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Comment by inthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Or is it - to me Github is just another example of the developer tools market cycle. Reminds me a bit of the image hosting market - image hosting company is created and gains momentum, then has to monetize, so they add advertising and people start to drift away when someone else then creates the next image hosting site.

In the developer space, it seems pretty much the same. SourceForge was good/cool until it wasn't, so people moved to Github. Now, as Github perhaps gradually loses steam or coolness (might not happen either), another company will emerge (maybe it's Gitlab) who will take share while Github perhaps spins into irrelevance. Wash, rinse, repeat - but each time the software tends to get cheaper and cheaper, creating a massive deflationary environment as the particular developer tool set becomes commodity.

Or maybe AWS or Google step in with an actual good product (hasn't happened yet as far as I can tell in CI/CD but hey you never know), and they charge nothing for it because it's part of a basket of services. Margin for the standalone company goes to zero.

Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty - and that probably makes sense - but it's very tough in my opinion to create great products for developers and make money as a company at the same time.

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But github has a monetization strategy, they're a paid service. This is more about their headcount expanding and possibly losing paying customers because they decided to get political.

I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

They made a code-of-conduct. It pandered too strongly to the list-every-under-privileged-class attitude including explicitly rejecting the concept of "reverse discrimination" and so the reactionary folks who want to insist they aren't sexist and hate any moralizing or politics that challenge them etc. got up in arms. It was all a stupid side-show and had nothing to do with anything that matters to GitHub's basic services or business model. Most people never noticed either way.

The very suggestion that GitHub getting "political" supported by a single issue thread caused them to lose $66 million dollars is so laughable as to barely warrant confrontation.

Yes, I read the thread thrice still didn't understand how that makes github political, especially when the company makes $ on enterprise customers. Is the opal project managed by Github?

Well they lost /our/ business over it. For us it was a clear signal we're better of just hosting our own damn repositories.

GitHub is a corporation. The Opal open source project is not. The maintainers in that thread who side against the "SJWs" still readily acknowledge that corporations have different obligations to political correctness than open source projects do. Lest we forget that even if you disagree with this, the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate, or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.

> the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly?

I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit.

> Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate

Immaculate? There's no black and white here.

> or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.

Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.

I thought it was accepted wisdom at this point that software is people. Caring about people doesn't strike me as incompatible with caring about software --- indeed, for projects which demand collaboration between individuals (i.e. non-trivial complexity), I'd think it would be essential.

It's not a radical departure at all. It's right there in the Agile Manifesto, for chrissakes.

That's not what they meant in the Agile manifesto. They just meant they don't want to get bogged down by process instead of publishing something useful to users.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools? That sounds pretty people-first to me.

I won't claim it's solely responsible, I don't even know if it's significant at all. But I did start moving projects over to gitlab and downgraded my account. The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.

>The idea that you could lose your source code from wrongthought is worrying.

Who is saying this, exactly? The conclusion of that thread was the top maintainer on Opal siding with the originator. If you're worried about him removing you from his projects for your political opinions, don't work with him. This is the argument of the other side in that debate. That this thread happened on GitHub is largely irrelevant. If you're talking about hiring Coraline then you're exhibiting the same kind of intolerance for varying political opinions that people are chiding the "SJWs" for in that thread.

Bluntly: I simply don't understand why you think a controversial issue thread reflects at all on how GitHub will function as a product. It's like switching toaster brands because the toaster company hired a proponent of the Atkins diet.

Dis you miss the part where they hired the professional victim to help spread her politics?

Where is she spreading her politics through GitHub?

With more bullshit like the diversity hiring spree theyre going on. But the internal politics doesn't worry me as much of the fact that they hired a professional bully that can influence who is allowed to use GitHub.

So you disagree with their internal politics? So what? As meh said in the Opal thread, you can absolutely use a tool made by people whose politics you disagree with.

Why are you assuming that GitHub will discriminate against you for your politics? I fully support your choice and in fact I think it's justified, but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime, as @meh would have the "SJWs" doing in that thread. It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.

That is totally fine and valid and is a thing everyone has the right to do. Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree. You can dislike the internal politics, but to do so you have to hold contradictory views yourself. That is the essence of disagreement, and cloaking it in anti-politics does nothing to change that.

