Introducing GitHub Community Guidelines
github.com
github.com
There is a 2nd+ level comment by oridecon down-thread with a perfect example:
> I wouldn't want to be the person deciding where issues like this fits: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
wtf do you do with that? who is making the complaint? are they part of the community? can non-community members sabotage a community by making this type of complaint? If no, why not? Their grievance from a moral standpoint is just as legitimate. But if so, then it means that my actions in a personal arena will spill over to my github account? And how do you prove that the person in the personal account was me, and not just a person with the same user name on a different platform? or a sock puppet designed to get me banned?
There is no higher-level of refereeing that is going to make this easy. Ultimately, I predict that any enforcement of this policy by github will be arbitrary and capricious. And if it's not enforced, then it's just a waste of air.
I really doubt that they are solving a bigger problem (based on my own experience using GH) than they are creating, but I wish them the best of luck..
If GH isn't referee who else will be one?
Unless someone is doxxing, I see no reason for gh to step in.
It used to be the case that postal and telecommunication services were neutral and not responsible for their users. If you have an issue with what somebody sent to you or published you go to court and have it resolved legally and by qualified people.
BTW, are there any laws regulating this kind of things? It certainly would be very unfortunate if companies were allowed to use "community guidelines" as an excuse for unjust discrimination. Can I make them actually responsible for their decisions and sue them for kicking out somebody they shouldn't or for failing to kick somebody they should?
They aren't policing the internet, they're policing their users of their service. If Github wanted to moderate the content on other people's websites I agree that would be weird and problematic.
> Can I make them actually responsible for their decisions and sue them for kicking out somebody they shouldn't or for failing to kick somebody they should?
I'm having a hard time understanding what you're getting at. Who do you think Github is going to discriminate against? "Internet Trolls" are not a protected class. The government does not require private companies to have to do business with anyone (a good thing!).
Anyone at all. I don't think GitHub will be better than any random project maintainer whom now they want to override.
But if you really need specifics and finger pointing, what about the fact that GitHub hired the troll who, with no affiliation with the project whatsoever, spammed Opal's issue tracker about private opinions that one member expressed outside of the project and outside of GitHub and demanded his removal from the project? See link in the top post here for details.
Will they start removing such spam once the guidelines are in place? Will they ban the troll? Maybe fire her from the job?
Therefore, society at large uses societal feedback to soft-punish people who misbehave: you can say whatever you want, but you will have to deal with how others react to your behavior.
It's an imperfect system, but it's the best we have found.
Github should be the same: step in when there are egregious issues where the law is broken (threats, stalking, subpoenas, hacking, etc), but otherwise let the individual development communities regulate themselves (like they did for the repo in the original comment).
Sometimes you will agree with how something was handled; sometimes you will disagree with how something was handled. But it will be handled by the individuals it affects.
An alternative available to GH might be to have an impartial entity available to provide objective input, if the community asks for it: "Ok GH community guideline arbitrator panel - this is what happened, with the primary documentation of the exchange being this pull request, this email exchange, and this glitter bomb which is photographed in the office where it went off.
Please give us a 3rd-person opinion (by a group of people who often think about these issues and are deft in handling them effectively) since we are obviously emotional about it by virtue of our involvement.
I'm just spitballing, but that would allow github to demonstrate their commitment to diversity without making rules that will be enforced subjectively and inconsistently.
Give me a break.
We are redefining words to the point of parody. There's nothing dangerous about writing software or interacting with people who do.
Sometimes you have to wonder how people get through the day. Humans are resilient creatures, but they can't be the more and more we try and shield ourselves from everything.
Do you really want people thoughtcrimed out of technical communities having committed no ill within the community itself?
And with any scheme like this, are you fine if these weapons are turned on you, and not just your preferred undesirables, with the same level of subjectivity but wielded by someone else? Say some non-github post of yours was taken out of context and caused a massive stink.
This attempt to codify morals, ethics, and general good behavior into quippy, hot-topic, vague buzzwords is not a structure to build inclusive communities. It's a structure to have everybody walking on egg shells, hoping they aren't accidentally unaware of this week's trending sensitivity outrage, which can be pointed at as enforceable through the Guidelines.
- "Threats of violence"
"If you think that someone else might interpret the content you post as a threat, or as promoting violence or terrorism, stop."
Arbitrary, subjective policing by anybody who wants to pitch in that they don't like you or what you're saying, or even who they think you are because of external stuff that has never been on github, no matter how non-threatening you've been. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior.
- "Hate speech and discrimination"
"Just realize that talking about these or other sensitive topics can make others feel unwelcome, or perhaps even unsafe, if approached in an aggressive or insulting manner."
