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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

It's 2016, and GitHub is stagnant.

GitHub used to bill itself as "Social Coding", but the "Network" graph has not seen ANY updates since its original introduction in April of 2008. Issues has seen very few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses internally have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g. https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/1372).

The word "Social" no longer appears on GitHub's landing page. They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.

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> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.

I've been puzzled for a while with what github is doing hiring so many social impact employees.

https://twitter.com/agelender

https://twitter.com/_danilo

https://twitter.com/rachelmyers

https://twitter.com/nmsanchez

https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating

https://twitter.com/ammeep

https://twitter.com/davystevenson

Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?

I happen to be an acquaintance of Rachel Myers, and while she does do not-for-profit stuff outside of work, do you have some evidence that she's a "social impact employee" there? It's not obvious on her Twitter/Github profiles.

I don't want to assume any motive to your comment, but I think it would be a cause for concern if the world at large assumes that women/minorities are hired strictly for their "social impact".

I assumed it had to do something with community involvement from here

https://github.com/blog/1521-rachel-myers-is-a-githubber

Github is a trailblazer here for tech companies taking social impact seriously. There is nothing derogatory about it. They do amazing projects in this area

eg:

http://connecthome.hud.gov/

https://github.com/detroitwaterproject/detroit-water-project

I was merely curious about how this fits into their grander strategy.

  Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?

I doubt it. Github has a reputation problem. I wouldn't put anything sensitive on there, given the attitude github leadership showed about privacy ethics in the Julie Horvath incident.

Even if you don't have anything against Github relating to the Horvath incident, there are other things like Github shutting down people's projects because they wrote a doc containing the word "retard." In other words, now they are in the business of regulating the content of open source projects (beyond obvious precautions like not hosting stolen credit card databases, child porn, etc.)

They seem to think they're too big to fail.

They also removed [0] C Plus Equality [1] project twice. Even Bitbucket [2] and Google [3] also removed it.

[0] - https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equalit...

[1] - https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality

[2] - https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-equa...

[3] - https://code.google.com/p/c-plus-equality/

Good.

What was the story behind this anyway? I am having a hard time determining whether this was actually serious or were trying to parody feminist activism.

And what if it really was a parody? Just censor it?

It was a joke by 4chan's technology board, made to see if people would take it seriously (some did and even agreed with it!).

> now they are in the business of regulating the content of open source projects

That is a very good thing. At this point in time we're beyond speculation. We have some good evidence about the direction online communities take with and without content moderation, and the serious players (most recently Reddit) have come to realize that top-down moderation is absolutely necessary. Fringe, unmoderated activity has a place, but it is outside mainstream platforms.

And who exactly gets to decide what is "fringe"?

I guess that the majority gets to decide. It doesn't really matter what is mainstream and what isn't, as long as there's a place for both. Broadway and off-Broadway are both fine, but mixing them can cause confusion and for both audiences to be disappointed.

Ah, majority rules. Which is an excellent system, as long as you are in the majority. Hopefully the majority doesn't decide to remove what is not their agreeable mainstream.

I didn't say that the majority rules, just that the majority defines what is mainstream. If you want to run an open-source project that promotes misogynistic values, be our guest -- just don't do it on GitHub.

I don't understand what the problem is. In anything -- from TV to theater, music, architecture and social clubs -- there is the mainstream and the fringe. Maybe one day, fringe ideas will become mainstream and maybe not, but as long as the fringe is fringe, it is usually not part of the mainstream. It's pretty much a tautology. The Wire was a superb TV show -- possibly the best -- but it just didn't belong on the broadcast channels. It wasn't censorship (not that I'm suggesting that sophomoric misogynistic jokes are anything like The Wire, but they have no place on GitHub).

>> I didn't say that the majority rules, just that the majority defines what is mainstream.

Sorry my friend, that is majority rules.

The problem is we already know what this form of thinking eventually leads to. It's happened several times throughout human history. The problem is one group feeling they have the power to dictate to the "other". Especially when the group dynamic and what is considered other changes frequently, leading to more and more problems.

You don't even need to read history. Just take an objective look in various areas of the world, and culture, today and you will see it.

What you consider your mainstream ideals today may be somebody else's fringe tomorrow. Such as some of these supposed "misogynistic" projects that were using age-old terms that someone recently decided was wrong because they want to somehow change the context of the usage of words. When this happens to you, and it eventually will if the pattern continues, hopefully the group in power will be nice to you.

> The problem is one group feeling they have the power to dictate to the "other".

Nobody is dictating. Do whatever the hell you want. Just don't put on an off-Broadway shown on Broadway. That's it.

> What you consider your mainstream ideals today may be somebody else's fringe tomorrow.