> but if you really didn't care about politics, you would keep using GitHub until they kick you off of it for thoughtcrime

I do care about politics, but it is irrelevant to my projects. The time to care about losing access to your source code is before you lose access to it (like backups). Github has shown that there is a signifact risk to hosting my code there so I'm moving off it.

> It honestly just seems that you want a platform whose politics you agree with, and don't want to use a platform whose politics you disagree with.

No, it want a platform that doesn't get involved with politics. Just like I don't care about the politics of any other service I use, as long as it doesn't interfere with my using it.

> Nonetheless, it's still a politics. Politics is unavoidable, it is a consequence of being able to think and disagree.

So you'd be happy to shop somewhere that doesn't allow gay people?

>Just like I don't care about the politics of any other service I use, as long as it doesn't interfere with my using it.

So I'll ask again. How, concretely, do Coraline's politics interfere with your current usage of GitHub?

They don't interfere with my current usage. I'm concerned it will interfere with my future usage and I'm taking steps to ensure that doesn't happen.

>I'm concerned it will interfere with my future usage and I'm taking steps to ensure that doesn't happen.

And how do you know Coraline wasn't interacting in the same vein?

Github does have a record of censoring speech it doesn't like (but which is not illegal). This includes removing github pages and kicking some obnoxious users off their platform while hiring other obnoxious users depending on the politics of those users.

The parent's point is not that they want a source code platform to agree with them in all political issues. They simply don't want a platform that kicks people off for political reasons. I agree with this. Perhaps an analogy will help you understand:

I don't know or care what the political leanings of my local water and utilities companies are. But I will never willingly be a customer of a water company that occasionally shuts off the tap based on a few tweets they disagree with.

On the other hand do you have any insight they are not losing a large sum of this money because paying customers are leaving for platforms that are not politicised?

Any platform can and will be "politicized." Mediums that allow unbridled communication between humans are always political to a varying degree. "Politics" is really just a word for structured disagreement, it happens and is happening everywhere.

And just to be clear, "prove they're not leaving" is not a great argument. I mean I guess they might be? But $66m dollars is a lot of money. They'd have to lose over a million paying customers to lose that much from people switching away. This is a simple calculation that returns a boolean, there are either a significant number of paying customers leaving such that it impacts on the scale of millions of dollars (and we're talking about a product that is $7/month for individuals here, that's a lot of $7 subs) or there aren't.

What do you think the ballpark is for paying customers irritated enough by that thread's existence that they leave the service altogether? I honestly don't know, I wouldn't know where to begin quantifying.

Suggestion:

    Something may be causing something.

Counter Argument:

    There's no proof of that.

Counter Counter Argument:

    Ah, but is there any evidence that 'Something' is *not* causing it.

No, you see, that's not how logic works. You provide evidence for something; not the absence of evidence for it not happening.

There's even a name for it. It's called: argumentum ad ignorantiam (guess what that translates as), also known as an appeal to ignorance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

but on the other hand they got rid of their meritocracy rug and removed it from their companies list of values over politics.

so there might be something to it honestly.

yup. I hope it was clear in my wording that your reply is just the conclusion you should have.

Definitely. I was shocked to see you were the only person rejecting the consensus on this and thus felt inclined to agree.

Damnit. I was hoping to cut this off before it continued, but apparently the whiners about this got up-voted to being the highest answers here. The person asking what happened didn't need to know any of this, they just needed to know that there was some inconsequential brouhaha they could ignore.

Apparently the cliche is right: a large portion of programmers are sorta insular and socially awkward white guys who embrace the concept of "nerd" as a positive and so are a bit defensive and feel threatened about other views and groups and people invading their social space. They may have legitimate concerns here or in similar cases, but the level of energy about it is so clearly defensive and of a magnitude that's wholly unwarrented.

It's not the nerd that's the problem per se, it's the reflexive rejection of other people's lived experience and the rush to label marginalized people asking not to be marginalized further as bullying that appalls me. You can disagree with the politics but when it comes to name calling the discussion is long over.