Again, this is undefined and the existence of inflicting "hate" is left to the sole interpretation of 3rd parties (ie, not you and not github). As respectful and non-insulting as anybody can get, can and does still invite others to place their own meaning into otherwise innocuous words. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior.
- "Bullying and harassment"
"In general, if your actions are unwanted and you continue to engage in them, there's a good chance you are headed into bullying or harassment territory."
Again, solely left up to random 3rd parties to determine what's "unwanted" from you personally. If you're a maintainer and your development actions are repeatedly unwanted by some users, can they claim you're bullying them according to the guidelines? If there are 2-way disputes, and both are "unwanted" by the other, what does this guideline even mean? Any legitimate argument between two firm sides can be claimed to be bullying, if either side decides to bring that in and try to escalate to silence the other. This has happened, and guidelines like this legitimize and invite the continuation of such behavior. This is not good to have for a site which should host legitimate technical discourse.
The others:
- "Sexually explicit content"
"We'll know it when we see it."
This is worded unclearly, and appeal to authority doesn't fix that. Any application of it will certainly bring arguments over the artistic quality of the content, and technical development of what inevitable stuff is going to be coming through VR. Also, does purely textual content constitute "sexually explicit" or "pornography"? It's vague, but at least it's more about the content itself, as opposed to somebody's subjective reception of the content, as in the case of the other problematic issues. Also it leaves the actual classification of the content up to the hosting site, not to the whims of random passers-by.
- "Impersonation" - has this been a problem? Since it relates to github's data and technical presentation, it makes sense. In any case, it is intentionally false communication which makes it defensible to remove from a site often used to hold canonical data. It focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
- "Doxxing and invasion of privacy" - straightforward. should be handled through legal systems, but I don't think those are in place yet. Plus, it focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
- "Active malware or exploits" - testable, applicable specifically to github's content and role as a software repository. Focuses on the content instead of on its reception by 3rd parties.
By the way, your whole rhetorical "You think people should be allowed to ..." is a prejudiced view of others, making inappropriate and uninformed judgment, placing words in others' mouths (could be construed as impersonating what I might say if one only read your reply?), associating me with potentially illegal behaviors, is not acceptable discourse, and is unwanted. Should you be banned?*
(* = this entire paragraph is hypothetical, in case it's not clear)
I was uneasy before but now this confirms it. I'll be moving my open source projects to Gitlab. And if they start with this monkey business I'll just host my own Gitlab instance.
git remote set-url --add --push origin https://gitlab.com/name/repo.git
git remote set-url --add --push origin https://github.com/name/repo.git
git remote set-url --add --push origin https://bitbucket.com/name/repo.git
The only thing that bothers me about these guidelines are that they're pretending to be about "community." Github is private company with ultimate control of what they host. They should own their actions. It is patronizing that they frame it as anything else.
They have a userbase, and are soliciting feedback a draft of rules they will dictate to that userbase. I do not belong to a community by having a github account. I use a tool that happens to be externally hosted. I'm not even a community member on all the project's I've contributed to, some were just a commit or two.
I hate this phony sense of connectedness and uniformity everyone wants to project onto me based on my vocation and website usership. We're more like strangers sharing a subway car. Nothing more. Stop telling me who to be. Stop telling me we're friends/community/family, or that we share any other personal connection.
Because I did not deem myself offensive.
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.
Illegal behavior is illegal behavior, and if someone's behavior reaches that level, it should be taken up with the police against the perpetrator.
So, conversely, if we don't want to live in that world, it is appropriate and beneficial for private institutions to have some standards of acceptable behavior beyond mere legality.
Alternatively, you could recognize that there is no right to not be offended.
There are ~7 billion other people out there, a solid majority of whom likely hold one or more views that you would find offensive (and who find one or more of your views offensive in turn).
That statement seems to imply that there is a mandate for 3rd parties to provide systems free of "undesirable behavior" from particular perspectives. Freedom of association means no, there isn't. Demanding private institutions provide freedom from offensiveness implies a perceived right not to be offended.
I feel like this is a bit of a strawman. Github didn't say they would take action against anything that might offend anyone. They were pretty specific: no death threats, impersonating other users, etc.
Besides, the best you can do is take action after the fact, not avoid being subjected to it, unless you cut yourself off or have weird vetting barriers between you and others, instead of an open communication platform.
eli's right, somebody should suggest adding "community guidelines" to this "offensive" blacklist and see how they resolve the paradox ;)
I anticipate that my account could be removed because of the actions of another contributor on a project, even if I had no involvement.
And a simply don't like the idea of it. They are selling a product, I want to buy the product, I don't want to be forced into their political philosophy for it.
I see no evidence they will delete your paid accounts because you think or express ideas that are merely contentious or unpopular.
