4 ms·

There’s a Reddit thread that goes into some detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103upr6/automatic1111_github_repository_removed/j319m3k/ h

by muglug 4y ago

There’s a Reddit thread that goes into some detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103upr6/automatic1111_github_repository_removed/j319m3k/ https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103upr6/au...

noirscape 4y ago
So it seems the actual reason for the suspension is that Automatic had a mod for the colony-sim game RimWorld that disables certain skin colors from appearing in the game. If you're not familiar, these sorts of mods are near universally made for racist dogwhistling; they're the "barely passable but not really" version of mods that would straight up whitewash non-white characters. The entire debacle started a couple of years ago iirc with the game Stardew Valley, which has non-randomized unique characters and someone made a mod to iirc whitewash the black characters that the game has (straight up just respriting them to look white). The mod was pulled from both Steam and Nexus if I recall, and a few weeks later you saw these sorts of "one skin color only" mods appear in games with a heavy focus on randomized character creation (the uploaders of these mods also usually try to say it's not racist by uploading multiple variations such as a mod that disables all white skin colors; this is just flimsy excuses, which becomes apparent when you look at the activity stats for these mods). Modding sites aren't very reliable on taking action on them, so it's the loophole used to still get away with doing racist shit.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were made just to troll people, like the time where 4chan briefly made some morons think OK sign is some racist/white nationalist thing
  - NDizzle 4y ago
    Briefly? Still a thing.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Well, y'know then Poe's Law[0] kicks in. Repeating racist dogwhistles but doing it "to own the libs" is y'know, still repeating racist dogwhistles. I can totally understand a company like GitHub for purely cynical money reasons not wanting to be affiliated with that sort of thing even if it's ironic (which, Poes Law, I have no reason to believe is the case with Automatic). As for the OK sign thing; that was a case of "4chan sliced a bunch of older pictures together of Trump and his ilk making an OK-sign" (which yeah, it's a common hand gesture, wow). The kinda strange thing is that it resulted in a sort of self-perpetuating effect; you had in part the media falling for the prank, but at the same time, those very same Trump supporters started doing the OK-hand deliberately to indicate what political "team" they belonged on. It fell out of favor with those Trump supporters after a bit (because y'know, it was just a trend and trends defined solely by "trolling the libs" don't tend to last; eventually "the libs" catch on and they need something new). Basically doing something ironically can make the people whose behavior you're emulating think they're in good company. Unless you take it to straight up absurdist levels (no Nazi will ever use Springtime for Hitler as propaganda), that will always happen. Stuff like being clear about it being made to mock (as with Poes Law, which suggests things like the /s sarcasm marker) or extreme absurdity (Springtime) helps avoid that. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
    - ilyt 4y ago
      So by accepting the well established sign is now racist because a group decided to use it you just... let them win ? Not a great idea IMO.
- NDizzle 4y ago
  Ah yes, the extreme racist groups of… RimWorld players. Ridiculous.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- reset-password 4y ago
  RimWorld is a single player game. They're upset about people making modifications that affect .. literally no one else? What a strange world to live in.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Well, nobody is upset over it except GitHub cuz y'know, it's still pretty blatantly racist. GitHub probably doesn't want to be seen hosting that shit because they're a company with business agreements and other businesses tend to start side-eyeing you and leaving you for competitors if you don't take action when people report racist stuff to you. (Usually because not cleaning that stuff up tends to be indicative of worse problems not being actioned on). GitHub in specific has a pretty nasty skeleton in the closet that they would really rather not have attention drawn to (their ICE contract, which has cost them several other contracts and has typically cost them about a third of their workforce every time it gets renewed), so they tend to be far more proactive in cleaning up that sort of thing. Their TOS probably has a line forbidding this sort of mod from being uploaded and someone probably just filed a report to GitHub about it breaking their TOS or someone from their T&S team happened to find it while checking up on Automatics repositories.
- nigamanth 4y ago
  How is the mod's actions his fault? That's like someone working for me messing up and me paying the cost for it.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    ...he made the mod? This is mod as in modification, not as in moderator.
    - nigamanth 4y ago
      Ah... I got confused lol
- Goz3rr 4y ago
  I feel like one thing that should at least be mentioned is that when they uploaded the "White only" mod in september 2018, they also uploaded an equivalent "black only" mod on the same day, followed a few days later by a "yellow only" one after "popular request", something that arguable could be used by people who roleplay in rimworld All contained basically the same few lines of code that skew the number distribution for the "RandomMelanin" method in the game. All three are still available on the Steam workshop, although it seems like the functionality of all 3 mods was merged into the "White only" mod, which now provides a slider that lets you select the range instead of hardcoding it, and that is the only source code that remained on their github. This is the only mod of the three that was actively updated for new versions of the game so that has an impact on the statistics as well.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Why describe this as whitewashing if 2 of the 3 mods changed all the skin colors to something other than white? Just dont see how you can come to this conclusion from 1 all black mod, 1 all yellow mod, and 1 all white mod. Its problematic. Maybe racist. But whitewashing?
  - noirscape 4y ago
    Whitewashing is what happened with Stardew Valley and my mention of it is just a small bit of history to explain where these sorts of mods come from. The RimWorld mods aren't whitewashing, they're just problematic and when you take in the broader context of the history of these sorts of mods (not to mention the history of these RimWorld mods on the Steam workshop, as another commenter pointed out, they started with the all white mod and only uploaded the all black and all yellow mods later), are pretty clearly racist.

