Comment by dominotw
10 years ago
> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
I've been puzzled for a while with what github is doing hiring so many social impact employees.
https://twitter.com/rachelmyers
https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating
https://twitter.com/davystevenson
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
I doubt it. Github has a reputation problem. I wouldn't put anything sensitive on there, given the attitude github leadership showed about privacy ethics in the Julie Horvath incident.
Even if you don't have anything against Github relating to the Horvath incident, there are other things like Github shutting down people's projects because they wrote a doc containing the word "retard." In other words, now they are in the business of regulating the content of open source projects (beyond obvious precautions like not hosting stolen credit card databases, child porn, etc.)
They seem to think they're too big to fail.
They also removed [0] C Plus Equality [1] project twice. Even Bitbucket [2] and Google [3] also removed it.
[0] - https://github.com/FeministSoftwareFoundation/C-plus-Equalit...
[1] - https://github.com/ErisBlastar/cplusequality
[2] - https://bitbucket.org/FeministSoftwareFoundation/c-plus-equa...
[3] - https://code.google.com/p/c-plus-equality/
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> now they are in the business of regulating the content of open source projects
That is a very good thing. At this point in time we're beyond speculation. We have some good evidence about the direction online communities take with and without content moderation, and the serious players (most recently Reddit) have come to realize that top-down moderation is absolutely necessary. Fringe, unmoderated activity has a place, but it is outside mainstream platforms.
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It's the "etc" that allows you to remove "retard".
"Regulating content" just meaning having some standards for what is hosted on their sites.
GitHub is (or should be) just another Git hosting site/Web frontend/misc. integration with other software project's concern. It should be relatively simple to just choose another website. If we've gotten to the point of saying that they are 'regulating the content of open source projects', we've already failed by making GitHub too important.
I happen to be an acquaintance of Rachel Myers, and while she does do not-for-profit stuff outside of work, do you have some evidence that she's a "social impact employee" there? It's not obvious on her Twitter/Github profiles.
I don't want to assume any motive to your comment, but I think it would be a cause for concern if the world at large assumes that women/minorities are hired strictly for their "social impact".
I assumed it had to do something with community involvement from here
https://github.com/blog/1521-rachel-myers-is-a-githubber
Github is a trailblazer here for tech companies taking social impact seriously. There is nothing derogatory about it. They do amazing projects in this area
eg:
http://connecthome.hud.gov/
https://github.com/detroitwaterproject/detroit-water-project
I was merely curious about how this fits into their grander strategy.