Hacker News Reader

Comment by poszlem | Hacker News Reader

Whatever side you are on in this debate of "should GitHub decide what is good and bad" I think most people would agree that they really should quote a specific violation of specific TOS when they close your account. This should be the norm, as opposed to the current situation in which you are left wondering what the hell was problematic that some GitHub employee disagrees with.

The corporation may benefit from having unclear moderation policies, but this is not in the best interests of the users. If you don't agree, consider the possibility that the corporation's political views may change and your own beliefs could then be subject to moderation instead of those of "the other side."

View on HN

Tech companies hate citing the actual TOS violations because if they did, people might follow them to the letter and then the tech company wouldn't have a justification to ban them. They love having a system where they can arbitrarily declare anything and anyone to be in violation of the terms of service and not have to back it up with an actual citation. Some on HN in that past have said this is ok because people who are bad can figure out ways to abide by the terms of service while also still being bad people, so the arbitrary nature of enforcement is a feature, not a bug.

I helped run a fairly large gaming forum for many years. You either have broad rules or ten thousand very specific ones no one can ever hope to understand.

Most folks prefer the former.

How does this relate to not telling people which rule they violated?

“You violated the ‘don’t be a dick’ rule too many times” isn’t much different than that. We found it regularly necessary, and that giving specific examples and number of times counterproductive.

Of course is is a feature to them. This is honestly like being in an abusive relationship where you never know if you're going to get praised or beaten up, so you always have to be on high alert.

But we should not be okay with them doing that.

I had a newly-created GitHub account banned when I uploaded a Scrabble word list to it as a Gist. Turns out it included various slur words and their systems picked this up automatically.

Although they didn't immediately specify the reason for the ban, to their credit the GitHub support person did explain what had happened when I appealed and the ban was lifted.

> they really should quote a specific violation of specific TOS when they close your account.

I suspect this ends up being impractical, due to helping the bad actors too much.

I think moderation being so inconsistent/unclear is mostly because moderation is difficult.

> I suspect this ends up being impractical, due to helping the bad actors too much.

Somehow states get by, despite letting criminals know what they did wrong.

Sure, people probing you to see what they can get away with is annoying, but in the long run, it's far more "impractical" to have opaque justice.

Imagine if we used the same logic for law enforcement. "We can't tell you what's illegal because that would help bad actors. Also, not knowing the law is not a defence for violating it."

And yet it's the minimum we expect from our legal system, I don't understand why we are okay with corporations being exempt from that.

Our legal system is really expensive, not sure if it is a good alternative to this. And perhaps you can hire a lawyer to sue them when they ban you, they will have to explain the exact TOS violation in the court I think?

Using GitHub is a privilege, not a right

You should do your business elsewhere if you don't agree with GitHub TOS

I am not talking about the current situation. I am saying that it should not be legal for companies to refuse to server a customer without giving a clear reason why they do so. Unless you think it would be fine, for example, for corporations to refuse serving minorities citing their TOS?

If it's not a right, does that mean GitHub could ban every black user if they wanted to? I doubt it. Could they ban every Russian (or people of specific nationality in general)? Can they ban everybody sharing an idea?

I'm really curious where the line is drawn.

They can in the current state of the Wild West that is the WWW, and also in the payment processing networks, and it's wrong.

Yes they can. What’s your point

Reply on news.ycombinator.com