Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

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> but all I see is a community consciously putting efforts to become more inclusive

In my opinion, agitating for these types of changes makes tech communities more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized.

It's not clear to me how changing the default branch name in a version control system and similar "inclusivity changes" makes the tech communities more inclusive, but I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc).

And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that).

I think a better, more compromising change would have been to leave default as master, but fix up the code base (remove hard-coded instances of "master") so that you can choose a different default branch name more easily (i.e. with `git init <default name>`. It's forcing the default name change upon everyone that people find unpalatable.

> I do very clearly see how it increases discord and contention in tech communities (see: this thread, previous threads on the topic, Code of Conduct threads, etc).

> And I think that increased discord and contention in communities is not worth increased inclusivity (however you measure that).

One measure of inclusivity might be hiring, retention, and promotion within the tech industry (and the developer subset of that) relative to the general population. Looking at the Stack Overflow 2020 survey results as one (admittedly biased) indicator, it's pretty clear that the tech industry does abysmally. As two quick examples: <5% of developers surveyed were Black, and <12% were women and non-binary. Source: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-pro...

Speaking from personal experience as one of those minorities, I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome.

Something like changing language that is rooted in ownership of people is not a huge change, admittedly, but the fact that so many people within the industry complain and fight it definitely serves as a reminder to me that I'm tolerated more than welcomed here.

Edit: Added some clarifying language

> I don't think people who are outside of these underrepresented groups understand just how many small reminders a day we get that the "default" is for us not to be welcome.

IMHO (and I didn't downvote you, btw), I believe you (and other minorities) are choosing to interpret things like complaining about political changes to code and projects as persecution. That is a choice you are making. You could also choose to see it for what it really is - people disagreeing about politics. Interpreting a political stance as a personal insult or persecution is not the right way to go, IMO. Assume good faith; give the benefit of the doubt.

If a project maintainer pushes back and complains when internet mobs try to force him to remove the word "red" from his codebase because it triggers soviet refugees... that doesn't mean the project maintainer is persecuting soviet refugees or that soviet refugees are "unwelcome" to contribute. Soviet refugees may choose to interpret the project maintainer's actions as such, but that doesn't make it so. In reality the project maintainer disagrees with the politics on the issue of removing the word "red" from his code and is pushing back.

The beauty of GitHub, HackerNews, and internet fora in general is that nobody really knows your race or gender or really anything about you (unless you make it known). From my experience, people on the internet are just usernames with personality, judged on the merits of their insights and contributions. I've worked with some great people online in the past on different projects, and to this day I have no idea if they were male or female or non-binary or black or white or asian or blind or deaf.

I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. I think where we disagree is in characterizing making inclusive language changes as "political" and keeping the status quo as "non-political", when the status quo is demonstrably not working for a lot of people. Changing "master" to "main" is admittedly likely near the end of the list of what the tech industry needs to do to in that regard, but if we can't even get low-effort token gestures like that to happen without a lot of outcry I'm not optimistic about any kind of substantive change.

The idea of places like HN being meritocratic tech utopias where race and gender are irrelevant and everyone's just a username with some neat ideas is really compelling. I can only offer that in my experience it's common knowledge among woman developers that if you want to have a good day, it's best not to read the comments here. It seems I've forgotten that myself!

> I think where we disagree is in characterizing making inclusive language changes as "political" and keeping the status quo as "non-political", when the status quo is demonstrably not working for a lot of people

Sure, your perspective is valid too, I just tend to lean the other way. I tend to believe that it is impossible to please everyone and that we should not strive to unless it has clear, demonstrable value.

> we can't even get low-effort token gestures like that to happen without a lot of outcry I'm not optimistic about any kind of substantive change.

Well, I think part of the reason for outcry in this particular case is that it is (again, IMHO) not a "low-effort token gesture". I mean, if you look at the patch being submitted in the email linked at the top of the thread to make main the new default:

> 351 files changed, 3903 insertions(+), 3890 deletions(-)

and for me personally it means that all my future git repos are going to have a different default branch than my past repos which breaks some of my utility scripts. And if I configure the default branch of my future repos to remain "master" to avoid this then some people might take offense and see it as a dogwhistle.

So to me this whole thing seems like a big charade, but maybe the silver lining is that Git really should have been designed from the start to easily take arbitrary default branch names, and this patch will enable that.

Is there any evidence that the submitter of the code did not want to make the change? It seems quite possible that the contributor wanted to make this change and volunteered their time. If that’s the case, the complexity of the change should not be relevant. The only complexity to consider is the downstream complexity. And besides, the change seems to be a one-liner plus find-and-replace in thousands of unit tests. Could probably have been done in a matter of minutes.

I am just speculating of course and maybe they were very unhappy to have to do this.

> more polarized since you are now making things that didn't used to be political, highly politicized.

I mean, how many people are __actually__ offended by master/slave terminology? 1%? 2%?

Now how many people are offended by this change, how many think that this is useless waste of time, how many think that this is tech industry being once again bullied into compliance over nonsense and it's all one sneaky slippery slope? I don't know, but it seems like a half or at least a third.

These changes with this reasoning are not making it more inclusive, they make it more exclusive.

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