Comment 2T5B Re: What?

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Github staff Jake Boxer disables #GamerGate operation disrespectful nod repository

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What? (Score: 1, Interesting)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 07:12 (#2T3S)

Last night (October 3) Github developer Jake Boxer disabled the GamerGate github repository containing documents for "Operation Disrespectful Nod". Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago. Here's a link to an image of the removal request for if/when the original tweet is eventually removed.
What?

OK, there is someone named Jake. There was a github repo. There were documents? There is something called "Operation Disrespectful Nod"?

"Which contained documents for a letter writing campaign to advertisers for the publishers of the game media articles declaring gamers dead just over a month ago." is not a sentence. Or at least is a horrible one. But specifically:

documents for a letter writing campaign (what does that mean?)
to advertisers (so - letters to advertisers?)
for the publishers of game media articles (so... uh... game mags and/or review websites?)
declaring gamers dead (nope - you lost me. are all gamers dead? I'm not dead, so I don't think that's what you mean.)
just over a month ago. (uh... something happened just over a month ago. No link. Did gamers die? Or was the repo deleted? Or was that when the repo was created? Huh?)

After clicking a few links, none of this is much clearer - except there is lots of drama. Most of it sounds mostly imagined.

GitHub was hosting a public repo that they didn't want to host, so they nuked it. So... "free service refuses service to someone." News at 11?

Re: What? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 09:33 (#2T3V)

GitHub was hosting a public repo that they didn't want to host, so they nuked it. So... "free service refuses service to someone." News at 11?
You are totally right. GitHub is a private company and can host whatever it wants. GitHub can be biased. GitHub can play it save. GitHub can pamper PC. GitHub can pull whatever it wants. TOS violation or not. But just wave this away with "News at 11"?

pipdedot is a privately funded public discussion website. It is totally withing the rights of the maintainer to ban the user kwerle, even though he did not anything wrong, did not violate pipedot's TOS in any way. But... the owners here have any right to be biased. If they want you gone, they can ban you on a whim. If this happens.... News at 12?

Re: What? (Score: 1)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 18:12 (#2T44)

pipdedot is a privately funded public discussion website. It is totally withing the rights of the maintainer to ban the user kwerle, even though he did not [do] anything wrong, did not violate pipedot's TOS in any way. But... the owners here have any right to be biased. If they want you gone, they can ban you on a whim. If this happens.... News at 12?
I guess 'wrong' is in the eyes of the beholder. The notion is that everyone thinks they're in the right.

I think that it is beyond the scope of any TOS to define everything that could be interpreted as 'wrong'. At least I hope so, because I never read 'em, anyway.

But here is my direct response in brief: I hope that pipedot bans users that it feels have done wrong. I don't come here to read ads, hateful crap from assholes, sort through base64 binary encoded warez, or any number of other things. I come here to read geek news. So, yeah, ban 'em. Or me.

Finally - WTF was the original article about?

Re: What? (Score: 2, Insightful)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-10-05 19:08 (#2T47)

I disagree, I see pipedot as a place for us to not only read news, but to discuss it and share ideas. You might not like what others have to say, but when we start censoring some where do we draw the line. What if, just as example, Bryan is pro Gamer Gate and he doesn't like you bad mouthing it? Should you be banned? I don't think so. It comes down to what constitutes as "wrong" and who makes that decision. It shouldn't just be arbitrarily left up to an individual.

Gamer Gate isn't a hate campaign BTW, censorship of people talking about it is part of the reason it exists. Problem being the game media has the platform to say what they want and gamers are already an easy target to demonized. 4Chan, Reddit, all Game media forms pretty much banned and censor discussion of it. So there's no way to spread the message that the movement isn't actually harassing the people the media says it is. The Escapist was allowing discussion, after they updated their code of ethics because of the movement, but they were DDoS and had to drop the form. Twitter and Facebook are the only place now where people can talk and organize.

I submitted some incoherent rambling with lots of links to various things to Soylent and it was rejected... probably because I'm a terrible writer, I don't think they're trying to censor it.

