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Comment by nusl | Hacker News Reader

Repo seems to be gone? User action or GitHub action?

Regardless, for visibility as to maybe-why this happened, here are screenshots of the user editing comments to insult/make them say something they never did;

https://imgur.com/a/LsvBXY1

https://web.archive.org/web/20251130091635/https://github.co...

The tool itself claims "Zero AI" (https://www.zigbook.net/) yet is very obviously A-Lot-AI.

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It's unbelievable to me that Github allows repo admins to edit other people's comments.

That's a useful feature for long-running issues to include updates in the opening post. Or to improve formatting when a bug reporter isn't familiar with markdown. And that it shows in the edit history should at least discourage abuse.

The vanishing small percentage of people that would actually check a comment’s history are the same people who would check a Wikipedia entries history.

At a bare minimum, the post should have in big bold lettering: Edited by <user_name>.

Allowing the maintainer to prepend a comment to the top seems more sensible to me to be honest. Would make API use harder potentially, but it would avoid weird abuse like this.

github is meant for collaboration, designing it around adversarial use would be a loss for everyone. Adding a function to report absusive edits rather than an entire post would be a better choice imo.

reporting abusive edits requires moderation/arbitration. the rules can instead be changed to sidestep the issue, while maintaining the value of the feature.

Report to whom? Github, who allows the behavior and therefore doesn’t see anything wrong with it, or the repo admins who have proven they they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the very thing you’re reporting? The well is already poisoned, there is no reason to think that they’d suddenly change their stance and cooperate.

In this case at least, github (most probably) banned this account, presumably after reports. There are also other stories for github banning accounts for pr trolling kind of behaviours. So not sure if everything is perfect, but at least there are cases such things work.

> designing it around adversarial use would be a loss for everyone

hmm... isn't this more of a 'personal viewpoint'? why are you stating this like a fact?

moreover, how would it "adding Edited by ~" constitute as a "loss for everyone" ?

I agree on adding "report abuse" button, but if no one notices that edit, how would anyone know what to report in the first place?

It's personal but I agree with it. This is probably the first time I've seen it abused like this. I've been on GH for like 10-15 years.

Normally, repository maintainers are not self-sabotaging like this.

That text is already there and can be seen in the screenshot

Yes, with an edit history I think it's a useful feature. I often use it to add pre formatting to errors or code examples people post, or to edit titles to be more helpful ("weird issue with X" → "clearer description of the bug" after triage). It used to be that it didn't have an edit history. I think it was added about five or six years ago? You could also delete comments with no indication there was ever a comment there.

I once had someone request a feature and they became quite aggressive after I declined it. I essentially told them to fuck off[1] and that was the end of it. A few months after this he strategically edited and deleted some comments to make it appear I was just insulting them for no reason and then started posting on HN and Lobsters what an asshole I was. Back then, there was no real indication of their manipulation.

[1]: In part because he was already a known troll. Well, maybe troll isn't the right word, but he does have a history of mass-reporting hundreds of feature requests across hundreds of repos, to the point where it's basically just spam. He's been banned from Github many times over this, but just keeps creating new accounts and it all starts over again.

It obviously does not discourage abuse

No, that's not obvious at all. A single event is evidence that some abuse still happens, it does not tell us how much more abuse there would be in the counterfactual where the history wasn't available.

discourage != prevent all

I get what you're saying, but I feel like they should highlight comments in some way if a repo admin completely replaces a comment with different text. I'm struggling to imagine a situation where that would really be appropriate. The "Edited by: username" seems too easy to overlook.

They could show multiple post authors, similar to how they do for co-authored commits.

What would be a valid reason to allow this? That just seems mind-numbingly stupid.

I maintain the formatter for Dart, so a lot of my job involves maintaining the issue tracker for the formatter.

I use this feature all the time. Users get Markdown wrong, give titles to issues that don't make any sense, have typos, etc. Being able to edit issues helps me keep the issue tracker easier to understand and navigate for maintainers and users.

Every feature can be used. That doesn't mean every feature should not exist. The fact that the edit history is still visible means it's next to impossible to abuse the feature. It works fine.

Markdown is pretty tricky for new users to figure out, so quite often, users will just paste big snippets of code without formatting them, which is nearly unreadable. I'll usually edit these posts to add ```backticks``` around any code.

or they'll do what i assume is the jira style code blocks with just `multiple lines of code`

This is particularly useful when editing the top-level comment of a popular issue to specify the current status. Or when a peer opened a placeholder issue and you fill it up. Etc.

If you actually use GitHub as a social network of sorts, there are many reasons to do edit comments. All the edits are visible anyway. You're on Git-Hub, you can already edit everything you have write access to.

In which world would you want others to be able to edit your posts in a “SOCIAL NETWORK”? In today’s age of misinformation? Greeeeeeeat idea.

For GitHub specifically? This world. This is a useful feature

Censoring insults or illegal speech (depending on jurisdiction) would be the main reason I can think of.

That also means that some users will be pressured to censor illegal speech no? If you live under e.g. a regime that disallows or discourages criticism, now suddenly the onus is on you to do something about those comments because you have the ability to. If you couldn't edit the comments it's not your fault.

Either way I think it's a pretty stupid feature the way it's implemented; it should show the edit more clearly or indicate that the comment has been written by multiple people (like StackOverflow does), especially if edits change more than e.g. 10% of the original comment.

It's not my feature, no reason to be angry.

in such case ability to delete comment would be enough

The responds and edits are simply unprofessional and immature. I don't hate AI and in fact I use it for many research based tasks, helping me narrowing a lot of tough topics, but it is the People with these kind of attitude turns me off.

AI use is fine, though pretending you haven't used it when you obviously did rubs me the wrong way.

I get why GitHub allows editing comments of other users though for public repos I guess it allows for this kind of abuse

Exactly, being dishonest is the real problem here.

Luckily, every edits are recorded in history, so they can't really hide their abusive behavior, for now. Even if they did, seem like there are often people faster in archiving their posts than they hiding their post.

I think the open abuse of people raising issues with the project is morally worse than the license issues or even lying about AI usage. Fraud is already bad, but someone can do that for reasons other than pure mean-spiritedness. To pull this nonsense, you have to actively take pleasure in making other people feel bad.

I don't mid the immature part, they are hate fueled. The ableism is disgusting.

Just knew what ableism is, but I don't think that is one but the more classic things bullies trying to downplay others by calling other idiots or autistic.

Either way, ableism or simply abusive behavior, both lacks respect, honestly and responsibility, which is a sign of immature behavior. Mature people can be playful, but they know when to act in the correct time, and definitely not in something that lead to a huge PR disaster.

Thus, being immature is the root cause of all these bad behaviors, including discrimination.

I find GitHub to be very prompt and responsive to abuse reports, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was them if people reported the comments etc.

I notice again I haven't internalized how much https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuspiciouslySpec... really happens.

Follow-up: seems they've been banned

The only public repo remaining under their github account is this VSCode-Copilot integration tool (https://github.com/zigbook/pilot).

It seems their whole account is gone now.

Did you make up A-Lot-AI? Can I suggest "A-Lott-a-AI"?

If you did, this is the greatest thing created in 3 ABC ("After Bullshit ChatGPTification"; ChatGPT launched in 2022.).

NB: Since ChatGPT is basically the new Messiah for many, I really think we should now be using dates like 3 ABC or 5 POS. POS stands for "Prior to Overlord Slop/Shit". I suggest we give up AD/BC.

But, please, I'm not the messiah! (hopefully you have watched Life of Brian!)

probably user reports to GitHub's moderation team

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