examples are explicitly social sites I guess you don't realize this, but GitHub is a social site too. >where moderation is done by the general public seeing and responding to content. And this is the same at GitHub, too. Have you never noticed the "Report Abuse" buttons for PRs, users, comments, etc? > GitHub has a slightly different dynamic, being work focused, and there being no reason for most people to delve into random repositories and flag inappropriate ones. Except you're looking at a reason right here. GitHub is also used for sharing your work with others, as was the case here. There are instances where such work is against community policies/guidelines, and in those instances, GitHub takes them down. I'm not sure where you're seeing the disconnect here. It's not any different at all than making a post on Reddit and a moderator removing it or someone reporting said post and then it being removed.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      > I guess you don't realize this, but GitHub is a social site too. Which is why I say “explicitly”. Github has social as what feels like a bolt-on afterthought because everyone else was doing it and it’s a buzzword. > And this is the same at GitHub, too. Have you never noticed the "Report Abuse" buttons for PRs, users, comments, etc? Nope. Never needed to look for one. However, rather more importantly, I have just made a deliberate look for a “report repository” link… …and found nothing. > Except you're looking at a reason right here. Key word being “random”. Twitter has trends, Reddit has its front page, public Facebook posts can and do go viral. GitHub has such a list, but you need to go looking for it — you don’t have random stuff thrown in you face whenever you use it like the other platforms, so there is _much_ less opportunity to train a learning algorithm to automatically filter anything. I’m not sure you could even train such a model now, with perfect data, because that would involve understanding the purpose of a repo rather than sentiment analysis of natural language. The appropriate people only found out about this repo because the person who made it did so with the internation to be noticed. And I’m not saying there shouldn’t be or even that there isn’t the capacity to take things down. I’m saying comparing repos to tweets is like comparing apples to grenades — they both “keep the doctor away”, but for the most part, treat them differently.

by qop 8y ago

txcwpalpha 8y ago

What? Yes you surely can expect that. That's what moderation is. That's what every site on the internet that allows user-submitted content does. Thats what Twitter does, YouTube does, Facebook does, Reddit does, and HN does. That's what GitHub does. GitHub is ultimately responsible for everything that is hosted on their site, and so of course they track each one and monitor them for violations of their policies. If they couldn't do that, they wouldn't be in business.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago
Then how comes that gitlab is still hosting this content? Do the have a different policy? Or is it they just didn't notice?
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  GitLab isn't still hosting the content. They too have taken it down.
ben_w 8y ago
Your examples are explicitly social sites (networking or forums) where moderation is done by the general public seeing and responding to content. GitHub has a slightly different dynamic, being work focused, and there being no reason for most people to delve into random repositories and flag inappropriate ones. Heck, even the underlying tech assumes problems fixed with patches rather than repository deletion, so if anthing it’s half way between Wikipedia and Geocities.
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  >Your examples are explicitly social sites I guess you don't realize this, but GitHub is a social site too. >where moderation is done by the general public seeing and responding to content. And this is the same at GitHub, too. Have you never noticed the "Report Abuse" buttons for PRs, users, comments, etc? > GitHub has a slightly different dynamic, being work focused, and there being no reason for most people to delve into random repositories and flag inappropriate ones. Except you're looking at a reason right here. GitHub is also used for sharing your work with others, as was the case here. There are instances where such work is against community policies/guidelines, and in those instances, GitHub takes them down. I'm not sure where you're seeing the disconnect here. It's not any different at all than making a post on Reddit and a moderator removing it or someone reporting said post and then it being removed.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    > I guess you don't realize this, but GitHub is a social site too. Which is why I say “explicitly”. Github has social as what feels like a bolt-on afterthought because everyone else was doing it and it’s a buzzword. > And this is the same at GitHub, too. Have you never noticed the "Report Abuse" buttons for PRs, users, comments, etc? Nope. Never needed to look for one. However, rather more importantly, I have just made a deliberate look for a “report repository” link… …and found nothing. > Except you're looking at a reason right here. Key word being “random”. Twitter has trends, Reddit has its front page, public Facebook posts can and do go viral. GitHub has such a list, but you need to go looking for it — you don’t have random stuff thrown in you face whenever you use it like the other platforms, so there is _much_ less opportunity to train a learning algorithm to automatically filter anything. I’m not sure you could even train such a model now, with perfect data, because that would involve understanding the purpose of a repo rather than sentiment analysis of natural language. The appropriate people only found out about this repo because the person who made it did so with the internation to be noticed. And I’m not saying there shouldn’t be or even that there isn’t the capacity to take things down. I’m saying comparing repos to tweets is like comparing apples to grenades — they both “keep the doctor away”, but for the most part, treat them differently.