Ethical Code – Let's Clean Up GitHub

I personally don't care if some repos with one watcher are full of idiocy, but I think opening pull requests is the wrong way to go about this. The old advice is, "Praise in public, criticize in private." If someone doesn't understand that they're offending others, a short e-mail will probably solve the problem. Pull requests and public "discussion" will just feed trolls.

Let&#x27;s not pander to the radical &quot;politically correct&quot; folk.<p>&quot;people publicly posting code with comments that could make so many people feel awful, unwanted, and excluded&quot;<p>Really? REALLY?<p>Let&#x27;s call this for what it really is shall we?<p>A group of vigilantes being dicks to people who they feel are being dicks, because of something as intangible as &quot;hurt feelings&quot;.<p>Oh please, are they feeling privileged enough? In my day bullies left bruises and broke bones, not offended and hurt feelings.<p>I&#x27;m offended at your offence to being offended by the word &quot;fuck&quot; in a comment someone else wrote. If you really want to do something, write some code. Make some art. Build something. Don&#x27;t bully some other guy&#x2F;girl&#x2F;furry&#x2F;etc into sanitising their code for the newspeak of the day.<p>Will Wheatons law applies here - &quot;DON&#x27;T BE A DICK&quot;

What&#x27;s the book where one character is dating an artist and she decides that binary - the phalic 1 and the yonic 0 - is symbolic of the patriarchy and so she has a team re-write software to invert the digits?<p>I think it was Neal Stephenson?<p>Because while I am in favour of carefuy chosing your language when picking names for stuff and leaving messages I worry that this kind of thing in the wrong hands can go too far.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what the research says about effective methods of asking people to make a change. I&#x27;m going to need something substantial to persuade me that this is a good method.

&gt; Okay, that’s great and all, but who decides what is right and what is wrong?<p>&gt; We the people.<p>No, it&#x27;s the brigade that decides.<p>So, a GitHub Ethical Brigade who will harass repos because an individual in the brigade decided to take offense?

It&#x27;s good that people will use their freedom of speech to voice their dissatisfaction with what other people wrote.<p>I just hope those who join this project don&#x27;t eventually make it a them vs. us thing: &quot;look at these disgusting dudebros who refuse to change these words!&quot;

I think this is a good thing - searching for the n-word on Github reveals a lot of static swear-word lists for filters (which are OK) [1] but also lots of rather strange choices for tests (what&#x27;s up with weboob&#x27;s test.py?). We as a community of open source developers have to stop and think about how the outside world perceives us.<p>There&#x27;s already lots and lots of negative flak in regards to sexism about Silicon Valley and IT-culture, which doesn&#x27;t help when the &quot;normal&quot; non-IT population already sees IT-people as a bunch of hateful nerds with absolutely zero social skills.<p>This is a good action in that it&#x27;s an open signal to change things - it might not achieve much, but it&#x27;s a signal.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/search?l=python&amp;p=1&amp;q=nigger&amp;ref=searchresults&amp;type=Code" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?l=python&amp;p=1&amp;q=nigger&amp;ref=searchre...</a> link from <a href="http://tommorris.org/posts/8053" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tommorris.org&#x2F;posts&#x2F;8053</a>

Imagine all of this energy directed to actually fixing bugs in popular libs, huh.

Given whats been happening what github needs is a major clear-out at the top and some proper adult supervision.

Somebody, give that scrollbar a sandwich.

Ok, you win. You&#x27;re holier than me. I must confess, I never thought of searching people&#x27;s repos for crimethink comments and variable names. Take me to the inquisitor. I&#x27;d take it as a mark of pride to be assaulted by this group of idiots.