zlacker

No, it’s not fair. Banning a repo should be taken as seriously as banning a book. Living in a country that is US where github HQ is hosted, freedom of speech should be prized and cared for dearly. For a commercial company, there should be only one reason to ban a repo and that is to abide with a law. For even that company should do everything in its power to prevent that or provide a viable lawful alternative. This should be taken so seriously that each ban should have been reviewed at CEO level. GitHub CEO saying he has no clue, it’s a scale issue and “mistakes are made” is not really acceptable.

>>sytelu+(OP)
I appreciate the idealism here, but the reality is that trying to run a business under the pretense of free speech absolutism can alienate an otherwise profitable market segment. With the loss of that market segment likely comes the grumbling of investors, to whom ultimately the executive management is beholden.

Grumbly investors beget grumbly board members, who then vote to oust executives to correct the profitability problem.

>>nrr+94
> can alienate an otherwise profitable market segment

How are you going to alienate/lose customers by not getting rid of customers? If anything, I'd argue the opposite; a platform that refuses to ban legal content is one that I find easier to trust (for a counterexample, see Google). It's not even like github-like companies are social networks where you can claim that one user's experience of the platform is made worse by another user's posts.

>>yjftsj+E4
We all know that the most vocal on the left, who want to silence anyone who doesn't pander to their political ideals, pressure public companies, advertisers, etc. to 'cancel' those who refuse to go along - drop their advertising, cut off their servers, purge their DNS, ban their accounts, shame them relentlessly until they disappear.

Most US companies these days have no morals, and are easily influenced by these tactics due to greed and fear of being targeted themselves. Silicon Valley and the majority of the big tech companies seem to be especially vulnerable to this, probably due to their own employee demographics.

What many of these companies don't understand, possibly because they live in a relative 'bubble' surrounded by those who think similarly, is that there are a lot of us out there who not only disagree with this type of behavior, but will actively NOT use the services of any company who supports these types of tactics.

>>hiram1+Bm
Sure, but that "lot of us" out there is a much smaller and usually much rowdier group of users that time and time again companies have been happy to wash their hands of. You're not profitable enough (and I'm not even getting started on the morality or ethics side of this).

>>hiram1+Bm
https://xkcd.com/1357/

>>bastar+mE
This comic is abused so much that I wonder if Randall would ever consider a follow-up poking fun at how it's wielded. It's meaningless in a normative, rather than legal, conversation such as this one.

>>nrr+94
You making the argument that to make some religious customers/investors happy, it's ok to mistreat LGBTs. After all, they are such minority segment and, you know, we are all here just for shareholder wealth maximization.

>>nrr+94
I think this is the most sensible answer here. My sibling comments are attempting to draw analogies to other types of censorship of minority groups which don't strike me as apt.

IMO you correctly summarized the forces they are dealing with. These people are just trying to make money. Idealism is problematic for the people invested in the company that aren't there for idealism, but money.

>>meowfa+hF
I think Munroe very much approves of it's abuse, when coming from the correct political side.

>>sytelu+0I
Where did GP make that argument?

>>sytelu+(OP)
"Banning a book" colloquially means that nobody is allowed to read that book, it conjures images of book burnings and the gestapo searching your house for contraband. "Banning" a repo here means, "Github is not offering you free resources to develop your code. Fortunately, you're using a distributed source control management scheme so everyone has a backup. Please take it elsewhere."

>>jannot+ez1
In theory, yes. In practice, your github repo is more like a domain name. There should be due process.

>>girvo+iE
I have assumed that many tech companies, especially in California and other liberal strongholds, hold this opinion. Like I said, they live in their insular bubbles, and imagine that the rest of the country is either deplorable and poor or they share their views.

Meanwhile, I work in a relatively conservative industry that also happens to have one of the largest budgets of any 'company' in the world. I have seen first hand when vendors were being evaluated for multi-million (or even billion) dollar projects, both Google and Github being crossed off the list without a second thought due to some of the publicly made political statements and actions of their executives and employees.

>>hiram1+Bm
Why do people always feel the need to bring "the left" into this? Wanting to silence people who disagree with you has nothing to do with either the original definition of "left" or the parties considered "left" these days.

The same kinds of "censorship" that you talk about coming from "the left" can be found in extreme parts of every ideology. Conservatives (probably of the rich and christian variety) have pushed many platforms to completely remove all even slightly adult content (the latest example being Tumblr), all sides of the political spectrum have been pressuring sites like YouTube to the point where no political discussion from any side can be monetized...

This is not an issue of political sides - it's an issue of politics (and society) in general.

As for the part about companies not knowing about the people who don't approve of this behaviour: they do. They know exactly how many of us there are: not enough. Losing even a single big investor will make a company lose more money than if everyone who disagreed with them completely stopped using their services.

>>hiram1+Bm
You aren't the customers in this situation. For every 10,000 of you who don't pay even pay GitHub the $7/mo for a subscription, there's a 3000-seat behemoth who pays $70k/mo for a GitHub Enterprise license.

You're principled minnows to that one profitable shark.

These companies understand profit, and that's where they derive their morality. I'd say it's probably more accurate that most US companies simply don't share your morals, not that they don't have morals at all.

Follow the money. This is a much more useful lens to analyze the situation than to consider the left/right political spectrum.