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[entremet]

http://fusion.net/story/369325/how-to-stop-online-harassment/

A few years ago, the software start-up GitHub faced an uncomfortable truth: It could be a pretty unpleasant place.

It was 2014 and the company was growing rapidly as a hub for programmers to collaborate on coding projects. But as its user base grew, so too did its problems. A GitHub developer, Julie Ann Horvath, left the company amid searing accusations of sexual and gender-based harassment, putting GitHub at the center of bad press for weeks and leading to the resignation of the company’s CEO.

To make matters worse, GitHub soon realized such problems weren’t limited to the office. Bullying and discrimination ran rampant on the site. There was systemic discrimination against women, with female coders often taken less seriously than their male peers. Petty disagreements devolved into flame wars in project comments. A bitter ex followed his former girlfriend from project to project, saying nasty things about her. And racist, sexist trolls sometimes co-opted features meant to enable collaboration to carry out vicious attacks, using, for example, a people-tagging feature to tag their targets on projects with racist names, transforming their portfolios into a slur of racist epithets.

Nicole Sanchez, the company’s VP of Social Impact, told that these are the “dangers and pitfalls of online life,” and not unique to GitHub, but GitHub wanted to try to prevent them.

Sanchez got to work, revamping how the company approached everything from hiring and performance reviews to office decor. Since its beginning, the company had been non-hierarchical, with no managers or titles, but Sanchez helped to kill it, finding that without bosses, people weren’t held accountable when their actions were in the wrong. She tweaked internal processes to make the environment more diversity friendly, like by creating a formal feedback process for complaints. And she hired February Keeney, a half-Puerto Rican transgender woman, to lead a new Community and Safety team to attack the problem of harassment on the site.

It was a difficult stance to take given the existing culture in Silicon Valley. GitHub, like so many tech companies, had long feared tamping down on what its users could say and do. Many techies feel that the internet is supposed to be open and free and that cracking down on even the most unseemly user behavior infringes on rights to free speech. Twitter, for example, had long refused to address its own problem with abuse, referring to itself as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Full article at the link.

As an aside this was troubling stat:

A 2014 survey of women who had recently left the tech industry found that culture—including harassment—was a major factor in their decisions. GitHub viewed a diverse user base as essential to the company’s success and decided it needed to snuff out harassment to achieve it.

I love how it was dealt with strategically. Github is much smaller than YT, Twitter, and Facebook, but there are lessons to learn here.

 

[Daffy Duck]

I really wish people would stop using the term troll for someone who is a fucking arsehole. Trolling properly is an art form IMHO, being an unpleasent dick about someones sexuality/race etc is just that, being a unpleasent dick.

Bravo to Github though for doing something about, sounds like it was a vile place to work.

 

[Lil'DigiOp]

I really wish people would stop using the term troll for someone is a fucking arsehole. Trolling properly is an art form, being an unpleasent dick about someones sexuality/race is just that, being a unpleasent dick.

The problem is Internet Culture has fully infiltrated IRL. Trolling is now synonymous with being a full on dick.

You don't care for the person's reaction anyway, you do it for Lols. Sounds just like a certain movement going on now

 

[entremet]

I really wish people would stop using the term troll for someone is a fucking arsehole. Trolling properly is an art form, being an unpleasent dick about someones sexuality/race is just that, being a unpleasent dick.

Language changes.

Also the internet is much different place today compared to when nerds ruled the roost, so that reflects such a change.

 

[AAK]

At this point Free speech isn't something that should be lauded. If people send hurtful, slandering messages out of prejudice and hate they need to be stopped. There shouldn't be any tolerance for this sort of bullying.

 

[entremet]

At this point Free speech isn't something that should be lauded. If people send hurtful, slandering messages out of prejudice and hate they need to be stopped. There shouldn't be any tolerance for this sort of bullying.

Free speech is fine as is.

It's mostly that people don't understand what free speech is. It's only going to protect from government prosecution. Everything else is game--banning from sites, firings, etc.

 

[HowardRoark]

Free speech is fine as is.

It's mostly that people don't understand what free speech is. It's only going to protect from government prosecution. Everything else is game--banning from sites, firings, etc.

It blows my mind how many people don't understand this. Like an "All Lives Matter" advocate trying to silence their critics by saying "I thought we had freedom of speech in this country?!" We do, you are not getting jailed for your rhetoric.

 

[RPGamer92]

Did they git gud?

 

[Skellig Gra]

I really wish people would stop using the term troll for someone who is a fucking arsehole. Trolling properly is an art form IMHO, being an unpleasent dick about someones sexuality/race etc is just that, being a unpleasent dick.