Indeed "nerd" isn't the problem, it's just that nerd-pride type of idea comes from two aspects: (A) that there's a history of being marginalized such that people in these circles can feel defensive and (B) there's a definite white-guy cultural thing all tied into the "nerd" identity such that people who identify that way aren't comfortable with the idea that tech could be potentially dominated by the sorts of people who are culturally ill-fit to that identity. The identity politics isn't nonsense.

There's just more going on with the sort of people who would get that up in arms over this stuff than just the surface issues themselves.

> Most people never noticed either way.

Noticed, didn't give a shit.

Frankly it was a complete over reaction based on virtue signalling, band wagoning and the general mesd that is any kind of nuanced debate online.

When I run into that stuff now I just close the tab, life is literally too short for it.

Totally.

A few people making a lot of noise.

Any suggestion this had a material impact on githubs business is pure speculation.

This is always the way though. Things like being fired for political opinions or detained without trial are always stuff that probably won't affect you as long as you keep your head down and act as a good citizen, and the people who got in trouble were probably pretty bad people. There's some line about how anyone who cares about freedom has to spend their life defending scoundrels.

Opalgate:

https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

TLDR: Some possibly transphobic person said something on the internet that got traced back to his github account. Some person not connected to the project complains and get's transphobic person removed from github. Github hires complainer to "improve diversity".

That and a couple of other things like their code of conduct have indicated that github wants to be the PC police more than a service provider. I want a dumb service provider.

I don't know if google has cleared out their "fake news" but the top hits on the subject are from heavily biased sources (geekfeminism.com and breitbart).

this makes me wonder how many of their hires actually add value rather than just consuming company resources

Wow, I didn't know the higher ups at GitHub were that unethical.

Thanks for the info and specific link. I definitely never heard of this.

Do we know if Gitlab has a position on Opalgate? because if Github continues to be fully SJW-converged in a heavy handed and obnoxious way, that may be an obvious place for people to migrate to.

Whoa. I didn't know about that either. I'm not going to comment on the content or arguments because, pretty much whatever one says, is going to result in a flamewar.

What I do find unsettling is the fallout, including GitHub's behaviour. I like GitHub as a product, and I use it all the time, but it seems at least moderately prudent to migrate repositories to Gitlab (or somewhere else) and keep them up to date, if only to have a backup other than my local copies if GitHub decided to close my account(1).

Looking at the wider context in the developer community, and across society, I am concerned by the number of people who want to immediately resort to the metaphorical thermonuclear option in the event of a disagreement. I mean this in terms of unyielding aggression, complete disengagement and exclusion.

I'm not specifically talking about gender issues either: Brexit and the US election are other prime examples. There's a complete lack of empathy from all sides in many online debates. It's starting to make me think psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit.

On that cheerful thought, back to work...

(1) There's no reason they should that I'm aware of, but who knows what might happen in the future? Old chestnut about all eggs in one basket, etc.

> Old chestnut about all eggs in one basket, etc.

The other old chestnut is "first they came for the..."

Yeah, and in cases like this, well, that could go either way.

> psychopathy isn't so much a disorder as a spectrum on which we all sit

I think you're getting a bit off in terms of perspective here. There's a huge difference between [words on a page] and [Human being I'm talking to]. I might well say something that makes someone on the internet cry, I might laugh and post pubbietears.jpg if they said my comment had made them cry.

If I saw someone crying in close proximity it's likely I'd stop and ask if they were ok (albeit i would also feel very uncomfortable and undecided on said course of action in case it's imposition).

I'm being artificially extreme but it's certainly true that empathy in most people will be more pronounced for a physical person than an online username (who, lets face it, may or may not be representing their reality).

Oh, for sure, but I think it has an influence on our behaviour in the "real" world, and not a positive one. It's anecdotal, but several personal friends are friends with each other no longer in the wake of the Brexit vote. Actions in the virtual world have consequences in the physical world.

(And, sorry, my wry sense of humour doesn't necessarily work in plain text and I should make more effort to remember that. To me the spectrum idea is interesting, but it's just an idea.)

The Brexit vote isn't "the virtual world" though, so I'm a bit confused here.