Sure, but that doesn't mean you NBC should broadcast Oz. That's what HBO is for (again, I'm not comparing HBO with misogynistic communities or that I think misogyny would become order of the day; but even vile ideas have their place). People know that broadcast TV has certain rules and certain audiences, and if you don't want to follow the rules or address that mainstream audience, your show will not be aired on broadcast TV. You want to call that censorship? Fine, but as long as those "censored" opinions have 100 other cable channels that will air them, that's perfectly fine by me.

> that someone recently decided was wrong because they want to somehow change the context of the usage of words.

BTW, as a former student of history I can tell you that people always decide to change the context of the use of words in order to make society better (of course, what they think is better). And this pattern is never restricted to just one political group. It is just that political groups always find the others' new contexts annoying.

I'm sorry, but I still see examples that only explain what majority rules is. I'm not seeing where you are suggesting one thing or another different than what I've said. Again, it's an excellent system as long as you agree with the majority.

I'm assuming you're not suggesting that since people "always" change the context on the usage of somebody else's words that it's an acceptable thing to do.

> I'm sorry, but I still see examples that only explain what majority rules is.

No. What I'm explaining is not how the majority opinion is treated, but how the minority opinion is, namely, it is not blocked. Majority rule could also mean that the minority is barred from voicing their opinions, but that is not the system I'm describing.

> Again, it's an excellent system as long as you agree with the majority.

I don't know about excellent, but it works well well even if you're not. I can't see how society can operate if every opinion -- no matter how fringe -- is given the same prominence.

Unfortunately, we've seen a lot of situations where the "majority," at least of those who speak up, are (for example) opposed to heavily restrictive codes of conduct proposed by outside groups, yet the code is forced through anyway by project leaders. Majority rule seems to be valid only when the majority votes the "right" way.

OK, but do you have a better system? The large, mainstream platforms need to be managed somehow, and their content has to be not too far from the consensus. You don't have to like it, but that's how the mainstream operates. As long as you have other venues where you can do stuff that's outside the consensus, I don't see the problem. I think that the way GitHub is managed now in terms of content (including code of conduct enforced by project leads) is very reasonable for a mainstream platform.

Personally, I don't know if research shows open-source code-of-conduct helps curtail the very real, very serious problem of online-community marginalization (I have seen research on that) or not, but I'd rather defer to the experts, and in any case, it's worth a try. Just as code should be written by expert programmers, community management should be directed by the advice of social experts. Again, I don't know if this is backed by research or an experiment in itself to see if the approach is effective, but I'd rather trust people who devote their lives to studying the issue than to programmers who just "feel" this is wrong. If programmers want to run their own communities and not rely on the advice of experts, they're welcome to do it outside the mainstream platforms. If their approach works better to decrease marginalization, I'm sure the experts will take it to heart.

Oh, I agree with you as far as majority rules. It's not great, but you need something and that's less unjust than most other options. What I'm complaining (pointlessly) about is that in these cases majority does not rule: some administrator or corporate functionary has already decided, and that's that.

With regards to who should be trusted to manage communities, I'm afraid I can't convince myself to believe in the experts. In most cases, these "experts" are not people who have successfully managed communities or are even particularly well educated on how they work; they are self-appointed thought leaders with, often, fringe agendas and little concern for who gets trampled in the process of enacting them. They are generally the last possible people you would want to put in charge of anything.

>. If programmers want to run their own communities and not rely on the advice of experts, they're welcome to do it outside the mainstream platforms.

Not if the "experts" do everything in their power to marginalize and poison the public image of those non-mainstream platforms, unfortunately. I think it was either Scott Alexander or one of his commenters who pointed out that, if you take over a community and impose anti-witchcraft policies, you can then easily dismiss any alternate communities -- with a certain amount of accuracy, even -- as being full of witches.

> Not if the "experts" do everything in their power to marginalize and poison the public image of those non-mainstream platforms, unfortunately.

Why not? I mean I can see how the "victims" wouldn't like it, but a society without any such form of influence is a society without interaction. For example, one person living in an empty world can be completely free (within their abilities), but two (or more) who may interact cannot. Either you allow one the freedom to restrict the other's freedom, or you limit both persons' freedom to exclude mutual freedom-limiting actions (by whatever means, be they forceful enforcement, internalized ethics or any other). The best you can do is manage freedom to some mutually acceptable level.

As the accusation directed towards those "free" programmers is precisely that they marginalize others (and contrary to the insistence of some of those programmers, that accusation is backed by actual data), this "persecution" is the best means we have curtail their behavior (unfortunately they are not persuaded by other means), and since the framework of our society allows this form of persecution but not actual punitive legal actions, it seems quite fair to me. Further restrictions against such persecution would naturally cut both ways.

