4 ms·

I am happy to see this. You say bullied into compliance but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive. It may not be that

by wadkar 6y ago

I am happy to see this. You say bullied into compliance but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive. It may not be that big of a deal for you but it is a big deal for those who don’t share the same worldview as you. Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others? What do you think about people who curse like a sailors in their personal life but wouldn’t utter an F in office/professional settings - do they have no principals?

aaomidi 6y ago
Same here, I honestly don't even get why people are angry about this. You're saying master isn't a big deal, well, neither is main. Would've you cared if git updates this without the discourse of "let's remove master from our everyday conversations."
- leshenka 6y ago
  Because next time yall say that 'main' is offensive because it puts some branches into position of power and actually they need to be more equal.
umvi 6y ago
> but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive In my opinion, agitating for these types of changes makes tech communities more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized. It's not clear to me how changing the default branch name in a version control system and similar "inclusivity changes" makes the tech communities more inclusive, but I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc). And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that). I think a better, more compromising change would have been to leave default as master, but fix up the code base (remove hard-coded instances of "master") so that you can choose a different default branch name more easily (i.e. with `git init <default name>`. It's forcing the default name change upon everyone that people find unpalatable.
- tw4l 6y ago
  > I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc). > And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that). One measure of inclusivity might be hiring, retention, and promotion within the tech industry (and the developer subset of that) relative to the general population. Looking at the Stack Overflow 2020 survey results as one (admittedly biased) indicator, it's pretty clear that the tech industry does abysmally. As two quick examples: <5% of developers surveyed were Black, and <12% were women and non-binary. Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-profile-race-and-ethnicity-all-respondents https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro... Speaking from personal experience as one of those minorities, I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome. Something like changing language that is rooted in ownership of people is not a huge change, admittedly, but the fact that so many people within the industry complain and fight it definitely serves as a reminder to me that I'm tolerated more than welcomed here. Edit: Added some clarifying language
  - umvi 6y ago
    > I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome. IMHO (and I didn't downvote you, btw), I believe you (and other minorities) are choosing to interpret things like complaining about political changes to code and projects as persecution. That is a choice you are making. You could also choose to see it for what it really is - people disagreeing about politics. Interpreting a political stance as a personal insult or persecution is not the right way to go, IMO. Assume good faith; give the benefit of the doubt. If a project maintainer pushes back and complains when internet mobs try to force him to remove the word "red" from his codebase because it triggers soviet refugees... that doesn't mean the project maintainer is persecuting soviet refugees or that soviet refugees are "unwelcome" to contribute. Soviet refugees may choose to interpret the project maintainer's actions as such, but that doesn't make it so. In reality the project maintainer disagrees with the politics on the issue of removing the word "red" from his code and is pushing back. The beauty of GitHub, HackerNews, and internet fora in general is that nobody really knows your race or gender or really anything about you (unless you make it known). From my experience, people on the internet are just usernames with personality, judged on the merits of their insights and contributions. I've worked with some great people online in the past on different projects, and to this day I have no idea if they were male or female or non-binary or black or white or asian or blind or deaf.
9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago
What exactly is the difference between a Californian white liberal changing spoken language forcing the whole world care about their petty politics and those nutjob charismatic Christians trying to ban rap videos during the 90's? Sure as hell not very exclusive or nice language, should we go start changing the culture of words too? Looks like you've become a full circle but it takes time to become self aware.
csense 6y ago
> Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others? I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended. If someone wants to be offended, they will find something that offends them. Nothing you do will ever make such people stop being offended. Next they'll be insisting that "bit" and "binary" need to be changed, because those words trigger people of non-binary gender, or something. All of this is just making extra work. Repos and scripts have to be updated with the new branch name. The default behavior of Git is changing in a way that's not completely backward compatible, which means things that rely on it might break. There's a definite cost to changing technical language, especially in the context of names in computer software that are part of the software's interface and might be relied on by other software that interfaces with it. Changing perfectly passable names unnecessarily is just creating work for no purpose.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  > I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended. Inverting this, it reads as: > No one could possibly be genuinely offended by the word "master" in this context. You are incorrect. Many are genuinely offended. Some of them are commenting here on HN.