The break down is there's a huge amount of positive along with the negatives going on and a lot of tangential things happening. Game media declared gamers dead. Gamers came together, conservatives, liberals, black, white, male, female, everything in between. Women and minorities formed #NotYourShield to stand up for cis-white-male gamers that were being demonized in the press. The Fine Young Capitalists raised $20,000 to get women into game development with Gamer Gates help. Wikipedia is having a huge editor war over the "Gamer Gate Controversy" page, and it's getting uglier by the day because most of the sources wiki uses are bias and basically reporting on and parroting each others bias articles. Anita Sarkeesian allegedly faked threats to herself to get in on the publicity, otherwise I have no idea why she keeps getting brought up as being harassed, She has nothing to do with anything, but 4Chan practically ripped itself apart when M00t banned discussion during the XOXO conference where he attended a talk by Anita Sarkeesian (can talk about CP and rape, not Gamer Gate). Julian Assange was on reddit and someone was shadow banned right in front of him for asking a question related to censorship of #GamerGate. Kickstarter Mighty Number 9 project's community manager banned people from their forums after they pledged hundreds of dollars for the project. People started a charge back campaign, and are actually getting money back. Several media sites revisited their code of ethics, only the Escapist to my knowledge made and significant changes. 8Chan was formed. Several new game sites sprung to life. Steam updated it's ToS so Curations (I think that's what they're called) have to disclose any monetary/personal connections. Intel pulled ads from Gamasutra. Linux dev threw a fit over it and refuses to update Linux kernel for Intel fixes. Git disabled the Gamer Gate repo.

Despite all that's already been accomplished people still think it's a hate campaign against Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian.

The article was about the fact that a large group of people trying to make a difference were using a public service, not violating ToS, and with a single tweet from someone opposing the group had the repository shut down. It has significant impact on software developers who use the service to host code for any number of projects that could be susceptible to a tweet from opposition or competition.

Re: What? (Score: 1)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 03:22 (#2T4G)

The article was about the fact that a large group of people trying to make a difference were using a public service, not violating ToS, and with a single tweet from someone opposing the group had the repository shut down. It has significant impact on software developers who use the service to host code for any number of projects that could be susceptible to a tweet from opposition or competition.
No, it doesn't. It has no effect, whatsoever. I am one of those developers.

Re: What? (Score: 1)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 10:45 (#2T4R)

I'm a dev that uses Git as well and it seems pretty important to me, others think so too.

Re: What? (Score: 1)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 14:44 (#2T4V)

Seriously? You gonna do anything about it?

Honestly, it hasn't even registered enough on their radar for them to blog post on the matter.

Re: What? (Score: 1)

by vanderhoth@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 15:46 (#2T4X)

I'm in discussions with my organization now about moving to either another service or an internal Git server. Oddly enough I wasn't the one who brought it up, but more than half of over a hundred the devs are on board. The main admin is looking at it as though it'll be a huge headache. A few have voiced concerns about not supporting Github and how that might reflect on our organization and project.

Github isn't going to blog about using ideological reasoning to remove a repository on the basis of of it being a harassment campaign. Anyone that takes this at more than face value is going to see it's not a harassment campaign and Github devs are using personal agendas to make decisions on what stays and goes.

Re: What? (Score: 1, Insightful)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 18:42 (#2T4Z)

I'm in discussions with my organization now about moving to either another service or an internal Git server.
... because GitHub removed a non-code related repo that recommended social/political actions not related to coding. I think y'all need a hobby. Or maybe you've found one.
The main admin is looking at it as though it'll be a huge headache.
To move to another git host? I think maybe you need a new admin.
Github isn't going to blog about using ideological reasoning to remove a repository on the basis of of it being a harassment campaign.
Pretty sure they're not going to address it because it's a non-issue.
Anyone that takes this at more than face value is going to see it's not a harassment campaign and Github devs are using personal agendas to make decisions on what stays and goes.
Are they? How do you figure?

Re: What? (Score: 3, Insightful)

by skarjak@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 19:48 (#2T51)

I find it interesting that you claimed this would have no impact on developpers, then one comes forwards to say it does affect him, and now you're just arguing and nitpicking. There's really no need to argue here. At least one developper has come forward to say it will bother him, therefore the claim that this will not affect any developper is objectively wrong.

Re: What? (Score: 0)

by kwerle@pipedot.org on 2014-10-06 21:35 (#2T56)

So... The effect is that one developer is thinking about leaving?

OK, how about 'virtually no effect?'

Re: What? (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-06 22:20 (#2T5B)

It's more than one developer leaving. It's also all of the developers and organizations who will never use GitHub going forward thanks to the total uncertainty that this debacle has caused.

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2014-10-07 13:31 Insightful +1 vanderhoth@pipedot.org

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by bryan@pipedot.org on 2015-01-02 05:35