So, given the current legal framework where marginalization is legal but may of course have social consequences, those developers would just need to be tough and bear them, which is pretty much what they say their own victims should do. Then why do experts prefer the well beings of some marginalized groups over that of exclusive programmers? Well, as any form of full or partial freedom-restriction works both ways, the thinking is that social groups with less power deserve more protection. Obviously, no one like to be marginalized in any way -- even the more powerful members of society -- but if someone must be hurt, we prefer it to be a group that will suffer less real damage.

In any case, if you prefer that such persecution would be prohibited with more forceful enforcement (say, legal), I'm sure that could be arranged, but I'm not sure those programmers would like the result any better.

I think you're missing the distinction between what is legal and what is right. I will cheerfully agree that the "expert" attempt to marginalize those who disagree with them politically is legal, and any attempt to legally prohibit it would have worse consequences (not least of which, the experts would use new laws as a weapon against their enemies rather than the other way around.) I will not, however, grant that it is right.

> Well, as any form of full or partial freedom-restriction works both ways, the thinking is that social groups with less power deserve more protection. Obviously, no one like to be marginalized in any way -- even the more powerful members of society -- but if someone must be hurt, we prefer it to be a group that will suffer less real damage.

Bit of a tangent, but if you deliberately wanted to create furious opposition to your policies there's no better way than to put unequal protection front and center. "Everybody should be protected from X" is a winning policy. "These strangers over here should be protected from X, but not you" is, to put it charitably, not.

> I will not, however, grant that it is right.

What proper mechanisms, then, does society grant the victims of weak-group-marginalization to fight their own marginalization? You're suggesting that even drawing people's attention to it is wrong.

> Bit of a tangent, but if you deliberately wanted to create furious opposition to your policies there's no better way than to put unequal protection front and center. "Everybody should be protected from X" is a winning policy. "These strangers over here should be protected from X, but not you" is, to put it charitably, not.

Unequal protection is already present everywhere. It is not binary (neither is it in this case), but it is very much at the core of modern democracy. The idea is that different people benefit from society to different extents or are harmed by society to a different extent, and therefore the taxes they need to pay or the investment they get from society should reflect that. Victims of a crime -- say theft -- are eligible for restitution, while people who are not victims, aren't. The idea of unequal protection in this case is that some groups are victims to unfair exclusion, and correcting that exclusion is fair.

> Victims of a crime -- say theft -- are eligible for restitution, while people who are not victims, aren't.

But I'm pretty sure you wouldn't endorse a policy where, say, white victims of theft are entitled to restitution, whereas black victims are not. That's what is all too frequently proposed by the "experts."

I think that the experts say that blacks are victims of theft by whites. A quick read of the economic history of the US would show that they are clearly right. You don't need to be an expert to see that this is the case. Those opposed to restitution are not opposed because it's wrong, unfair or unjust (as it is clearly right, fair and just), but because at this point it may cause more trouble than good.

I'm sorry, at this point I don't even understand what you're saying or how it relates to the topic. I meant "theft" as in, you know, somebody breaks into your house and steals your TV set, not some weird fringe theory about reparations.

so what do you think of saudi prince becoming second twitter biggest stakeholder. He is free to censor anti saudi govt speech on twitter?

I don't know what you mean by "free". Of course, a business owner is free to direct their business as they wish within law. Would I like it? No. But businesses are rarely ideologically neutral, and they often reflect the ideals and world views of the societies that created them. As Twitter is a Western company, it reflects Western notions, so I wouldn't be happy when it starts reflecting Saudi world views, but if it does, I guess someone will start another Western Twitter. If you want Twitter to be a public infrastructure rather than a private business, make it a government-owned company.

It's the "etc" that allows you to remove "retard".

"Regulating content" just meaning having some standards for what is hosted on their sites.

GitHub is (or should be) just another Git hosting site/Web frontend/misc. integration with other software project's concern. It should be relatively simple to just choose another website. If we've gotten to the point of saying that they are 'regulating the content of open source projects', we've already failed by making GitHub too important.

Yeah, I'd honestly like for a website that actually focused on "Social Coding" rather than the Enterprise Money that GitHub is focusing on. Tbh, that is what GitLab, Bitbucket does also which is why they really are only effective as replacements rather than improvements upon.

I wonder if threads like this keep popping up if people will say "Fuck it" and build an OSS Github clone that focus on being the Reddit of Code/Git rather than another Version Control Enterprise product.

I'd do it but I'm an asshole, not a community builder.

EDIT:

Since I'm in the edit window and its complaining I submit too fast:

Tbh, the problem with Kallithea SCM and Trac is they aren't really built to generate network effects. They both suffer from the same problem as literally every other unsuccessful Github competitor has:

1) You need something built to generate a network effect first, other considerations second, to successfully compete.

