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GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

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Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#401

Post by derefr »

honestcoyote wrote: post #289
vidarh wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a white middle-aged male, Tumblr is the only place I've experienced what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism. It's quite fascinating to see just how vile some of it gets. Of course it is only fascinating to me because I can trivially withdraw from it and not be particularly affected.

My point about Tumblr is that it's a huge site containing a lot of blogs. Seems like half (or over half) is porn. Most of the other half seems dedicated to rabid fanbases of various bits of pop culture. There's some politics like everywhere else on the net, but I have no idea why so many people here, including my downvoters, think it's this despicable bastion of frothy far leftism when that's only a small part of it.…

It's the social "flows" of the sites that differentiate them. On Reddit, you subscribe to a number of communities, and then you only see content that a bunch of people agree fits those communities' standards. On Tumblr, you subscribe to a bunch of individuals' blogs, where those bloggers all have 1. a very simple/encouraged inbuilt mechanism for sharing things they see from their own subscriptions onto their own blog, and 2. a culture of "signal-boosting"—a term loosely meaning "passing along chain letters", or more generally, sharing something they wouldn't have posted for its own sake, with an audience that didn't sign up for such content, because "it's important that this spread until it reaches the people who are affected by it." As if it were a local weather emergency or an amber alert or something.

The combined result is that, on Tumblr, you'll subscribe to people for one thing, and then inevitably they'll "signal-boost" other things into your feed that you didn't sign up for. The most often "signal-boosted" thing is Social Justice discourse. This is why people get the impression Tumblr is a Social Justice website: if you subscribe to blogs about porn, cats, and tech, you'll end up with a dashboard containing porn, cats, tech, and "signal-boosted" Social Justice.

Personally, my problem isn't with Social Justice, but with "signal-boosting" itself. I (very carefully) use Tumblr, and enjoy doing so, but only by strictly following a policy of unsubscribing from any blog that "signal-boosts" anything. I think this means that I end up following only blogs that are completely disconnected from Tumblr's social graph, though, so I don't know how precisely I can be said to be "using Tumblr" at this point, rather than just being subscribed to some blogs that happen to be hosted there.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#402

Post by TheBakaAniki »

venomsnake wrote: post #144
morgante wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub has, since the Horvath incident, made it pretty clear what kind of person they want to hire. And, frankly, that's fine. There are plenty of places where I, as a competent white male, can get hired and promoted without difficulty. The fact that Github isn't one of those is not a systematic problem. More power to them.

No it is not. Either we are all allowed to discriminate or none at all. If only some must have power to discriminate - I prefer the status quo. Since I like the white male privilege. I am fine with society without privilege. I will fight tooth and nail against one in which my privilege is transferred to someone else.

I wouldn't mind transferring my "privilege" whatever that is supposed to mean. Actually I would laugh at them. This "privilege" thing doesn't make me happy. Even if a lack of "privilege" would make me unhappy I don't care. I already am. The real world is a shitty place. Nothing here is worth living for.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#403

Post by hitekker »

malandrew wrote: post #377
samps wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly shocked at the lack of empathy on display in this comment thread. The technology world has a diversity problem—why not assume that this is a good-faith effort to address it, just expressed in words you don't like? Why instead flip directly into Internet Outrage Status? This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are p…

Did you read that slide and the comments others have made addressing it? Even after going through some seriously generous contortions to assume good faith, it's racist and alarming. I also don't think your comment extends good faith you are demanding to the comment and commenters which you're addressing. there are people complaining about the very notion that there might be something wrong with how hiring and promoti…

Comments like the one you replied to, threaten to derail our discourse with the distortions you've already pointed out.

Comments like yours, on the other hand, are the reason I come to HN. Measured rebuttals without being too biased one way or the other-- it really enhances the reading experience of those going through this thread.

It's hard to convey my appreciation through an upvote, since that can be confused for just popularity, so I had to say it here.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#404

Post by emehrkay »

There is a lot of anger in this thread. I understand. Honest question though: how much of it isn't coming from white men? I ask because the tone of what is causing this anger has been publicly said, and masked as "culture" and other phrases, about women and people of color for a very long time.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#405

Post by igotratelimited »

igotratelimited wrote: post #384
brighteyes wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "This is not work for white folks to lead" > Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit. But on the other, 1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian…

"...you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people." It's not purely about representation, although that is important too. It's about centuries of white dominance. A couple decades of people of Asian descent having a strong presence in an industry isn't enough. How many of those overrepresented Asians are holding positions of senior le…

Getting quickly down-voted for a thoughtful comment.

White fragility is real.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#406

Post by defen »

gyardley wrote: post #355

What an utter mess of a thread. Look, social experiments of the sort taking place at GitHub are good things - they can teach us something. If their policies make the organization stronger, that's awesome - we get a stronger GitHub. If their policies end up damaging the organization, that's also awesome - because it'll become evident they're bad policies, and companies will stop implementing them. Everyone just sit ba…

> If their policies end up damaging the organization, that's also awesome - because it'll become evident they're bad policies, and companies will stop implementing them.

I'm a bit more cynical - if it fails, I suspect the failure will be blamed on "wreckers".

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#409

Post by brighteyes »

igotratelimited wrote: post #384
brighteyes wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - "This is not work for white folks to lead" > Well, it's not. It's kind of missing the point if your diversity initiative is being run by white people. On the one hand, sure, it would be odd if it were entirely led by a group of people that the initiative is not meant to directly benefit. But on the other, 1. The title implies it is white people that must be left out of leadership there. It does not mention Asian…

"...you should have a similar objection to an Asian person. Not having that mentioned can't help but seem racist against white people." It's not purely about representation, although that is important too. It's about centuries of white dominance. A couple decades of people of Asian descent having a strong presence in an industry isn't enough. How many of those overrepresented Asians are holding positions of senior le…

The historical question has to address the current facts on the ground, though. Those centuries matter in some ways, for example, in currently poverty rates among black people, for example, which are a disgrace to the US. But how do those centuries justify focusing only on white people in that slide, if the goal of the slide is diversity?

I didn't miss "to lead", I referred to it. My point is that no matter the position - rank and file, or leadership; technical or non-technical; etc. etc. - it is never ok to say "this position is not for [race of gender X]". It's just wrong.

Again, it's fine to say "it would be helpful to have a presence of [group X] here". That focuses on the positive, doesn't exclude a specific group, and there are valid reasons to indeed want a presence of underrepresented minorities, because it's about them.

In other words, this entire initiative could be done in a non-racist way.

Re: GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart

#410

Post by samps »

colmvp wrote: post #373
samps wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly shocked at the lack of empathy on display in this comment thread. The technology world has a diversity problem—why not assume that this is a good-faith effort to address it, just expressed in words you don't like? Why instead flip directly into Internet Outrage Status? This kind of outpouring of rage, to be frank, is why Hacker News has such a bad reputation. Look around at the comments here: there are p…

Personally it irks me that tech has excellent representation of diversity in the forms of people of colour, specifically Asians from different a diverse set of backgrounds, yet they don't count in the tally of diversity.

Yes, that's worth celebrating!

But we also have to remember that, to someone not in those well-represented groups, it's not a huge consolation. Diversity isn't a floating-point number between 0.0 and 1.0.

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