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Comment by yuja_wang | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is in response to out-of-control GitHub employees enforcing arbitrary "Codes of Conduct" on their users, including flagging repositories for using language that's not inclusive enough, or might offend someone?

Seems like without management, an employee with an agenda--especially on that's not related to technology--could go off unchecked for a long time.

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No, it's almost the opposite. This kind of thing started happening for the same core reason they added management: because of the Tom Preston-Werner / Julie Ann Horvath scandal two years ago.

It made them understand the importance (and risk for the business) of such issues, so added HR and middle-management with a focus on them. As a side effect we ended up with things like this happening.

The people with an agenda are not random employees in a flat company here, it's the management.

Seems unlikely that an organization of GitHub's size would overhaul the entire management structure to deal with problems brought about by a single employee (or even a few).

Can you elaborate?

I think this might be a reference to the "WebM for Retards" repo which was banned. After that event, someone ran a search and found myriad other repos containing "problematic" language which were ignored.

Not just that repo -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12232250

I'm honestly so jaded by the injection of language policing into everything that all I can do is sigh nowadays.

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