
GitHub: Block the Bullies - remi
https://github.com/blog/862-block-the-bullies
======
jz
Background: <http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1306816425.html>

In all fairness, the guy was being a dick (no pun intended) to Zed. However,
Zed should have kept the insults to the troll and left Github, Powerset,
Engine Yard, and the Ruby community out.

~~~
gaius
How does anyone in the Ruby "community" have the time to get any actual work
done?

No other language community _in the world_ behaves like this.

~~~
forensic
The value proposition of the Ruby community has more to do with their
mindshare than their technical merit.

Compare and contrast Scientology with Psychiatry. Both communities make
similar value propositions: improve mental health.

Scientology is optimized to gain and keep converts and to spread like a viral
meme.

Psychiatry is optimized to achieve good treatment outcomes.

Scientology makes more money despite being a less effective form of therapy.

Virality itself is adaptive, so the Ruby community thrives and survives
despite being a mediocre technology. Everything about ruby is optimized for
gaining converts, attention and cohesion. Hard technical merit is less
important in this case than community cohesion, growth, and publicity.
Flamewars bring the ruby community publicity and this leads to growth which
leads to the survival and replication of ruby.

Erlang and C++ survive on hard technical merits. They take a different
evolutionary strategy that requires less propaganda / groupthink.

Just look at the life cycle of communities as if they were a species and it
all makes sense.

~~~
randallsquared
_Scientology makes more money [than the field of psychiatry]._

This seems really questionable to me. If we assume 13 psychiatrists per 100K
people in 2005 ( <http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=523453> ),
and just count Europe and the US, that's ~80K psychiatrists, and if they
average 120K USD per year, that's nearly 10 billion USD. Scientology had a
worldwide income of less than 400 million in 1993 (
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jD-
Xo-q...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jD-Xo-
qIcRUJ:www.rickross.com/reference/scientology/history/history44.html+net+worth+of+scientology&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com)
), so it would have had to grow by 20 times to rival psychiatry circa 2005.

I think psychiatry (leaving aside everything but actual practicing
psychiatrists) probably dwarfs Scientology in total income.

~~~
forensic
Yeah you're right. I think at one point Scientology may have been richer, but
they have gone downhill it seems.

------
mycroftiv
This is a very good feature, but I am also afraid it will make Zed Shaw and
others think that his attempt to out-troll the trolls and multiply internet
drama was a force for positive change. "If you throw a big enough temper
tantrum and incite a large enough shitstorm, developers will address your
concerns" is an unfortunate precedent. The fact that controversy and
negativity attracts eyeballs and can trigger improvements is understandable,
but it also creates perverse incentives.

~~~
zedshaw
I love how you're this paragon of stoic virtue, and I'm a drama queen, yet,
here you are talking about it even more instead of ignoring it and going back
to whatever it was you were doing.

~~~
overcyn
Theres a difference between discussing the concept of "internet drama" and
actually creating "internet drama". Mycroftiv is doing the former whereas you
do the latter.

~~~
ctide
You do realize that discussing internet drama is what spurs people to create
internet drama, right?

~~~
ramchip
Citation needed. This doesn't look self-evident at all to me.

~~~
ctide
The goal of internet drama is to make the instigator and everyone they know
laugh at what they've done. The initial 'poke' will generate some of that, but
a 'successful' attack will generate days of discussion that 'everyone' laughs
at. I get that there are lots of people who don't understand this on this
forum, but, asking for citations to understand concepts that are described on
wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama>) is a bit ridiculous, don't
you agree?

------
dwlathrop
I think zed had a reasonable complaint. was he a jerk about it? maybe, but
it's a customer's prerogative to complain about a bad experience. github's
prompt response to zed has made me a happier (paying) customer. way to go!

~~~
look_lookatme
YEP! Props to Zed. After calling a bunch of people homophobes and writing some
code to engage in an asshole war within the confines of GitHub, he got a
simple feature implemented that would have probably been fast tracked with a
reasonable email.

------
getsat
Is this due to the recent drama with Zed Shaw being invited to the "DongML"
project? Very entertaining as an observer, but very annoying for Zed I'm sure.

Sad that they still haven't added a requirement that you accept an invite to
become a collaborator, or at least a profile setting on your account that
requires that confirmation.

~~~
kneath
It's interesting to me that so many people want confirmations. You can remove
yourself from any repository you wish at
<https://github.com/account/repositories> (yes, I know — this is a confusing
place. It's something I'd like to improve). But the idea is that "Confirm?
Reject." is the same number of steps/interactions as "Added. Reject."
Confirmations wouldn't make the experience any better for someone being
annoyingly added to projects. They'd just be rejecting invitations instead of
rejecting access.

As it stands, when you are added as a collaborator to a project it shows up in
exactly one place — your private, logged in dashboard. It doesn't show up
publicly anywhere.

Bypassing confirmations keeps the workflow simple for the professionals who
use GitHub and want to collaborate with ease.

