I've been puzzled for a while with what github is doing hiring so many social impact employees.
https://twitter.com/rachelmyers
https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating
https://twitter.com/davystevenson
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
They seem to think they're too big to fail.
[0] - https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equalit...
[1] - https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality
[2] - https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-equa...
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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".
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:
https://github.com/detroitwaterproject/detroit-water-project
I was merely curious about how this fits into their grander strategy.