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Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#761

Post by [deleted] »

jka wrote: post #463
anm89 wrote: post #129

I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal mea…

The trouble with libertarianism is, ultimately, that libertarians only care about themselves. The kind of policy that GitLab is proposing here is fine - or even aspirational, under a certain lens - until one day you wake up and find that the same software is being used to destroy your community and compatriots. How could that happen? Isn't this free speech to max utility? Isn't that flawless? No, it's free utility to…

[deleted]

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#762

Post by m463 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #326
neonate wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company.…

The phone company analogy doesn't really work, because phone calls are by default private, between exactly two parties, usually just two people. If you look at the tech company equivalent of that, like FB messenger, or Hangouts, or other messaging systems, they behave more similarly to the phone company. It'd be difficult to get in trouble for something you said in a private message. If you want the analogy to make s…

I think you're correct -- a phone call is one-to-one and the internet is a broadcast medium.

I believe radio (as in ham radio) actually has FCC rules regarding identification and profanity.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#763

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

jyrkesh wrote: post #430
Mvandenbergh wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with at least Facebook and Twitter (and possibly Google) in this analysis is that their attention-grabbing model requires them to analyse and interfere with the data which is coming through their systems. The only way not to do that would be for FB timelines and Twitter feeds to be strictly sequential feeds which at some point in the past they may have been but they are not now. Once you start basing your…

Exactly. At face value, I'm firmly in favor of what Ravikant was saying, but even the simple example of a spam filter proves how it's impossible in practice: without basic spam filtering, something like Twitter would be absolutely unusable in the face of endless crypto and malware spam. At some level, Twitter/FB/et al have to do SOMETHING to shape/filter the volume of traffic they receive.

That's interesting because we desperately need spam filtering on our phones right now.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#764

Post by austincheney »

jka wrote: post #463
anm89 wrote: post #129

I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal mea…

The trouble with libertarianism is, ultimately, that libertarians only care about themselves. The kind of policy that GitLab is proposing here is fine - or even aspirational, under a certain lens - until one day you wake up and find that the same software is being used to destroy your community and compatriots. How could that happen? Isn't this free speech to max utility? Isn't that flawless? No, it's free utility to…

> The trouble with libertarianism is, ultimately, that libertarians only care about themselves.

I am wondering on what you base this line of thinking? Do you have any examples where persons advocating for liberty are acting primarily out of self interest?

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#766

Post by LeftHandPath »

anarchodev wrote: post #331
anm89 wrote: post #129

I personally think this is awesome. I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product. If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal mea…

> I don't wan't some git hosting startup to be the arbiter of morality for society. The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use othe…

> Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used.

I think we're getting to the core of it here. [The law's opinion isn't clear yet, but it appears to lean in this direction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...) GitLab's decision may not be adequate - but it could help dodge a bullet or two while the law sorts itself out.

> "The problem with the whole 'activism' mindset is it doesn't actually target the people who created the problem, it just creates lots of noise – and the problem with noise is facts get lost," Fellows said.

The responsible thing to do is to refuse to play ball. If they claimed to be actively vetting content and something slipped through the cracks, it could be more legitimately portrayed as an endorsement than something that occurred with a Laissez-Faire policy in place.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#767

Post by amiga-workbench »

bluntfang wrote: post #656
Smithalicious wrote: post #130

Good, this makes me glad to be using Gitlab. Gives me confidence that I can rely on them even if I ever get into hot water politically. I also think that it's good to assert that yes, it's fine for a git host to just host people's repositories and not have to be in charge of making moral judgements. We have other tools for judging morality; things so immoral that society shouldn't allow them should be handled by the…

>Gives me confidence that I can rely on them even if I ever get into hot water politically. Rely on them for what, exactly? What makes you think they would bend for you and not this other political entity that has you in hot water?

>Rely on them for what, exactly?

It's nice to know they're not going to cave to a gaggle of Twitter blue checkmarks.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#768

Post by ineedasername »

There's really two mandates to workers here:

1: Don't discuss politics at work. This seems reasonable, when the discussion has a good chance of getting heated and making it more difficult to work with colleagues.

2: Don't vet potential customers (in part because it might get political)

This second one is less defensible. Avoiding politics is fine when it's unrelated to the work, but when it intrudes on work, it becomes relevant, and avoiding the issue is a lapse of ethical responsibility. That people might disagree on the boundaries of that responsibility is precisely why the discussions are needed.

I'm not saying this is easy, that it won't lead to conflict, but it can be done in a structured fashion that minimizes the ability for conversation to blow up into flame wars. Again, not easy, but necessary to avoid abdicating moral responsibility for your actions.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#769

Post by soulofmischief »

At the end of the day, you can either put your customers first, or your employees. Gitlab has made their choice. Microsoft has made their choice.

Cancel culture is cancerous, but this is a case where if I can avoid Gitlab, I will, on the grounds that I wouldn't want to recommend them to another entity given their CEO's readiness to do business with the worst scum on the planet.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#770

Post by natmaka »

nostrademons wrote: post #578
neonate wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it. Here's the main part of what Naval says: "If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company.…

They did this for many years - when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2009 tech's attitude was "We just provide the mechanism, we let our users determine policy". My first couple years at Google (09-10), management was very insistent that "We don't take sides - we show the user the best result for their query regardless of how much we dislike it." There were examples like literal searches for Nazis where the top result wa…

> Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness"

It leads to the "deplatforming" approach, i.e. not only refusing to provide a neutral publishing platform (or assimilated-related tools), but also to actively fight against those who do so.

'Be careful what you wish for', indeed.

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