Bravo to Github though for doing something about, sounds like it was a vile place to work.

IMHO, traditional trolls are assholes too. Certainly not on the level of people who are racists/bullies. But actively trying to annoy/get people worked up for your own lulz is still a dick move.

 

[Alucrid]

Even the internet’s seedy underbelly, Reddit, has placed bans on its most toxic quadrants.

haha damn

 

[tokkun]

Free speech is fine as is.

It's mostly that people don't understand what free speech is. It's only going to protect from government prosecution. Everything else is game--banning from sites, firings, etc.

"Free speech" as a principle applies to any organization. What you are describing is whether or not there is a First Amendment legal requirement to fulfil. Just because private organizations do not have a First Amendment duty to free speech does not mean they are immune to criticism on free speech grounds.

 

[Kthulhu]

I love how it was dealt with strategically. Github is much smaller than YT, Twitter, and Facebook, but there are lessons to learn here.

They all could easily do something about it. They simply choose not to.

 

[Pau]

Never knew that about GitHub. Glad they are taking the initiative! Makes me feel better about using their product.

 

[entremet]

They all could easily do something about it. They simple choose not to.

Facebook does do stuff, to be fair.

Facebook issue is scale. It's very hard to moderate billions. Look at this site? It has tons of mods, paid email validation, layered approvals, etc., and it's still hard to moderate it. Moreover, not every user here posts. Facebook has way more engagement since it has PMs, group messaging, and privacy settings.

 

[TheSeks]

GitHub had trolls? I guess in the commit logs. I honestly don't know anyone that uses it for the "social network" aspect and just use it to fork things from.

 

[marrec]

They all could easily do something about it. They simply choose not to.

Yep. It's just a matter of scale isn't it?

Though, the revenue stream for GitHub and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are completely different.

Like, if YouTube were to take bullying and harassment seriously it would directly affect their bottom line. Or so they probably think.

 

[Stumpokapow]

The article doesn't really sustain its thesis. It does explain that GitHub hired someone responsible for diversity and climate in their own offices (who then created a safety team of engineers), and that unlike many internet companies GitHub did not push back to protect "free speech"--because it's a code project management site--but the article doesn't really establish that GitHub had trolls, that it now doesn't, or what they actually did to get rid of them. The only example of a "troll" given was a guy stalking his ex-girlfriend from project to project, and the only example of a change given to block trolling is adopting a code of conduct. As for the stalker, since the stalker was abusing tagging people, they made a minor change to how you can tag people.

But Twitter and Reddit and all the examples of troll-friendly sites have always had codes of conduct that in theory disallow the behaviour that flourishes, and all sites are constantly tweaking the parameters of functions to avoid abuse, and many of those places actually have had diversity or safety hires from an early date, so it's unclear why these hires are effective in some companies and contexts and not others. Why did it work for GitHub and not for them?

Even if you want to (and you disregard "free speech"), curbing harassment in a website with an open membership policy is almost impossible, and report tools don't scale very well because in the end people need to review reports and unless you're Facebook you can't hire a bazillion people to look over the gallery of horrors all the time. It's really really hard to manage high frequency interactions between many users. There are virtually no tools to prevent serial harassers from re-registering again and again. If you can't require a verified non-free email or a verified credit card or a verified phone number, there are almost no behavioural methods that work to discourage re-registration.

The final paragraph gives a clue to what is actually going on: "Just like the real world, there are different spaces for everyone. Maybe Reddit is your neighborhood dive bar, and Facebook your corner coffeeshop." The article is raising this to argue that different places should have different standards. But it's maybe more instructive for the bigger question of what kind of people those places attract anyway. GitHub, by contrast, is a Home Depot; mostly it's technically skilled people there to work, not to talk, it wasn't where most harassment was occurring to begin with. It's great that they are taking it seriously--and if any harassment does occur, it should be stopped--but it's not clear there's much a teachable moment for dive bars and coffee shops.

 

[br0ken_shad0w]

GitHub had trolls? I guess in the commit logs. I honestly don't know anyone that uses it for the "social network" aspect and just use it to fork things from.

Fork wars can get pretty nasty.

 

[ElFly]

"Free speech" as a principle applies to any organization. What you are describing is whether or not there is a First Amendment legal requirement to fulfil. Just because private organizations do not have a First Amendment duty to free speech does not mean they are immune to criticism on free speech grounds.

even if you argue that, free speech does not override every other concern as the most important rule ever

 

[RinsFury]

I really wish people would stop using the term troll for someone who is a fucking arsehole. Trolling properly is an art form IMHO, being an unpleasent dick about someones sexuality/race etc is just that, being a unpleasent dick.

Bravo to Github though for doing something about, sounds like it was a vile place to work.