~~~
kstenerud
I would disagree. If I happened to be in the job market, and my potential
employer were to look at my github profile (yes, we do look at your github
profile) and find "bigdicksucker" as one of the repos I'm apparently a
"contributor" on, well, that wouldn't look too good, would it?

~~~
mojombo
_As it stands, when you are added as a collaborator to a project it shows up
in exactly one place — your private, logged in dashboard. It doesn't show up
publicly anywhere._

You must make a contribution to a project before you show up in any kind of
public fashion.

~~~
jmaygarden
I got "dong markup" in my RSS reader from pull requests to zedshaw/mongrel2
today. So, the trolling was very much in public view.

~~~
mileszs
As Zed mentions in the article, he contributed to the project, which is why it
showed up in your RSS feed.

~~~
jmaygarden
Actually, the RSS feed was for zedshaw/mongrel2. It showed up because these
trolls were spamming pull requests to a legitimate project.

------
pufuwozu
This is GitHub's response to the (killed) article I posted yesterday:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601342>

------
chmike
The implemented solution is impressively elegant. Keep the barrier very low to
join another project and provide a mean to block undesirable subsciptions.
There is still a possibility for harrasement with multiple projects, but there
is a report to staff option now to solve it.

These are very smart, efficient and pragmatic solutions. It's also a
demonstration of what is meant by "good execution".

------
code_duck
It's a logical feature for a site with a social aspect to offer, and I'm
surprised github hadn't done so previously. I suppose the audience for the
site tends to be mature.

Good for Github for going ahead and doing it. I know of some companies who
would have dug their heels in and ignored the issue, or stubbornly maintained
that it wasn't needed.

------
16s
I'm glad Zed made this an issue. No one should be harassed like that.
Honestly, it made github look very unprofessional. I'm glad they stepped-in
and fixed it.

------
willvarfar
The profile page needs tidy up - if only it split the projects into tbose you
collaborate on,and those you are invited to collaborate on. Its just wording,
but it makes it clear that being added to a repo you haven't contributed to
will not be shown publicly.

~~~
fhars
There is somethig to that idea: you are only _invited_ to participate in a
project until you accept the invitation by actually commiting to the project.
Eveyone is happy: Nobody needs to change the code (except for resorting the
display of the projects on the private dashboard into two groups) and
participation requires an explicit confirmation. Win-win :-).

------
frou_dh
Zed just seems to react strongly to anyone who tries to intimidate him. Same
deal with all the people called out in the classic Rails post. I don't fault
him for it.

~~~
Mafana0
Would you post a link to the referred post?

~~~
frou_dh
<http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto>

~~~
Mafana0
Thank you.

------
drivingmenuts
I'm surprised that this feature wasn't in there to begin with. All social
networking (which is primarily what Github is about - the source control
really isn't anything new) should include bilateral confirmation.

What they've implemented is adequate, but I'd rather see something much
stronger, like active confirmation from both parties before being added to a
project.

------
rgbrgb
Ah, the age old enmity between nerds and bullies.

------
Fester
Now Github became a real social network.

------
senthilnayagam
convenience and privacy are the issues, github has tried to do a balancing
act.

------
sondh
That was fast!

------
mdg
I flagged this.

It wasn't submitted to let people know about the feature, it was submitted to
stir the pot.

------
joyce_ampah
Hello

------
endlessvoid94
I think this was a good response to an attention whore.

EDIT: I wasn't trolling. Not even a single response?

~~~
jonursenbach
I never understood why people absolutely loathe Zed Shaw.

~~~
redthrowaway
I don't actively loathe him, but the persona he spends so much time
cultivating is brash and irritating. It seems whenever I see his name
mentioned, it's because he's making a stink about something, rather than doing
something useful. I get that he does useful things, and LPtHW is apparently a
great resource, but he (intentionally) attracts far more attention with his
antics than his works.

The court jester may make a good point every now and then, but he's still a
clown.

~~~
zedshaw
Oh look, another anonymous troll that has exactly the same validity and
standing as my comment.

This place is awesome with the anonymous posters.

------
illumen
I wish I could block zedshaw from all of the internet. I wrote a web proxy
once which cuts out adverts - I think I could extend it to block zedshaw too.
But my proxy is old, and had bugs with some webservers.

Maybe a zedblock plugin for firefox would be cool instead?

Even better would be to just integrate it into firefox. But then you'd still
have to put up with the character whilst using other browsers.

Which means a WC3 draft would be more appropriate, so that all of the browsers
could implement it. I imagine WHATWG have already got something in the works
though. They've been doing a lot of good work with the whole html5 thing.

Does it bother anyone else that github appears to be following a Concerned
father approach here? I guess it's not that bad. Other internet forums have
moderators and such, but github isn't really about the project - but the
individual. So I'm not sure how letting other people moderate for you would
work within the github garden.

</nonsense>

