thorough

Every so often in the US you’ll hear of people with neuroses that stem from the Great Depression (quite frequently, with hoarding among the elderly population). I think COVID will have a similar impact on a significant subset of the population today.

Sure, the vast majority will move on, but some will continue to live with a vague fear of being too near to other people. Personally, I find this thought very saddening, but I’m bracing myself for it and doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.

You are leaving something out that seems quite relevant to me, which is that the list wasn’t just objected to as unprofessional but that the conversation was escalated to the highest possible level, linking it to genocide.

DHH says the trouble didn’t come from objecting to the list. In fact, he’s disavowed it repeatedly. He said the trouble was that the employee said that the list was not merely unprofessional but was one step on a ladder of racial oppression that leads to genocide.

It’s one thing to say someone is acting unprofessionally. It’s another thing altogether to accuse them of being on a path to genocide. If I did that to someone when it was so clearly uncalled for, I would be an asshole and my relationship with that person would be strained from that point forward.

If you don’t like that strain in your workplace, you try to draw a line on speech. It’s not something I’d want from the government, but it seems appropriate for a workplace.

So this "good faith" requirement seems like a huge gaping loophole, just a wonderfully easy way to dismiss and even censor a ton of people you merely disagree with. Whether or not they are arguing in good faith is so subjective and therefore the question of who you should hear out becomes the usual popularity contest: if you are sufficiently unpopular, it will be easy to convince people to dismiss someone as arguing in bad faith if they already dislike that person.

One example might convince you that this "good faith" rule is too restrictive if you agree with me on one premise, that ~90% of politicians regularly argue in bad faith. Yet most of us who agree with this do not as a rule claim that we will never hear them out.

Yeah, I've definitely grasped their argument, which became clear once they clarified that "allowing people to make up their minds" doesn't mean "allowing content the owners disagree with" but rather "we won't try to criminalize this speech on other platforms." After all, if I were a publisher who refused to publish books with a certain viewpoint, in what other way could I say I (as opposed to the government, say, or the publishing industry as a whole) am "allowing people to make up their minds"?

(Sidenote: I do think YouTube and other corporate-run forums like that would welcome some regulation in the area, for two reasons: (1) they'd no longer be blamed for how they decide difficult content questions, and (2) it might make it more difficult for small startups to disrupt this space by increasing the legal barriers to entry.)

Right. The actor matters a huge amount. We all agree on that.

But if you run a forum and say you will not allow any view to be expressed therein that you don't agree with, you aren't in fact "allowing people to make up their own minds"---unless by "allowing people" you just mean not actively harming them for expressing views in other places, or something equally wild.

Another way of saying it is that no one would say you are "tolerant" if you only "tolerate" behavior you agree with.

I think the conversation is just a little more sophisticated than you imagine it to be.

And you can be generally in favor of free speech (!= the First Amendment) without accepting its more extreme interpretations. I mean, I'm guessing that you personally are too if you are like most people. For example, most of us would think that YT shouldn't censor either of two people saying (respectively) "Trump was elected in 2016 as a result of Russian disinformation" and "Trump was not elected in 2016 as a result of Russian disinformation."

The interesting question here is, "What speech should a privately-owned forum allow that its owners disagree with?"

How would you suggest a company like YT can "allow people to make up their own minds" about an issue if they do not "provide a platform for views" of that issue that they "don't share"?

Unless you are just making the point that YT censorship is more acceptable than government censorship (which I think everyone agrees with), then I'm not sure how you can have your cake and eat it to here.

I think if you’ve decided that there is something wrong with the employer/employee relationship where hundreds spend their professional life working at someone else’s company, pushing ahead that person’s vision, and fulfilling that person’s goals, then you shouldn’t turn around and play an integral role in the same game you once despised, all because it’s much easier to succeed in business if you have a bunch of people devoting their working lives to your vision.

I don’t know how to escape that model at a wider scale, exactly, but if I were worth millions of dollars, I think I’d have the economic luxury to invest some time to figure out how.

Hmm... the Bay Area in my experience is one of the less walkable parts of the United States I’ve visited.

I sincerely think that your CEOs of large companies are much less powerful than one would naturally think. They have money and power, but much of it is based on a group of people sympathetic to some pretty extreme views approving of you.

