Will your cloudservices give in to political bullying? | Hacker News Reader

Will your cloudservices give in to political bullying?

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17 pointsterangdom14 comments

The idea behind github is to encourage new ways of thinking and different approaches -- including ones that question conventional thought. Parodying the excesses of feminism via github helps to reveal to women and men alike just what precisely the gender divide is made up from. Leaving the github up serves the useful purpose of inviting and CHALLENGING women to increase their interactions with men working in IT and show that real women are unlike the exaggerated-caricatures that feminism (or at least 'extremist feminism') has caused them to become perceived.

I don't need to be CHALLENGED to increase my interactions with men in IT. Because IT is filled with men, I interact with them constantly. Perhaps a useful github would instead attempt to CHALLENGE the men in IT to interact with real women, instead of building up imaginary caricatures and basing complex worldviews on this without validating it. Sounds kind of waterfall, really, to build up so much theory before ever trying a real interaction.

The C+= project wasn't designed to challenge interactions between men and women. The C+= project is satire about the ideas of the feminist movement. The C+= project makes up caricatures about the feminist movement.

It sounds as though you do need to be challenged. These caricatures did not spring from nothing; there are reasons for them being used. Might they be bad reasons? Probably, but not definitely. Go deeper and interact more deeply with those men in IT with whom you claim to work alongside. What you find might surprise you and also give you a chance to bring about changes for the betterment of women, men, and IT workers generally.

If you're too cheap to host your own information repository, you have to play by the rules of the people who do. What you want to do is publish your work to censorship resistant Internet tools like Freenet, Tor, i2p or Gnutella.

I agree. But these cloud services are so new, that people are not aware of the risks they are taking. They don't realize the needs they actually have. Since the customers don't know their needs, neither do the service providers. But if you want to stay ahead of the curve, I think you should as a consumer, request reliable service providers, or self host. As a service provider you should provide reliable services. At least, that is where I think we are heading.

Why are so many of the accounts commenting on this post (and the dead one) brand brand new? Are you existing users too embarrassed to make your points under a 'real' name, or brand new 'extremists' roaming the internet to find a place to argue the topic?

I'm used to anonymous discussion where my ideas are considered on its own without regard to the celebrity of my character. I felt the need to become egotistical and celebrity driven by registering a pseudonymous account to express the idea that a parody/satire of the feminist movement doesn't imply attacking women and their rights.

They are from 4chan. http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38723234

Yes, more identifying data for anyone supporting politically incorrect views, please.

[0]: http://imgur.com/MqxipLU

While a satirical repo doesn't necessarily belong on GitHub, I think the general trend of large internet companies to pull material that is considered offensive, usually by progressives, is worrying.

In fact, if GitHub were an American shopping mall, they would not be allowed to stop people from wearing T-shirts that mocked feminism, because of they way the first amendment is interpreted.

I don't think GitHub should remove material just because it differs from their political viewpoint, or from the viewpoint of people who are able to cause the most trouble for them. Of course people are always free to criticize the repo and its authors if they don't like it.

That is a much bigger issue than the specific content of the repo. While it may not be "valuable" from a code quality and usefulness point of view, the C+= repo was a modestly clever satire.

Is that Github's business to host political/comedic content? Not exactly - they do code hosting. On the other hand, code is just text files and they can host any form of data.

Is it their business to police content? That depends on jurisdiction - for example, in the USA, much depends on obscenity or hate crime laws. In Germany, if something were deemed to be Nazi propaganda, it would be illegal.

Obviously, none of this applied here - instead, the internet 'progressive' outrage machine created a PR nuisance for GitHub that needed to be addressed somehow. It creates an unfortunate precedent, and points to the trouble that a person or group can have when they don't control their own content and servers.

You put it very well, and I agree with everything you wrote. The only point I was trying to make that was different than what you have said, is that if GitHub had consistently removed all satirical repos, then it wouldn't be a problem.

Sites are free to set there only rules, but sites like github can also be considered as a public space, and so I think these sites have a moral obligation to make these rules objective and not politically biased. What is troubling is that, whether the rules explicitly say so or not, they tend to censor non-pc material. I'm sure progressives would have no problem seeing the issue if the censorship was the other way around.

I agree with your point as well.

The problem seems to be "squeaky wheel gets the grease". A blog/twitter outrage mob launches lots of reports to GH for "offensive content", which is a nuisance for them. After all, hosting is their business, not policing content.

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