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Comment by boardwaalk | Hacker News Reader

This seems pretty close to just saying, “If we can’t change the world, let us change nothing at all.”

Sure, it’s trivial. It doesn’t, in any significant way, actually do anything. But I find a lot of time when reviewing code — if there are code badly formatted or variables misspelled, I have a hard time looking at the actually problems in the code until those superficial things are fixed.

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But changing master to main doesn't fix anything, nor did the author find it a problem to begin with. I think the point is to focus on real change and not fake change, because the former is what's important and the latter is a distraction.

> This seems pretty close to just saying, “If we can’t change the world, let us change nothing at all.”

I don't see it that way. In my view, this change is worse than "nothing at all" because it doesn't represent any substantive change, but it does create fodder for bad faith actors to portray the movement for social justice as trivial.

On the other hand, now that the name change is done, if there are more protests then nobody will waste time talking about whether Github should change the branch name. This time, people were talking about it even before Github did anything, so it was going to be a distraction regardless. Github doing this ought to be considered just closing the book on this discussion IMO.

Sure. The change itself means nothing to me, I don't think "master" or "main" makes any difference, it's the use of github's corporate megaphone to project this triviality onto the wider discussion about social justice that I take issue with.

No, this is saying "If we can not change the world, let's do other productive things instead of meaningless distractions to feel good about changing the world."

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