Comment by Estragon
10 years ago
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/
What was the story behind this anyway? I am having a hard time determining whether this was actually serious or were trying to parody feminist activism.
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Good.
> 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.
And who exactly gets to decide what is "fringe"?
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so what do you think of saudi prince becoming second twitter biggest stakeholder. He is free to censor anti saudi govt speech on twitter?
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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.