by muglug 4y ago

noirscape 4y ago

So it seems the actual reason for the suspension is that Automatic had a mod for the colony-sim game RimWorld that disables certain skin colors from appearing in the game. If you're not familiar, these sorts of mods are near universally made for racist dogwhistling; they're the "barely passable but not really" version of mods that would straight up whitewash non-white characters. The entire debacle started a couple of years ago iirc with the game Stardew Valley, which has non-randomized unique characters and someone made a mod to iirc whitewash the black characters that the game has (straight up just respriting them to look white). The mod was pulled from both Steam and Nexus if I recall, and a few weeks later you saw these sorts of "one skin color only" mods appear in games with a heavy focus on randomized character creation (the uploaders of these mods also usually try to say it's not racist by uploading multiple variations such as a mod that disables all white skin colors; this is just flimsy excuses, which becomes apparent when you look at the activity stats for these mods). Modding sites aren't very reliable on taking action on them, so it's the loophole used to still get away with doing racist shit.

ilyt 4y ago
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were made just to troll people, like the time where 4chan briefly made some morons think OK sign is some racist/white nationalist thing
- NDizzle 4y ago
  Briefly? Still a thing.
- noirscape 4y ago
  Well, y'know then Poe's Law[0] kicks in. Repeating racist dogwhistles but doing it "to own the libs" is y'know, still repeating racist dogwhistles. I can totally understand a company like GitHub for purely cynical money reasons not wanting to be affiliated with that sort of thing even if it's ironic (which, Poes Law, I have no reason to believe is the case with Automatic). As for the OK sign thing; that was a case of "4chan sliced a bunch of older pictures together of Trump and his ilk making an OK-sign" (which yeah, it's a common hand gesture, wow). The kinda strange thing is that it resulted in a sort of self-perpetuating effect; you had in part the media falling for the prank, but at the same time, those very same Trump supporters started doing the OK-hand deliberately to indicate what political "team" they belonged on. It fell out of favor with those Trump supporters after a bit (because y'know, it was just a trend and trends defined solely by "trolling the libs" don't tend to last; eventually "the libs" catch on and they need something new). Basically doing something ironically can make the people whose behavior you're emulating think they're in good company. Unless you take it to straight up absurdist levels (no Nazi will ever use Springtime for Hitler as propaganda), that will always happen. Stuff like being clear about it being made to mock (as with Poes Law, which suggests things like the /s sarcasm marker) or extreme absurdity (Springtime) helps avoid that. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
  - ilyt 4y ago
    So by accepting the well established sign is now racist because a group decided to use it you just... let them win ? Not a great idea IMO.
NDizzle 4y ago
Ah yes, the extreme racist groups of… RimWorld players. Ridiculous.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
reset-password 4y ago
RimWorld is a single player game. They're upset about people making modifications that affect .. literally no one else? What a strange world to live in.
- noirscape 4y ago
  Well, nobody is upset over it except GitHub cuz y'know, it's still pretty blatantly racist. GitHub probably doesn't want to be seen hosting that shit because they're a company with business agreements and other businesses tend to start side-eyeing you and leaving you for competitors if you don't take action when people report racist stuff to you. (Usually because not cleaning that stuff up tends to be indicative of worse problems not being actioned on). GitHub in specific has a pretty nasty skeleton in the closet that they would really rather not have attention drawn to (their ICE contract, which has cost them several other contracts and has typically cost them about a third of their workforce every time it gets renewed), so they tend to be far more proactive in cleaning up that sort of thing. Their TOS probably has a line forbidding this sort of mod from being uploaded and someone probably just filed a report to GitHub about it breaking their TOS or someone from their T&S team happened to find it while checking up on Automatics repositories.
nigamanth 4y ago
How is the mod's actions his fault? That's like someone working for me messing up and me paying the cost for it.
- noirscape 4y ago
  ...he made the mod? This is mod as in modification, not as in moderator.
  - nigamanth 4y ago
    Ah... I got confused lol
Goz3rr 4y ago
I feel like one thing that should at least be mentioned is that when they uploaded the "White only" mod in september 2018, they also uploaded an equivalent "black only" mod on the same day, followed a few days later by a "yellow only" one after "popular request", something that arguable could be used by people who roleplay in rimworld All contained basically the same few lines of code that skew the number distribution for the "RandomMelanin" method in the game. All three are still available on the Steam workshop, although it seems like the functionality of all 3 mods was merged into the "White only" mod, which now provides a slider that lets you select the range instead of hardcoding it, and that is the only source code that remained on their github. This is the only mod of the three that was actively updated for new versions of the game so that has an impact on the statistics as well.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Why describe this as whitewashing if 2 of the 3 mods changed all the skin colors to something other than white? Just dont see how you can come to this conclusion from 1 all black mod, 1 all yellow mod, and 1 all white mod. Its problematic. Maybe racist. But whitewashing?
- noirscape 4y ago
  Whitewashing is what happened with Stardew Valley and my mention of it is just a small bit of history to explain where these sorts of mods come from. The RimWorld mods aren't whitewashing, they're just problematic and when you take in the broader context of the history of these sorts of mods (not to mention the history of these RimWorld mods on the Steam workshop, as another commenter pointed out, they started with the all white mod and only uploaded the all black and all yellow mods later), are pretty clearly racist.