Sure, but do you really want to live in a world where a 3rd party can block your employment for something you said that is merely offensive but not against the law? Even worse, a ban with no a appeal process that lasts forever.
Again: I don't understand why anybody expects GitHub to moderate or adjudicate these dramas. They're a source code hosting site, not a university disciplinary board.
No: a user caused problems for them, and they kicked them off the site, the same way you'd get kicked out of a McDonalds for walking in without pants.
If you do the Internet equivalent of walking into GitHub without pants and they kick you off, and you gave them money, we can have a conversation about whether they should give you your money back (I guess I probably would). But other than that, what's there to talk about?
Make a new account that isn't traceable to the reputation you lit on fire, or go to any of the other perfectly viable Git hosting sites. You can even run your own.
I get not wanting to tell your boss why your old GitHub account doesn't work anymore, but: you're going to have to have that conversation, probably.
Being banned from GitHub can prevent you from doing your job or gaining future employment. Being banned from a single McDonalds doing prevent you from buying fries at 90% of places that sell fries.
> Make a new account that isn't traceable to the reputation you lit on fire
They tried...
And doing that leaves a blade dangling above your head even if your behavior is perfect on the new account.
Why can't there be anything you can do to wipe the slate mostly clean? Maybe even donating $100 to charity and giving github a few dollars for wasting their time.
If you really feel like GitHub bans are a "blade dangling over your head", use GitLab, or Source Hut.
GitHub is not going to develop a charity-linked rehabilitation program for people who shit on their carpet. They're just going to ban you. They're a business, not a public utility.
There's some unpleasant subtext to being blocked from GitHub that has nothing to do with someone's ability to write code: it's that your employer is certainly going to ask "uh, why are you not able to make a GitHub account?", and when you tell them "because I shat on GitHub's carpet", they may very well fire you. But that's on you, not GitHub.
If your employment is limited because you are banned arbitrarily from a tool for any reason then the situation is wrong.
Regardless of that, my entire org relies on github globally. If we could not onboard or retain someone due to this I would raise this with our risk and compliance board and the product would be written off from the accepted vendors list almost immediately and cause a fuck load of evaluation and migration work and a $100k/year enterprise customer to disappear for them. That's how bad this is.
We already did this to two other vendors and we don't get a choice. It's a business risk.
It's not getting banned, it's why you got banned. You could get banned from a tool nobody even gives a shit about for reasons that will absolutely get you shitcanned from a variety of jobs. You could get locked out permanently from Google Mail and Github simultaneously and still keep your job if the reason it happened truly was that you made a fair-minded and impassioned case against closed-source development tools that was so persuasive freaked evil vendors out. It's all about the circumstances.
That is correct. Which is why I don't give a fuck about the circumstances. I care about the risk to the organisation. And that is a tangible one. And it must be mitigated.
Saying that there's a sliding scale toward being effectively a utility is "deeply unserious"?
Is it also "deeply unserious" when I say it's bad that shopping malls are privately owned areas masquerading as public spaces, which lets them ban people in ways that actual public spaces can't? Because there's a lot of literature on that topic, and I see it as pretty similar.
Yes, yes it is unserious. Shopping malls aren't public squares, as several decades of US jurisprudence has ably established, and the collapse of shopping malls in the face of ecommerce amply demonstrates that the argument was silly to begin with. You couldn't have picked a better bit of evidence for my argument; thank you.
They were never legally determined to be public squares, and that's a good thing, because that would be an eminently stupid decision to make about an institution that will be about as relevant to American life as drug store soda fountains in 10 years. And so it goes for the awesome societal importance of GitHub. Inconstancy is my very essence, says the Wheel.
> because that would be an eminently stupid decision to make about an institution that will be about as relevant to American life as drug store soda fountains in 10 years
Malls lasted a long time. But why is that a stupid decision? Let's not even say "decision" though, let's just say every mall offered to rent the hallways out to the local government at a nominal fee, nothing else changed, no lock in. Wouldn't that be a significant improvement?
And when I said earlier, tens of millions of users, if github wants to be small again then it will go back to the bottom of the sliding scale.
No, it wouldn't, because it turns out that malls are not actually an important part of the fabric of American life, or even commerce, and it would be dumb to invest more importance in them. Mostly, the only reason anyone ever talks about malls anymore is to make arguments about who should be allowed to use the n-word on Twitter.
(I'm probably being hyperbolic, but I'm sorely tempted to test the hypothesis with the search bar below.)
Letting people walk around malls, during their heyday, was just as important or more important than letting them walk around public streets. And that importance was used for a lot of bad discrimination of various kinds. Saying "no, everyone is allowed in the hallways unless they start breaking the law" does not invest more importance in them, it just helps everyone have fair access.
I totally agree. I don't even see how they have any upside here, if they do this too much they'll lose business and doing it at all invites people to demand that they keep doing it.
But in other countries, is more complicated than that.
In Brazil, those kinds of bans behaviors are not ok under consumer protection laws, and also their TOS where they don’t guarantee anything even for paid accounts is definitely not ok and suable for damages if something happens.
Good luck. You know that there are some optics to how responsive you are to these comments, and how un-responsive you are to comments that asked you to say more about what your "controversial comments" were. I'm beginning to think they might not just have been about ad blockers.
> I'm beginning to think they might not just have been about ad blockers.
Did the first line about regretting the comments not indicate that pretty clearly?
I really don't want to accuse you of being deceptive for rhetorical effect, but are you actually "beginning" to think this? Am I completely misreading your comments?
Edit: This comment was a waste of space and I didn't express myself well but I was half a minute too slow on the delete button.
It's not at all clear to me what the comments were, and I don't think the level of regret matters really at all to the analysis. If I punch you in the nose, I will surely regret it moments later, but that isn't going to save me much trouble.
I said in another comment, most of the comments were on the Python extension repo for Vscode, about the quality of the extension and feature choices, many people were criticizing as well, and the trend of moving towards closed source.
You keep saying that but haven't described any of the comments in anything but the vaguest terms - so vague that the descriptions alone sound like an implausible basis for a ban.
I don't wish to link my identity to this hn account.
This is what I got from gh support:
```
Your accounts were disabled following reports that its content or activity may have been in violation of the following prohibition found in our Acceptable Use Policies:
"We do not allow content or activity on GitHub that:
is off-topic, or interacts with platform features in a way that significantly or repeatedly disrupts the experience of other users"
Specifically, the activity that was reported included posting repetitive and disruptive comments in Visual Studio repositories, which we found to be in violation of our Acceptable Use Policies.
You were reported for saying something about open source and github banned you for it? This still doesn't seem to add up at all. How many comments are we talking about? Did they contain, oh, I dunno, slurs? And again, you can paraphrase the comment(s) which you seem to remain very reluctant to do.
If the comments are as boring as you're suggesting they are, you don't have a real problem. Tell your manager what happened and work with them to arrange an account you can use.
Github is indeed not a monopoly as far as a fitted out office building is not a monopoly. It does have an extremely high exit cost. And it's not reasonable for the owner of an office building to refuse access for your staff for saying something horrible about them.
Offices (and SaaS products) are dangling on a thin thread. It doesn't take a lot to lose customers. Lots of them. Especially when working from home (hosted gitlab) is a reasonable option. Most offices near me are converted to housing. You can't convert github to housing so it has even less tangible value if it pisses users off which starts a chain reaction of risk.
It's also bloody unreliable and in the forefront of people's attention for risk already.
Okay then, let's see you try to get a job by telling the hiring manager, "by the way, GitHub has perma-banned me so if you hire me, you'll have to change your entire organization's usage from GitHub to something else."
