Hacker News Reader

Comment by jetrink | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. This is social media style moderation being applied to a website that is more similar to infrastructure or a library. If I were a member of a private, professional library* and a colleague was found to hold racist views or had submitted a racist paper, I would still find it unacceptable to see that all of their books and papers had been indiscriminately pulled off the shelves overnight. In fact, such a thing would be unthinkable.

* Do such things exist? I'm just trying to keep the example out of the public or academic spheres.

View on HN

Good lord. The replies you’ve attracted are awful. I just wanted to say that I agree with you, so that you don’t feel like you’re the only one.

Have a nice day!

> In fact, such a thing would be unthinkable.

But wouldn’t you agree that if I run a private professional library, I have the right to add or remove books by any (legal) process I deem appropriate?

> Do such things exist?

I sorta do this; I have a small collection of historical programming languages texts that I make available to my students and anyone else interested. It’s not really a membership kind of thing tho.

> But wouldn’t you agree that if I run a private professional library, I have the right to add or remove books by any (legal) process I deem appropriate?

Of course. I don't think this is a question of freedom of speech or anything like that. I think this is about how Github should moderate its content in a way that is best for its users and its business. Making a Twitter profile or a YouTube channel disappear is categorically different in my mind from making a GitHub repository disappear and I think GitHub should want for me to feel that way. If I don't, it changes how and how much I use the service.

> Making a Twitter profile or a YouTube channel disappear is categorically different in my mind from making a GitHub repository disappear and I think GitHub should want for me to feel that way.

I agree it's categorically different but not in the way you mean. From your other post, I understand that you view Twitter and YouTube as social media, and they are distinct from software infrastructure like GitHub.

The way I see it, all three are social networks, but what make GitHub distinct from the other two is that it's backed by git. So if GitHub wants to ban me, I can easily move my code to any number of services. Which, honestly if you're relying on GitHub as infrastructure, you should have a backup plan anyway for if/when it goes down.

> This is social media style moderation being applied to a website that is more similar to infrastructure or a library.

I don't know anything about the immediate situation here but calling GitHub "infrastructure" is not accurate. I know every man and his dog hosts their repos there but GitHub is a private company (owned by Microsoft!) and is not obliged to host things that it thinks will make it look bad.

Private companies can be treated as infrastructure, and of course private companies are free to operate in a way that reduces faith in their reliability.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com