We call it “FU money,” but these guys aren’t satisfied with being able to say “FU” and still live comfortably; they want to be in charge of things that are seen as significant.

I believe it will always take more than money to get thousands of largely independent adults to do what you want.

I’m working at my job doing just fine. My employer is pretty happy and so am I. Then a new guy comes along and says, “I can do thorough’s job better than he can.” My boss hires him and she agrees. At length, she decides to keep the new guy and fire me because he’s meeting her needs better than I am. She doesn’t need to pay me anymore.

There are two happy people in this story and one unhappy one. But the fact that there is an unhappy one doesn’t seem like nearly enough to me to decide it shouldn’t have played out like it did.

Does it seem like enough to you? If not, what other common element would this story have to have to decide it shouldn’t have happened?

Hypothetical question:

I have little money but I write an amazing book and it sells to millions. Each books takes, say, $5 to print, and yet I sell it for $15. Therefore I end up wealthy from this endeavor.

Did I exploit the people who chose to buy my book? The people who printed it?

I think the article states and it has been repeated several times in the comments here that the author already did so and that a lawyer is now required because the offender disputed the claim.

All right, you've stated that you think that having to remedy such an obvious abuse by hiring a lawyer is not a problem. But the question is, why don't you think it's a problem?

If you were "looking for a sensational headline" and GitHub intentionally took your copyrighted code and was running it, wouldn't you come up with a more direct statement than "GitHub has my stolen code"?

For example, if I bought a phone on Craigslist and someone said to me, "You have my stolen phone," I would not assume they were accusing me of stealing their phone.

I think the main problem with this headline is that so many have read it as "GitHub has stolen my code," but that is hardly the author's fault.

Maybe he should have written it as, "Someone stole my code and posted it on GitHub" but that would disguise the author's main point, fleshed out in the article, that GitHub is not acting appropriately in this case.

If someone posted copyright information in say, the forum area of your personal website, and someone from the website containing that information emails you about it, you might actually find yourself doing some basic due diligence and just removing the code.

If you are a large corporation that doesn't have enough resources to do even this kind of bare-bones investigation because you have too many users per employee, you would probably come up with a process like this instead and lean on that process to guide you.

That would be reasonable in your situation, but it is perfectly fair for someone to say, "They should avoid getting themselves in that situation so that they don't have to make simple things so hard for individual people. The Internet is too dominated by ultra-scaled companies. It would be better if the companies operating in it were smaller."

I went to two colleges, one with tens of thousands of students and one with fewer than two thousand. When some paperwork issue came up, it was so nice to be able to go talk to someone in the accounting office and be treated like an adult instead of having to talk to a student working making barely above minimum wage who has to treat me like a stranger off the street because he deals with so many people. There are downsides to scale.

How is the title misleading? It's "My Latest Brush with the Corporate Internet: GitHub has My Stolen Code."

If a website, even one like GitHub that posts others' submissions, had something I felt was mine and I had to go through a complicated process to get them to remove it, an adversarial process no less, I would describe that as a "brush."

If I felt that the process was made more difficult because the other party was a large corporation instead of a small group, and if I felt that there was a movement in the web in that direction, I would think it's reasonable to label the party "the corporate Internet." This kind of metaphor is certainly very common, where a journalist might label a practice by a company like like Facebook or Twitter as being done by "social media" writ large in spite of the fact that neither company is "social media," per se, but more literally a single entity in the large area that goes by that name.

And the statement "GitHub has My Stolen Code" is a very literal bottom-line summary of the source of the writer's contention. Its presence in the headline has the redeeming quality of removing the metaphor from the first half of the headline for readers who might want more specifics before they read the article.

As the article progresses, the more and more apparent it becomes how full of himself the author is.

In an article that is ostensibly designed to honor his aging father, the author (a marketing professor at NYU) gets to the point that he wonders if his father isn't jealous of his ability to teach. Later, he backhandedly criticizes his father (while, again, complimenting himself) by saying that that he wouldn't take a flight to see his own grandkids but would to watch his son teach.

I'll give the author this: after reading this article, I am quite confident that he "believes to be true" that he is a great guy.