But the angry angry facebook comment slapfights are in the virtual world and are doubtless partly to blame for a lot of sundered acquaintances.

I can think of a few comments by family members (aunts/uncles etc especially) on rants by 20 somethings on facebook about how the idiot olds were screwing us all over - being quite hurt by the positions taken in the rants.

Some of this is to do with the weirdness that is facebook crossing virtual/real world interactions. But most of the people who are still obsessed with spouting their personal views on [Global warming/Brexit/Trump/Syria/etc] will quickly find a partner to trade verbal blows with

^^^This. Thank-you!

See my original post above this where I specifically cite online debate, including about the Brexit vote. I perhaps could have been clearer in my second post, but that was a direct response to somebody who'd responded to my first post.

i wonder how Linus would have responded, and if linux were to be born today, considering's Linus' abrasive tongue, would survive.

some of these people have a point - their small minority though is pretty rabid and off point. i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.

it'll be interesting how we will resolve this kind of emergent social angst - before too much of our future falls victim to it.

there was a code of conduct that people working together adhered to back in the day, and as long as it was kept minimal and professional things are just fine - but it's always over applied, and it always contributes to the fall of its parent. PC and SJWs fall into that catigory these days. they should revise their tactic, i think it does them more harm and causes them to lose credibility, rather than gain any. they might win a few battles, but we'd all lose the war.

i belong to a majority that gets shit due to what a minority does - in my head, i think the way to change that is by serving as an example for the good - and fight the bad together with everyone willing.

the Opal folk should have just apologized, said they'll talk to their dev about his actions and closed the issue, then moved on. instead, that thread's curator u/meh just fanned the flames because of his own spartan approach to community health that overshadowed project health, and ended up causing more damage than it set out to avoid.

here's hoping github survives this.

  i've never seen "RESPECT ME!" ever not backfire, on any scale and for any group.

Perhaps you mean something different than what I'm understanding you to have said, but demanding respect seams like it was a key part of women's suffrage, the American civil rights movement, and the more recent push for marriage equality [1]. It is true that there are still plenty of people who do not respect those groups, but they currently receive vastly more respect than they would if they had not stood up for themselves.

[1] clearly not meant to be an exhaustive list

It's a powerful tactic that gains success under powerful circumstances.

When deployed during a minor skirmish, going nuclear often risks similarly nuclear retaliation.

I agree that I respect the suffragettes and even some of what FEMEN even does.

But what I meant is the "REAPECT ME" that leads to being "tolerated" rather than it being earned respect.

Should I take from this that what is being done today is likened to what suffragettes did back in the days of first wave feminism?

You sometimes hear stuff about how github has all these internal problems now, since they got rid of their special rug or whatever, but is there any evidence of this spilling over into the projects they host?

As far as I can tell projects are still managing themselves as they and their leaders see fit. Seems fine to me.

The spectre of spooky SJWs haunting silicon valley shouldn't be the thing prompting people to consider redundancy in their source code management.

There was also the WebMConverter "retard" flap: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118

That was the thing that got me to delete my private repos and stop paying Github for its services - that day, they stopped being a neutral platform and became an opinionated service provider, and while I don't tend to do anything that would run afoul of their policies, I am exceptionally uncomfortable with the prospect of a platform provider exercising editorial control over others' code. I still use it for open source stuff, but I moved all my private stuff to Gitlab and have been exceptionally happy with the choice to do so.

Hard to tell. I've heard some pretty bad things involving internal power disputes but externally it mostly looks like dealing with anti-PC trolls harshly, while hiring a few bigoteers. Nothing looks unreasonable in isolation but there is a clear left-leaning bias.

There was the bruhaha over banning someone from the whole site for using the triggering eggplant emoji: https://mobile.twitter.com/evilaubergine/status/679108445421...

https://www.google.com.tw/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAct...

> I didn't follow when github started getting political. What happened?

They suddenly decided to be a PC/feminist stronghold, with the associated reverse-logic, claiming words like "meritocracy" were actually oppressing and not empowering, and what not.

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/

After that stance was lost, you would every now and then read about just another piece about Github where PC politics were being inserted as Github policy.

https://hacked.com/github-promotes-reverse-racism-sexism/

It's been a gradual, but noticeable process.