Github and some recent hires they've made have a history of this.
Oh please. We all know what kind of rancid and toxic people are spearheading these kinds of seemingly innocuous initiatives.
>I see no evidence they will delete your paid accounts because you think or express ideas that are merely contentious or unpopular.
Yeah. Because I am going to take the risk and potentially disrupt the workflow of three high-volume OSS projects I maintain. The time I assumed benevolence from Github is long over. Time to move my shit to a reliable service like Gitlab.
- Threats of violence
- Hate speech and discrimination
- Bullying and harassment
- Impersonation
- Doxxing and invasion of privacy
- Sexually explicit content
- Active malware or exploits
It's not the majority of the time, but I've see policies against 'bullying and harassment' used to silence anything but. That might be what is worrying OP.
Someone might link to one of my tweets from 2010 where "I want cloning to be legalized" (that's not me, just same username).
> Hate speech and discrimination
Gender as an entry field. People have a variety of views on this one. I imagine that the prevailing view is going to call certain other views "hate speech" no matter how politely expressed. It is up to Github if they want to take this stance on it, but it is understandably going to get them called the "PC Police" should it ever come up.
> Sexually explicit content
I understand not bringing this into discussions for no reason. But what if someone is developing a Leisure Suit Larry clone? I think implementing a NSFW warning for viewing a project is perfectly reasonable by almost anybody's standards. But disallowing it entirely will preclude such projects from Github. But again, totally understandable if Github decides that it's not the place for such things.
> Active malware or exploits
Metasploit has been hosted at GitHub for few years and they never seemed to have a problem with that. Are they going to kick them now? Why should they care?
Interesting comment in the scheme of things, since the "I'll know it when I see it" phrase is often cited as a failure of having a concrete legal definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it), which is one of the things should be avoided when possible when making a list of things which should not be done.
Whether GitHub is too big for "people have a reasonable alternative" is debatable, yes. But HN itself has vague guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), such as "Anything that good hackers would find interesting," and it seems to work pretty well in practice: people know the moderators and have a sense of whether they trust them to act in good faith.
Here is a (likely incomplete) list of GitHub competitors:
https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitHosting
AFAIK bitbucket and GitLab are the serious contenders, both with large, serious users and projects.
Edit: By this I mean, no GitHub is not too big for "people to have a reasonable alternative"
> "[...] that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography.[2] I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
> [2] It is too late in the day to argue that the location of the line is different, and the task of ascertaining it easier, when a state rather than a federal obscenity law is involved. [...]"
So they seem to have many definitions of hard-core pornography, which are complicated by State and Federal law covering the ground twice, but are refusing to talk details of either because they have rejected the film being hard-core pornography in the broadest sense.
This seems reasonable, and a way a judge can stop some external group wasting public time and funds by needlessly going over the minutia of the laws.
Githubs use appears to be diametrically opposite to what they paraphrase.
- Threats of violence
- Hate speech and discrimination
- Bullying and harassment
- Impersonation
- Doxxing and invasion of privacy
- Sexually explicit content
- Active malware or exploits
Now most people will be up in arms about #2, "hate speech and discrimination". I'm sure agreement is much higher for their rejection of "Active malware or exploits".
I'd just like to submit that many people who spend a lot of time online have a distorted view of what is meant with "hate speech and discrimination". I know quite a few activists from what's probably the "left fringe", and I have never found any among them that fit the prevalent stereotype of a "PC Police". Instead, I've seen quite a few examples of the harm that can be done by discrimination (fresh example: a group of 10 people at a conference, and the police chooses to stop-and-frisk the only black guy. Twice. In front of his colleagues, while wearing a Cisco T-shirt and the conference badge).
And that makes my assumption suddenly seem wrong: some malware is, except in rare cases, some lost time or monetary damage, but probably not enough to meaningfully change your life.
Discrimination hits individuals. Possibly only a small percentage, and I have honestly no idea what it feels like. But I'm inclined to trust people, especially because it doesn't cost me anything. I'll rename master/slave, I'll sign community guidelines, I'll try to be a mentor, and when anybody wants to censor certain words in old books I'll calmly explain why that's a stupid idea.
Exploits and NSFW is just silly and the rest is asking for abuse.
> I'm sure agreement is much higher for their rejection of "Active malware or exploits".
Not really, especially when they use it as an excuse to censor lists of malware-infested websites
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712648
while providing hosting for years to famous projects like
https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework
Not that I think they should take MS down, of course.
That is exactly the problem.
There are a lot of people from a privileged upper middle-class background who have never experienced (or even seen) real discrimination, and as a result have a very warped frame of reference what "Hate speech and discrimination" means.
These are the people who will be in charge of enforcing the rules.
