The meme/troll issues were edgy teen style humor and not that funny, but the legitimate ones that tried to gently explain what rebase does and went completely ignored were funny because they felt surreal and hyperreal at the same time. Office-Space-esque comedy.
That's just the reality of any platform that doesn't gatekeep who gets to participate. Eventually assholes are going to join, that's simply unavoidable.
> Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.
> Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)
Pacifism only works if there is someone who can protect the pacifist.
In the Christian religion, God ultimately protects the virtuous pacifists by putting them in Heaven, away from bullies. In an online forum, there's no transcendental force to render such a service, so...
That’s rose coloured. Maybe people were more intelligent, but even 10 years ago people would absolutely flame each other in GitHub issues on public projects.
I suspect the author is thinking back to more than ten years ago.
But yes; even newsgroups, BBSes, etc. were subject to this kind of stuff. People have always been people, even smart people with money to purchase computers.
GitHub doesn't provide nearly enough tools for moderation though. Like restricting issue creation, comments, and discussions to only certain folks (beyond the per-issue controls).
> GitHub doesn't provide nearly enough tools for moderation though
Which in itself would summon the vitriol of the super-trolls. "Moderation is censorship" is the most absolutely ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
Moderation is censorship, because moderation is an editorial choice. The fallacy is that all censorship is bad, not that moderation is censorship. Not all content needs to be given consideration in all contexts. In fact, if that were somehow an inherent good, actual communication would be impossible as noise overtakes signal.
It's fine both to "moderate" your own repo, as well as to "censor" your own repo. No need to play word games or demand that strangers that you owe absolutely nothing to can't be upset. They can be upset, and you can ignore them until they go away.
>Which in itself would summon the vitriol of the super-trolls. "Moderation is censorship" is the most absolutely ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
Even worse is "moderation of this kind would disproportionately impact disenfranchised LGBTWBIPOC+ users since they're more likely to have new accounts", "gatekeeping" is therefore racist, etc. ad nauseam.
That's for sure is the most absolutely ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
Sure, but then there's also the reality that people who don't want to deal with assholes and trolls will pack up and leave. So IMO it's best to combat it and not normalize it, so that we can have more nice things.
Use the report feature. I've gotten so many accounts removed from the platform for abuse.
Sometimes I wonder though why GitHub allows like an anonymous account with no projects and no followers to do things like upload executables to my issue tracker, or file a dozen new issues on a project with 160+ watchers. Then there's the people who use AI to fill their profiles with fake content to look less sus. It's particularly spicy when you work for a non-profit that puts a lot of oversight into decisions like banning people. I think Microsoft could be doing more to make sure the people who participate in the GitHub community are openly original and have good intentions.
The net all over made it clear well over a decade ago that we won't get any serious moderation past a certain critical mass. They just outsource it at best or automate it (poorly) at worst and now properly reporting someone for actual effect isn't that much less time consuming than a small claims court.
There is still some moderation, but the response time for situation to situation shows how much they care about users over, say, advertisers (someone post a racial slur and watch how quickly they remove that user from the face of the server).
Putting anything to a public environment, always assume an actively hostile environment. No matter how many well-meaning users you may have; if it's more then a handful, there will always be enough jerks who would try to ruin the show for everyone.
To my mind, premoderation is the way. Any new user's submissions go to the premoderation queue for review, not otherwise visible. Noise and spam can be rejected automatically. More underhanded stuff gets a manual review. All rejections are silent, except for the rare occasion of a legitimate but naive user making an honest mistake.
What's passed gets published. Users who passed premoderation without issues for, say, 10 times, skip the human review step, given that they've passed automatic filters, so they can talk without any perceptible delay. The most trusted of them even get the privilege to do the human review step themselves %)
One thing I wish the tech companies would do is to use LLMs for junk moderation. At least to flag potential junk.
Meta uses they LLMs to summarize comments already and can do this, yet they choose to allow obvious crypto scammers, T-shirt scams, “hey add me comments”.
A simple LLM prompt of “is this post possibly a scam”, especially for new accounts, would do wonders. GitHub could likely do it too.
I run an app that Serves a small, specific demographic.
We get about 50% [obvious] spam/scam signups (only 5 or 6 a day).
That’s pretty sobering, when you consider that it’s a very low-profile, unpromoted, region-locked (US, Canada, Ireland, and India), iOS-only native app.
Same here. I run a tiny Wordpress site that organizes private poker games for a local ~40 person league. We get maybe 5 signups a year from actual new members. We have it so that only admins can create new user accounts.
Once, that option got turned off accidentally and anyone could sign up. We got about 10 signups a day until I reverted the change, all spammers and bots.
The server logs also show that we get hit by script kiddies dozens of times an hour. This is such a tiny scale operation, with no meaningful commercial activity going on, but anything exposed to the public internet should be considered under attack 24/7.
That's the fundamental platform with all online platforms. It's their own form of carcinization.
The problem is that to outsiders, the initial set of gatekeepers who arose naturally in the early community as "the people that knew what it was about" will themselves appear to be "the toxic assholes", so every community will naively eventually cut out its gatekeepers to be more inviting to newcomers.
Only to have the actual toxic assholes flood in, become the new gatekeepers, and dominate the discussion, and suddenly your Faces of Evil speedrunning Discord must have a stance on the war on Gaza and the US election because we clearly need to keep out the neo-Nazis according to our CoCs, right?
And no, I don't have an answer to this other than to largely disconnect from online platforms and start engaging in your local community. Something I myself am not guilty of doing.
Most people aren't trying to be "useful". They're trying to be funny or get attention. For something as mainstream popular as this was, you can bet you'll get more jokers than aces.
You'd think "clout" would matter less to a community of tech, especially on a place dedicated to communities (hopefully) bettering the tech we use. But alas, people doing this probably don't think much farther than 15 minutes.