You may or may not agree with the means/politics itself, but there should be no question that Github itself has been getting increasingly political recent years.

And when you do that, you are bound to alienate someone. I, like many others, would prefer Github to remain a dumb/neutral service-provider. That's what I use it for. I don't need it to throw a political platform in my face.

Similar to Twitter. I do not understand why the hell they get political.

At least with Twitter it's hopefully a wake up call for a lot of people about relying on centralized infrastructure.

Then again, Snapchat.

The mountain does not go to Mohammed, Mohammed goes to the mountain.

That is, politics is not something you can opt out of. Choosing to do or not do certain things impacts certain individuals and groups. The result is politics. It comes to you. If you operate any system by which humans can communicate, politics is inevitable.

While true, if you've heard of any of the happenings at GitHub, you know it's not that simple and that they have been aggressively political in the past.

Twitter is very politicised though.

The ban hammer is not wielded impartially.

twitter has been the birthplace of many emancipatory political movements. How was it ever not political? Furthermore, how are they wielding the ban hammer badly these days? Banning abusive assholes like Milo for example who make the site less fun for everyone else should happen more often, not less.

actually, their are some systems that try to force political forces out of the company. see holocracy.

A blog that could be relevant http://hintjens.com/blog:111

(it's not about politics, it's about money)

SourceForge and GitHub feel different. SourceForge was always _really_ spammy from day one, GitHub has a far superior product.

It seems logical that GitHub will eventually figure out how to make money, even if it is just by following the tried and trusted "project management system" model

SourceForge wasn't spammy from day one. I remember it back in the first year or so of its existence. It was actually really good, and an absolute revolution for the open source community as no such sites had existed prior to that. It immediately gained massive traction and was every bit as central to the open source/free software community as github is today.

SourceForge has a new owner trying hard to bring it back to life.

> trying hard to bring it back

Any source or info on this?

I used it from 2000ish until around the time that apt-get became good. I can't ever remember a time when sourceforge didnt make me try to click on ads when attempting to download software.

It was certainly a valuable tool and definitely the GitHub of its time, but man- soooo spammy.

> Developers have, as far as I can tell, almost zero brand loyalty

I feel like part of this stems from the fact that every service now wants to charge a monthly fee instead of offering a one time purchase.

If you want me to pay $X/mo, that fee has to correlate to the value you are providing me each month. The minute that equation changes, people start to consider other options.

One of the benefits to SaaS is that you can make more money and your revenue is more predictable, but on the other hand it means your market is more susceptible to competition because companies are comparing their options more frequently.

> when someone else then creates the next image hosting site.

If I am not mistaken Imgur is doing quite well for many years now.

How is Imgur making money ?

Ads, they are making good money from the ads that they removed paid plans and gave all the features to everyone.

Keep in mind that also have a superior product to just about every image host that came before them (other than Flickr), they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit, and to top it off have their own social networking features with non-trivial market adoption.

With that many eyeballs on your site it's no surprise that even their subtle advertising style [1] is profitable. I'd personally much rather see sponsored posts everywhere than pandering direct marketing and spying/tracking.

[1]: http://www.imgurads.com/

> they are the de-facto favored image host for Reddit

Not any more - https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/reddit-image-uploads/

> Not any more

Actually that is still the case. He said "de facto" not "official". Imgur still represents the majority of image links on most subreddits.

https://www.reddit.com/domain/i.imgur.com/

r/all shows more imgur links than i.reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/all/

Your article dates from half a year ago and they still couldn't snuff imgur out with built-in upload facilities, suffice to say, as far as the users are concerned, imgur is the defacto beloved service. People on twitter are more likely to use twitter's img upload than redditors are to use their own.

slowly being replaced with sli.mg, the way that reddit is slowly being replaced with voat.co.

So it's not?

I have been hearing that about voat.co for couple of years.

took reddit a while to replace digg as well. a few years, in fact.

People moved from digg to reddit in mass becase digg screwed up big time, as long as Reddit does not make any big screw ups, its pretty safe.

seems the spez /r/the_donald controversy has tripled voat's user base.

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