I'm one of the top (50? 25 now?) Devs on GitHub. It's a community, not some place I want people asking for support to be shoveling shit down my well. I want a place where I'm happy to drink your water, not one where I'm like "why the fuck did they fling a bug in it."
I for one am excited for these sorts of changes and will be happy to keep paying for the newsletters to fund them.
That's what's going on here. You've said elsewhere that you don't think github should be a community or encourage community behavior. That's fine, you can move along. Plenty of us do want to collaborate with others in a community environment, and setting standards of behavior is a necessary condition for that. So I'm happy with this change.
Maybe you've never experienced any problems with the open source community. Personally, I know I never had. Even if most of us have positive experiences, there are some people who don't. These guidelines are trying to make it so less people have a bad experience in the future.
Having community guidelines doesn't kill a community. Hacker News itself has guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and I don't think we've suffered because of it. While the language of GitHub's guidelines is different, the goals seem very much the same.
Let's assume that GitHub is acting in good faith here, and trying to make things better for the community.
This is not happening in a vacuum. I guess you haven't heard of "OpalGate."
> and trying to make things better for the community.
"Better" is in the eye of the beholder.
I am doing some dependency analysis, so as to identify weak points for our business, e.g. DRP and so on.
So far, the creakiest points we identified are Github and NPM.
Github makes judgments on what is good and what is not, so they may shut down my dependency. Not good.
NPM is the same. Any random person amongst the 5,000 dependencies can withdraw their approval, and kill my dependency. Not good.
So I will recommend just removing both.
Github ->> Just host your own Git
NPM ->> Yarn or whoever understands "stability"
They _are_ asking for feedback, after all...
- fear of political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvPgjg201w0 - skepticism on political correctness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-7YGGCE9es - the political correctness game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2u62u4entc
A 10 minute summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDg8sP_atIA&feature=youtu.be...
But it's quite obvious they see the responsibility with the project owners first, and will only step in if it escalates. A written policy can make the owner's jobs a bit easier because they can just point at it and deflect criticism to GH.
So is thought-policing your customers.
Personally, I nuked my Github account months ago.
Dueling anecdotes!
because GitHub has been trying to save their reputation after some pretty lousy things went on, leading to them deciding to bend to PC pressure.
I'm all for respecting others, and absolutely against any sort of threats of violence, harassment, etc... It's a massive problem online.
That's a ways from having people flood your project with requests to change things like master/slave terminology or the name of the project because "bro" is horrible.
Citation Needed. I suspect the number of real threats are approximately the same as the number of people that have really fucked my mum.
Plus it's hardly right that you can threaten someone just because "lol it's the internet brah"
Unless we lock down the internet and give up anonymity then it's something we have to accept.
I suspect that Linus's DVCS (as opposed to one of the many other DVCSes with extremely similar data models) succeeded in large part because Linux was an extremely active project, as opposed to because of any inherent technical superiority. I remember the early days of git, when people were using it because that's what you had to do to get Linux's VCS repo; the de-facto requirement to use some wrapper like Cogito was not a point in git's favor.
So, I'm not sure the extent to which GitHub can be fairly said to derive its success from Linus. At best, it derived its success from the network effects around git (as a result of Linux switching to it, and therefore other projects switching to it because they knew Linux and whatever VCS Linux used would be well-supported), and fixing all the things about git that didn't work well. Linus still hates most of what GitHub does that stock git doesn't do! But all of those differences are the reason that GitHub has a very successful company that, seemingly, makes a business out of running a bunch of free tools on a central server.
So yes, without git there would be no gihub as we know it.
Google may get software and systems (and even hardware now), but Google has failed spectacularly when it comes to social.
That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
Not everything has to be a social network, but many things (including software engineering) are better if they are. Not every social network needs moderation, but many of them are better if they have it.
And while threats are fairly clearly defined, "harassment" is very nebulous. One person views a non-directed statement as harassing, the other doesn't, the community around that exchange might take one side, society-wide may vote differently, countries have different norms & attitudes, etc. How can everybody share a censorship system where everybody's view of what constitutes harassment is slightly different? It'll never go far enough to cover many people's definition (which is your complaint against the current system), and go too far for others. Sorry, but I think that having the world's systems catered to one person's comprehensive subjective view of "bad" (whoever it is) really is too much to ask. We should stick to those things which are more cut and dry, which won't ever be comprehensive.
AFAIK YouTube ranking also prioritizes controversial comments, which increases interactions (metrics!) but also highlights bad stuff.
Do we have any reason to suspect they even tried? Maybe it's because they just slapped comment functionality onto their pages to increase user engagement?
let no crisis go to waste. Indeed! Tip of my hat to "Warriors".