by wadkar 6y ago

aaomidi 6y ago

Same here, I honestly don't even get why people are angry about this. You're saying master isn't a big deal, well, neither is main. Would've you cared if git updates this without the discourse of "let's remove master from our everyday conversations."

leshenka 6y ago
Because next time yall say that 'main' is offensive because it puts some branches into position of power and actually they need to be more equal.

umvi 6y ago

> but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive In my opinion, agitating for these types of changes makes tech communities more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized. It's not clear to me how changing the default branch name in a version control system and similar "inclusivity changes" makes the tech communities more inclusive, but I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc). And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that). I think a better, more compromising change would have been to leave default as master, but fix up the code base (remove hard-coded instances of "master") so that you can choose a different default branch name more easily (i.e. with `git init <default name>`. It's forcing the default name change upon everyone that people find unpalatable.

tw4l 6y ago
> I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc). > And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that). One measure of inclusivity might be hiring, retention, and promotion within the tech industry (and the developer subset of that) relative to the general population. Looking at the Stack Overflow 2020 survey results as one (admittedly biased) indicator, it's pretty clear that the tech industry does abysmally. As two quick examples: <5% of developers surveyed were Black, and <12% were women and non-binary. Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-profile-race-and-ethnicity-all-respondents https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro... Speaking from personal experience as one of those minorities, I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome. Something like changing language that is rooted in ownership of people is not a huge change, admittedly, but the fact that so many people within the industry complain and fight it definitely serves as a reminder to me that I'm tolerated more than welcomed here. Edit: Added some clarifying language
- umvi 6y ago
  > I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome. IMHO (and I didn't downvote you, btw), I believe you (and other minorities) are choosing to interpret things like complaining about political changes to code and projects as persecution. That is a choice you are making. You could also choose to see it for what it really is - people disagreeing about politics. Interpreting a political stance as a personal insult or persecution is not the right way to go, IMO. Assume good faith; give the benefit of the doubt. If a project maintainer pushes back and complains when internet mobs try to force him to remove the word "red" from his codebase because it triggers soviet refugees... that doesn't mean the project maintainer is persecuting soviet refugees or that soviet refugees are "unwelcome" to contribute. Soviet refugees may choose to interpret the project maintainer's actions as such, but that doesn't make it so. In reality the project maintainer disagrees with the politics on the issue of removing the word "red" from his code and is pushing back. The beauty of GitHub, HackerNews, and internet fora in general is that nobody really knows your race or gender or really anything about you (unless you make it known). From my experience, people on the internet are just usernames with personality, judged on the merits of their insights and contributions. I've worked with some great people online in the past on different projects, and to this day I have no idea if they were male or female or non-binary or black or white or asian or blind or deaf.

9HZZRfNlpR 6y ago

What exactly is the difference between a Californian white liberal changing spoken language forcing the whole world care about their petty politics and those nutjob charismatic Christians trying to ban rap videos during the 90's? Sure as hell not very exclusive or nice language, should we go start changing the culture of words too? Looks like you've become a full circle but it takes time to become self aware.

csense 6y ago

> Are your principals so low that you wouldn’t accommodate change of language and behavior to be more welcoming of others? I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended. If someone wants to be offended, they will find something that offends them. Nothing you do will ever make such people stop being offended. Next they'll be insisting that "bit" and "binary" need to be changed, because those words trigger people of non-binary gender, or something. All of this is just making extra work. Repos and scripts have to be updated with the new branch name. The default behavior of Git is changing in a way that's not completely backward compatible, which means things that rely on it might break. There's a definite cost to changing technical language, especially in the context of names in computer software that are part of the software's interface and might be relied on by other software that interfaces with it. Changing perfectly passable names unnecessarily is just creating work for no purpose.

floatingatoll 6y ago
> I'm saying that if someone finds the word "master" offensive in this context, they want to be offended. Inverting this, it reads as: > No one could possibly be genuinely offended by the word "master" in this context. You are incorrect. Many are genuinely offended. Some of them are commenting here on HN.