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by 2h 1210 days ago
I would recommend avoiding making contributions on GitHub. If you want an account for search and whatnot fine, but I had an account with hundreds of stars killed. They said it was because I created a second account. I said they could delete the second account, or I would do it. They refused to accept this suggestion and are keeping both banned.

What's worse is they also kill every single issue, PR and comment you've ever posted. It's quite cruel and unnecessary.

4 comments

Woah, what? I have a GitHub account for work, and one for personal stuff. (Separation of church and state is a good idea)

Are you saying, I could get both nuked if they find out it's the same person?

This exactly. I have three accounts, private, public, work.

GitHub asking for one account? Crazy.

When you are a platform as big as them, you can only do this so much before it crosses a line into antitrust.

Biden's Administration just hired a ton of anti-trust lawyers.

Unfortunately its a sad fact that the people making these decisions are the people who don't have the natural sense to not do this in the first place for the simple reason that the behavior drives negative sentiment and outcomes in the long run for little if any net benefit.

They need to make Executives personally liable for stuff like this, otherwise they won't learn that they can't get away (it costs them something) as opposed to a business as usual slap on the wrist with the behavior baked into sales.

This is about as far from antitrust as you can get. It’s fine to think you know things, but you don’t.
> This is about as far from antitrust you can get.

Not really, no.

No DMCA notice is posted, its simply a vague you broke our ToS but we're not going to tell you how or why so you can correct it according to the mods, and then the non-response for 9 days.

Github owns Microsoft, Microsoft has an interest in Content, IPTV like many other technologies can potentially be used by people and businesses for a wide variety of legal uses.

If a business closes an account for cause, you say why, you allow access to the maintainers to migrate (if its not a legal issue), and you keep the account closed.

If you don't say why, block access immediately, and don't provide a legitimate reason, you could be in violation of the Sherman act either directly, or more often via third-party liability when it comes to open source.

I'm not a lawyer, but I know that much, its far from clear that its not antitrust, and on a more personal note, you should be more careful with those snipes. Its against the HN ToS after all.

There must be more to this situation?
What would you recommend instead?
anything that is self-hosted is not gonna go down by way of someone else you have no control over