If you said any of that to someone in real life you'd be charged with harrassment or worse, it should be the same online.

 

[Razorskin]

GitHub had trolls? I guess in the commit logs. I honestly don't know anyone that uses it for the "social network" aspect and just use it to fork things from.

The issues tab is where it really goes down.

 

[tokkun]

even if you argue that, free speech does not override every other concern as the most important rule ever

Sure, but that is a straw man argument. Even within the strict confines of the First Amendment there is the concept of unprotected speech. The classic example is "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre".

 

[compo]

I remember about a year ago when someone took an out of context photo during GitHub's new member training, and the training session had something do with GitHub's new emphasis on diversity in the workplace. /r/programming lost its mind. A bunch of people vowed to use some other new project hosting site that didn't "discriminate against white people" (it was GitLab or BitBucket, or something else).

It was a sad moment in /r/programming history. But it made me love GitHub even more. I appreciated that a large company dared to rival the status-quo.

 

[ElFly]

Sure, but that is a straw man argument. Even within the strict confines of the First Amendment there is the concept of unprotected speech. The classic example is "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre".

well that's, again, for the government

private sites may have wider definitions of unprotected speech, or simply may believe that protecting users from harassment takes precedence over free speech, and that outside that, free speech is fine

it has never been an absolute, ultimate right. different organizations have different priorities

 

[FyreWulff]

"Sanchez got to work, revamping how the company approached everything from hiring and performance reviews to office decor. Since its beginning, the company had been non-hierarchical, with no managers or titles, but Sanchez helped to kill it, finding that without bosses, people weren’t held accountable when their actions were in the wrong."

I've literally never seen the bossless flat structure work. It just results in supercliques forming.

 

[Mammoth Jones]

None of these sites want to invest in a good moderation team.

I've literally never seen the bossless flat structure work. It just results in supercliques forming.

Fuck bossless work culture. I've read Lord of the Flies, I don't want that in my office culture.

 

[DedValve]

"Sanchez got to work, revamping how the company approached everything from hiring and performance reviews to office decor. Since its beginning, the company had been non-hierarchical, with no managers or titles, but Sanchez helped to kill it, finding that without bosses, people weren’t held accountable when their actions were in the wrong."

I've literally never seen the bossless flat structure work. It just results in supercliques forming.

Its like the lean startup method, rather than take aspects of it and integrate it into your own culture people basically read a book of how amazing it is and then force it to work when in reality it just ends up being shit overall.

I doubt a bossless structure could ever work in a way that was inviting and open and it explains a lot of Valves behavior or lack thereof when it comes to management, accountability and diversity.

I know its a numbers game when it comes to Twitter and Youtube but there could be far more efforts to quell the thirst of trolls and hate speech and it shouldn't have taken years for Reddit to remove hate subreddits. Freedom of speech should not allow hate speech and the fetisishaztion of it by sillicon valley has done nothing but help shaped this horrible internet culture and only now they are (very lightly) dealing with it.

EDIT: Good on you github for not tolerating intolerance. People don't have to put up with this shit if the company makes a very serious effort to quell it and better yet foster a better community rather than leave it to its own devices.

 

[Crayon]

Irl, there are consequences to trolling. The failure of the authorities to deal with online harassment during the gamergate situation was a critical point. "Just log off" was a devastating precedent.

 

[entremet]

None of these sites want to invest in a good moderation team.



Fuck bossless work culture. I've read Lord of the Flies, I don't want that in my office culture.

I've never read positive stuff of bossless setups. One of the last jobs I interviewed for in a recent job search had a bossless culture, but the reviews on jobsites were horrible.

 

[FoxSpirit]

I really wish people would stop using the term troll for someone who is a fucking arsehole. Trolling properly is an art form IMHO, being an unpleasent dick about someones sexuality/race etc is just that, being a unpleasent dick.

Getting people riled up for your enjoyment and often derailing sensible discussions is an artform now? Stealthtrolling is the pinnacle of a legit pasttime?

No fucking way. I always hated trolling, bringing up controversial shit into good discussions and then act like the most obtuse numbnut ever to fish for people who will get seriously angry about it.

Dear trolls new and old, please go die in a fire. Or at least burn your internet access.

 

[FStop7]

people weren’t held accountable when their actions were in the wrong

Feel like it could all be boiled down to this.

A lack of accountability.

I've semi joked with colleagues about how the OSI model needs two new layers to cope with the modern Internet: a security layer and an authentication layer. The authentication layer would be used to hold people accountable for their actions in addition to authenticating their identities.

 

[DarkArterialGore]

Nicole Sanchez, the company’s VP of Social Impact

That job title...