Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#871

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

neonate wrote: post #280

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…

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 problem wasn't so much about "taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed." More problematic wa sthe fact that, in the case of Facebook, their algorithms promoted content that was more "engaging" (read: controversial), so basically the whole system turned out to be optimized for fake news.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#872

Post by Jack5500 » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:20 AM UTC

neonate wrote: post #280

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…

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.…

This has actually been the law in i.e. Germany and I think many other countries as well. As long as the platform doesn't interfere with the content (§ 8 Abs. 1 TMG) they are directly accountable for the content (Which doesn't mean that they don't have to take it down in case of an infringement for example). But as soon as they moderate said content they are legally liable. And this is exactly what social media platforms have done and that is one reason why they are responsible for their content now. This is of course only one part of the truth, because at the same time there has been a shift in perception of these platforms and other laws (i.e. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz) have been specifically aimed at social media platforms to hold them accountable.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#873

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:22 AM UTC

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #334

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 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…

> 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.

Not to mention a completely different topic - ads for scams. When I create a new ad on FB, they keep it in review for at least a couple of hours. But every day I see dozens of ads that are obviously dishonest. Some financial scams, ads for some fishy schemes, some of them badly translated.

When you are a publisher and accept an ad, obviously it's very tempting to claim all responsibility is with the advertiser (it is not, although details vary between jurisdictions). But even if you didn't have any responsibility legally, it still feels terribly wrong from the ethical point of view to get rich by helping scammers cheat some poor chaps of their money.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#874

Post by manfredo » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:29 AM UTC

fzeroracer wrote: post #685

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to call women in tech initiatives nonpolitical. There's no significant political opposition to them; things like the INSPIRE Women Act (the women in tech initiative for NASA) regularly get passed with no real debate.

If it was non-political, then you would expect to see no debates on the issue. Given that there was a post here on HN [1] about an initiative for women devolving into flamebait and arguments about reverse sexism, I think one cannot say it's non-political. As most things are political. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19464269

> about an initiative for women devolving into flamebait and arguments about reverse sexism, I think one cannot say it's non-political. As most things are political.

More specifically, an initiate that explicitly excluded non-females elicited comments that said this program was sexist and exclusionary.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#875

Post by alkonaut » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:29 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #370

alkonaut wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely right. Saying “don’t talk politics at work” seems to assume that politics is something that goes on on the outside. A stream of news on divisive topics. In reality, politics happens everywhere and you can’t really avoid talking about it. “Don’t talk about politics not relevant for the workplace” could be reasonable (most poltics is after all not related).

To me this (news not your comment) sounds like a very slippery slope. What happened to freedom of speech? And who is to decide what is "political" what is not? As long as speech is not offensive, I think it should be protected.

Agree - and workplace rules shouldn’t be “don’t talk about X” but rather ”please avoid talking about X unless strictly necessary.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#876

Post by DATACOMMANDER » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #660

Has anyone read the pull request ? For those that didn't, here it is: + We do business with customers with values that are incompatible with [our own values](/handbook/values/) for the following reasons: + + 1. Our mission is 'everyone can contribute', while there is a [code of conduct for contributing](https://about.gitlab.com/community/contribute/code-of-conduct/) we want to get as close to everyone as possible. +…

What part of the world do you live in, where there’s a real risk of a white supremacist politician receiving even 1% of 1% of the popular vote?

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#877

Post by ojosilva » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

HN to me is the ideal model of modern, democratic publisher for the times we live in. Content here is self-moderated and slightly editorialized. The community strives for a civil, educated debate and penalizes who doesn't follow suit. I don't know if HN would scale in a larger context, like in FB/Twitter feed scale, or on more personal networks ie Whatsapp or Telegram. Also comment sections of newspapers or Youtube should have a more HN-like moderation and overall charter to make it more civil.

It really drives me nuts to not be able to vote or moderate down or my family members that publish fake news to Whatsapp, or read racist and mysogenist comments in YouTube that seems to persist regardless of downvoting and flagging.

It sounds idealistic, but I really think the world would be a much better place if the HN culture and processes could be somehow automated and embedded into public and private threads everywhere as some sort of nearly inescapable standard.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#878

Post by mixmastamyk » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:38 AM UTC

mixmastamyk wrote: post #829

unscrupulous_sw wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to chime in, I also unknowingly got myself labeled sexist when the topic came up during a random lunch with "friends" (company provided lunch so it had random people from HR and recruiting). Somehow or another the topic of whether going for 50/50 will "lower the bar". So I started thinking about the problem mathematically like any engineer would, with statistical distributions and estimates of the existing pipel…

I don't support or discourage your argument in this case. I'll just make a very important point that many young folks take (and my younger self took) a while to grasp… There are a number of sensitive issues where stark logic and "inconvenient" facts are very much not appreciated. Best to avoid them in polite discussion. Given that most social issues are not cut and dry, there is difficulty in finding the logical answ…

For an example, see the results of RMS' recent pedantic take on the Epstein case.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#879

Post by sam1r » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

neonate wrote: post #280

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…

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.…

"Wow, that is such a clear analysis that someone should transcribe it."

There's no way the three could have predicted the show that would have been put on today.

Just like we couldn't have predicted the massive impact iphones/android [steve jobs + android] would have had in the past decade on today's society.

My two cents, i guess.

Re: Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

#880

Post by memmcgee » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

It seems no one has yet mentioned the potential illegality of this policy. The rights of employees to discuss their working conditions at work, a largely political discussion, is protected by the NLRA. Google got whacked by the NLRB for their ban on political discussion as well.