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0 pointsben_w7y ago0 comments

> I guess you don't realize this, but GitHub is a social site too.

Which is why I say “explicitly”. Github has social as what feels like a bolt-on afterthought because everyone else was doing it and it’s a buzzword.

> And this is the same at GitHub, too. Have you never noticed the "Report Abuse" buttons for PRs, users, comments, etc?

Nope. Never needed to look for one. However, rather more importantly, I have just made a deliberate look for a “report repository” link…

…and found nothing.

> Except you're looking at a reason right here.

Key word being “random”. Twitter has trends, Reddit has its front page, public Facebook posts can and do go viral. GitHub has such a list, but you need to go looking for it — you don’t have random stuff thrown in you face whenever you use it like the other platforms, so there is _much_ less opportunity to train a learning algorithm to automatically filter anything. I’m not sure you could even train such a model now, with perfect data, because that would involve understanding the purpose of a repo rather than sentiment analysis of natural language.

The appropriate people only found out about this repo because the person who made it did so with the internation to be noticed.

And I’m not saying there shouldn’t be or even that there isn’t the capacity to take things down. I’m saying comparing repos to tweets is like comparing apples to grenades — they both “keep the doctor away”, but for the most part, treat them differently.

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txcwpalpha7y ago

>Which is why I say “explicitly”. Github has social as what feels like a bolt-on afterthought because everyone else was doing it and it’s a buzzword.

If that's the logic we're going by, then Facebook isn't "explicitly" social either, as it originally started out as a photo site and just had comments "bolted on" as an afterthought. And yet it still has moderation. So again, I don't even know what your point is.

>Nope. Never needed to look for one. However, rather more importantly, I have just made a deliberate look for a “report repository” link…

So because you personally have never reported anything, means that the community doesn't report things? I don't think you know how things work...

>…and found nothing.

You must have not looked very hard. Repositories are linked to users, and thus to report a repo, you report a user. And in case you have trouble finding it, the link to report a user is one of the first things you see when you open their profile, just underneath the profile picture and name.

>Key word being “random”. Twitter has trends, Reddit has its front page, public Facebook posts can and do go viral. GitHub has such a list, but you need to go looking for it — you don’t have random stuff thrown in you face whenever you use it like the other platforms

What are you even talking about? GitHub's discover repo feature is one of the very first things you see on the GitHub front page. There is literally a giant banner dedicated to discovering new projects right there in front of you when you first open up GitHub. If you do a Google search for "GitHub", the "Explore" link is the first link that is shown to you under GitHub.com. You don't have to go looking for it at all.

>so there is _much_ less opportunity to train a learning algorithm to automatically filter anything.

Who said anything about training any kind of algorithm to do anything? We're talking about reporting and moderating content. Nobody even mentioned a learning algorithm.

But hell, if we're going to bring it up: GitHub does have this. Again, on the front page of GitHub, if you click on the link in the giant banner that suggests you explore more repositories, one of the places it takes you is a list of suggested repositories that it suggests to you based on other repos that you have starred.

>The appropriate people only found out about this repo because the person who made it did so with the internation to be noticed.

The appropriate people found out about this repo because the person who made it shared the repo, because GitHub is a social site meant for sharing code, just like thousands of other people use it all the time. Just go view Show HN and see how many link to GitHub: https://news.ycombinator.com/show

I really have no idea what your point even is, other than for some reason you seem to be trying to draw some distinction in GitHub's social features against other social site's features. There is no need for such distinction, because at the end of the day the same type of moderation is still happening.

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