Comment by pekk
10 years ago
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.
It was a joke by 4chan's technology board, made to see if people would take it seriously (some did and even agreed with it!).
And what if it really was a parody? Just censor it?
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"?
I guess that the majority gets to decide. It doesn't really matter what is mainstream and what isn't, as long as there's a place for both. Broadway and off-Broadway are both fine, but mixing them can cause confusion and for both audiences to be disappointed.
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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?
I don't know what you mean by "free". Of course, a business owner is free to direct their business as they wish within law. Would I like it? No. But businesses are rarely ideologically neutral, and they often reflect the ideals and world views of the societies that created them. As Twitter is a Western company, it reflects Western notions, so I wouldn't be happy when it starts reflecting Saudi world views, but if it does, I guess someone will start another Western Twitter. If you want Twitter to be a public infrastructure rather than a private business, make it a government-owned company.
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.