Comment by nodja | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nodja | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Regardless of what the author of the repo did or did not do, I think that deleting his account and everything in it is a failure on the part of github and warrants a policy change. There's lots of good knowledge contained in the issues and discussions hosted on the webui repo all of which are now lost or very hard to find. Even papers coming from big companies have directly used the repo as reference[1].

I was personally playing around with prompt2prompt and reading issues when the ban happened and now I can no longer find the most recent comments, I still had the url but the internet archive only has a copy from back in october, and finding this specific discussion will be hard again since it will be pruned from search engines.

IMO github should've put the repo in read-only mode, if they want their social features to be taken seriously they can't be removing discussions and comments that people that have contributed that have nothing to do with the infraction. What's the point of hosting discussions if there's a chance they'll be nuked later just because the original author of the repo did shitty things.

[1] ctrl+f automatic1111 on https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00704

Agreed. This is social media style moderation being applied to a website that is more similar to infrastructure or a library. If I were a member of a private, professional library* and a colleague was found to hold racist views or had submitted a racist paper, I would still find it unacceptable to see that all of their books and papers had been indiscriminately pulled off the shelves overnight. In fact, such a thing would be unthinkable.

* Do such things exist? I'm just trying to keep the example out of the public or academic spheres.

Good lord. The replies you’ve attracted are awful. I just wanted to say that I agree with you, so that you don’t feel like you’re the only one.

Have a nice day!

> In fact, such a thing would be unthinkable.

But wouldn’t you agree that if I run a private professional library, I have the right to add or remove books by any (legal) process I deem appropriate?

> Do such things exist?

I sorta do this; I have a small collection of historical programming languages texts that I make available to my students and anyone else interested. It’s not really a membership kind of thing tho.

> But wouldn’t you agree that if I run a private professional library, I have the right to add or remove books by any (legal) process I deem appropriate?

Of course. I don't think this is a question of freedom of speech or anything like that. I think this is about how Github should moderate its content in a way that is best for its users and its business. Making a Twitter profile or a YouTube channel disappear is categorically different in my mind from making a GitHub repository disappear and I think GitHub should want for me to feel that way. If I don't, it changes how and how much I use the service.

> Making a Twitter profile or a YouTube channel disappear is categorically different in my mind from making a GitHub repository disappear and I think GitHub should want for me to feel that way.

I agree it's categorically different but not in the way you mean. From your other post, I understand that you view Twitter and YouTube as social media, and they are distinct from software infrastructure like GitHub.

The way I see it, all three are social networks, but what make GitHub distinct from the other two is that it's backed by git. So if GitHub wants to ban me, I can easily move my code to any number of services. Which, honestly if you're relying on GitHub as infrastructure, you should have a backup plan anyway for if/when it goes down.

> This is social media style moderation being applied to a website that is more similar to infrastructure or a library.

I don't know anything about the immediate situation here but calling GitHub "infrastructure" is not accurate. I know every man and his dog hosts their repos there but GitHub is a private company (owned by Microsoft!) and is not obliged to host things that it thinks will make it look bad.

Private companies can be treated as infrastructure, and of course private companies are free to operate in a way that reduces faith in their reliability.

Fully agree.

I didnt read the full thing but the point is, is any code worth less because it’s author is making some statements that in the eyes of some people would not be not acceptable? Who decides that?

I think this is the point where github ceases to be of use as a platform to host code, since at any point they could come down on you, and in succession break hundreds of other programs that would have dependencies on the “banned” code, etc…

Personally it would've been better to take down the offending repos and at least give a warning to the author before doing this.

Now all knowledge is lost. Not the code, but there were discussions, tutorials, and what not.

I don't know who Auto is or what he did in practice that led to the violation (yes, I read about those mods): my qualms with the repo were due to its questionable licensing, which is, however, allowed by GH. After all, I can use something without agreeing with the author's moral views.

And yes, this again, even if one agrees with the suspension, shows the danger of centralized platforms when they become so large (although they are convenient).

Luckily - and for now at least - it looks like A1111's account has been re-enabled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com