2) You need to then leverage that network to chase Corporate money.

GitHub seems to be neglecting #1 in favor of #2 and that imbalance is an opportunity if someone can exploit it. However, that requires someone who is good at being a community builder rather than a software dev.

Recently even Python language planned to move its repositories to github.com for network effect, instead of helping projects like kallithea SCM and trac by partnering with software conservancy or gnu. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.

I hope they change the decision to support one of the project like Kallithea or trac by migrating their system and build network effects.

> and trac

Because, honestly, trac just sucks. It ain't as bad as the stuff Atlassian sells but still... it tries to be a fusion of MediaWiki and Bugzilla, and eh nope.

I still get a few emails a year from Trac instances where there is no support for unsubscribing emails

> instead of helping projects

This isn't how it works. You don't help projects by pretending the football-stadium-sized issues with them don't exist and using them despite their flaws.

Trac is an awful, awful piece of software. It's awful to set up, to use, to maintain, to gather feedback from, it's awful for just about everything. If in some very weird parallel universe it gathered even 1% of the following that Github has today, you'd find a 20 page google document at the top of HN about its issues.

This is me being nice. Kallithea is a lot better, but it's just a far poorer Github-like clone. You might as well use Gitlab.

The other advantage of Github is the network effect. You don't have to create yet-another account, which removes a barrier to contributions.

When you're an open source project, you can think of the "Submit issue" button as your payment form. Same UX rules apply: The user must be able to file the issue as easily as possible. You should not throw obstacles in their way. You should not ask 50 questions when they can't answer half of them, especially if they just want to tell you "You have a typo in decode.c" or even just say hi.

Time to enrollment. How easy is it to become a contributor? When I file an issue on your project, I am doing you a favour - you should help me help you. I have myself given up on several large scale projects because they use shit software for bug tracking. It's not fun.

A lot of people don't understand this today. Github has fixed these issues and this is a huge reason why they are popular. And before you say anything, this document here is about is not time to enrollment, but quality of life when you are already a developer (especially on large projects). I'd certainly love for GH to fix those.

Gitlab is FOSS and does everything Github does (arguably) better.

The only reason one would use Github is for network effect.

Personaly i believe the ethical trade off to be too great, and I believe FOSS supporters should agree with me.

Ubuntu has actively moved away from directing users to Launchpad to report a bug from a crash, and instead moved towards reporting to a crash database where they're triaged by actual developers.

Debian, in a similar vein, doesn't even have a web form to report bugs. As a result, almost every bug I've gotten on a Debian package has been clueful. At the very least, I know what version of the software they're running.

I've managed repositories that have gotten hundreds of low-quality issues. The poor filtering and curation functionality of GitHub ensures that a good deal of my spare time I have to work on those projects is spent managing the inbound issue flow, which is at least 90% noise.

Thank you for your time spent on Debian!

Look at diagoproject.com's ticket triage. They moved repository to github.com but cannot move issues there. It's built on trac and works. I am sure github.com will take ages to do such thing. Indeed even Python needs to rely on roundup for issues tracking. Now the developers will be more miserable since issues won't directly link to commits or changes which is loss of integrity.

Also from a ethical point of view it's wrong to trust for profit commercial closed source for community driven open source work. I am sure history will repeat and github.com will become future sourceforge.net.

The django project is one of the last big trac users. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to use trac. They should definitely move issues to github, or at least to a better issue tracking platform.

"I am sure github.com will take ages to do such thing" I have no idea what you're on about. I handled the migration of a massive bugzilla database to Github. Wrote this[1] in the process. The github team was super friendly and helpful in assisting me in the process with zero delays (shout out to Ivan!).

[1] https://github.com/jleclanche/bugzilla-to-github/

OMG can we get a moratorium on "tbh"? Just say "Indeed" or some other filler. "To be honest" is bad writing even when it's spelled out.

How reasonable is it to make issue tracking and social interaction part of the SCM itself [with optional web interface] ?

git issues "This needs attention"

>> Issue #1 created

git issues

>> List of issues

git issues -u #11

>> Issue #11 up voted

>> #11 Important stuff, needs attention

git issues -d #6

>> Issue #6 down voted

git issues -f #4

>> Issue #4 flagged

Your `.git` directory would become huge pretty quickly and you would have plenty of problems with people commenting on issues without having a repo up-to-date. How would you handle conflicts in that case?

How is that a different problem than people editing code in a repo that's out of date?

You have to be a coder to participate~

> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.

Maybe putting most of their efforts into Atom and Electron?

Mayhap it is related to their abandonment of being a meritocracy as doing such was being divisive? Success can be very devise as well so perhaps they are making a noble sacrifice to avoid dividing people.

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