As a data point: I can honestly say I’ve never heard of Gamergate before this comment, and I am a 31-year-old white male. I did read a book on Watergate when I was in my teens, though.
GamerGate is well worth understanding. While some of the details are unique to the situation, it’s provided a template for right-wing radicalisation that’s been employed multiple times since. There’s also an entertaining “where are they now” aspect where some people have been almost forgotten and some are in the White House. KotakoInAction is still going and has (inevitably) morphed into a bunch of people complaining about the Lūgenpresse.
Let’s just say that I think it’s an important event and understanding how a guy harassing his ex-girlfriend became a formative moment in alt-right history is fascinating, but I really don’t want to get drawn into arguments with anyone who’s still drinking that particular kool-aid.
I thought the series made by some journalist was very interesting, I don't remember her name, and I don't remember so much of gamergate. But I'm definitely not a core part of either group there..
On the contrary. I provide a ton of value, for free, in the form of:
Identifying the actual roots of the problems people post passionately about, and clearly explaining the underlying mechanisms that lead not just to this problem but many others they might not realize are related
Researching for years the best ways to fix it, going out of my way to have substantive discussions with some of the top problem solvers across multiple fields, and publish the videos up publicly
Spending over a decade on actually writing the open source software, hiring people, creating jobs, without asking anything from any of you
And making it freely available as open source, with documentation, all without taking on VC funding or any of the actual profit-taking and extracting rents that goes on here with “software a service”
In literally every way I can, I try to contribute value without taking in return.
So you could not be more wrong, and if you’d click the links you’d see that. But you’d rather not even look, because in your capitalist mind, sharing the result of decades of work and over $1 million spent on free open source platforms for the world is “self-promotion”. You’d rather see another startup extract rents for a simple product built around tiny feature, funded by venture capitalists who want to have an exit by selling shares to the public, who will demand more rent extraction and wait for even further enshittification of platforms and society. It’s pretty amusing to me.
I currently enjoy staying relatively almost completely unknown, and seeing the reaction people have to the most straightforward application of the above solutions to their own problems. Because I think that even on HN, many people are acting very irrationally and groupthink dominates, and while millions of people actually use my software, 99.99% have no idea who I am, and I get to see how human groups react to form instead of substance. This is btw why we often can’t have nice things, at least not unless the solutions, like bitter medicines, are presented wrapped in candy for organizations. We are a generation of children living on an ecological credit card, one of the most spoiled in history, but think we know better than everyone else. So I kind of enjoy seeing the irrationality as a form of entertainment although on a global ecological scale, it’s sadly quite scary.
I recommend visiting the Ecomuseo in Palermo [1] if you ever have the chance. They examine, among other things, the lasting impact of the subpar building of now mostly crumbling structures by the Mafia that still litter the cities of Sicily.
Yes, the mafia built housing, but it’s not the kind of social housing we might hope for—it’s mostly slum-like. Of course, the city of Palermo is also EXTREMELY densely populated—I read something like the fourth-most densely populated city in Europe in a magazine once, but can’t source that now, so take it with a grain of salt.
Nota bene: I’m not Italian myself; my wife’s family has their roots in Sicily.
Unpopular? One of Italy's most popular historians likes to joke that, back in ancient Rome, any budding politician would have taken a post in Syria or Lybia over one in Gaul or (shudders) Britannia any day of the week. And every time, the audience just laughs and nods. The Mediterranean was a highway, not a frontier.
> but it’s not the kind of social housing we might hope for—it’s mostly slum-like.
It may be not what we hope for, but isn't it pretty much the same as what happens when the government builds it? I mean, the "projects" aren't exactly the shining example of what "we might hope for" either. It looks like this way of solving the problem is bound to fail whoever tries it - be it the well-intentioned government or the mafia.
- On the one hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move. For maintainers, $500 might make the difference between struggling to pay rent and having enough money to leave it in the bank, or having a nice dinner at the end of the month.
- On the other hand, for GitHub, 500k is nothing, just a PR move! If they really wanted to show appreciation for the maintainers that power a billion dollar business, more than a drop in the bucket would be great.
So, I guess it boils down to: that’s a great start, don’t stop there!
A $500K donation to the maintainers of the open source projects used by a company is significant. Full stop. There is no other hand. It is also not the only contributions they make. If all companies made decent sized donations to the open source projects they rely upon the whole ecosystem would be more vibrant and sustainable.
Microsoft also has its FOSS Fund which donates $10K each month to a project that is nominated and voted upon by its FOSS contributors. https://github.com/microsoft/foss-fund
Is there even one $10M ARR business that has donated $500K even one time? Maybe I am just missing this as these companies do not get the attention of GitHub but I have been involved in open source for 20+ years now and I have little memory of any companies that are donating. The only contributions I tend to see is the companies that have FTE to work on some of the open source projects that matter to that company.
What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR? Every company relies on open source. Most do not contribute money or people to the effort. We ought to be celebrating and encouraging more of this.
> Is there even one $10M ARR business that has donated $500K even one time?
I don’t have exact figures for most of these companies, of course, but I have seen many small consulting or teaching businesses contribute a lot of money to OSS (here’s one such example, I don’t know the company, just a quick look on Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/frontendmasters). That’s because they rely on the success of those software systems to continue making money, of course, but I don’t think that’s any less true for the big payers.
> What about all of the banks, oil, retail etc. with enormous ARR?
I in no way meant to single out GitHub or insinuate that what they were doing was bad, that’s why I tried to end on a high note (to emphasize yet again: _it’s a great start_). What I’m trying to say is that I hope it doesn’t stop there, for GitHub or anyone else. The incentive to do it is higher when there’s good PR coming out of it, and that is mostly true the first time around. I’m hoping that there are more incentives at play than just PR (genuinely, not in a “but I don’t think so” way).
The term originates from the concept of receiving a free horse and having the audacity to check its teeth so as to judge the quality and value of the gift as that was the means at the time of judging a horse's age, longevity and health.
$500k donated by any business is a lot and should be praised and encourage others. They don't HAVE to do anything, but they are taking the initiative to help out. Can't say the same about other companies.
i would bet good money that GitHub controls a non-profit whose purpose is to give money to open source devs. Otherwise every donation to a sponsor would be a loss because they're passing on 100% of the money†. If, however, they're giving the money to a non-profit then it's all a tax write-off for them.
† yeah, yeah, soon they'll be charging 10% to companies who sponsor, but I'm betting us little folks donating are cumulatively at least a million dollars and they probably don't want to loose hundred thousand when they could have a tax credit for it.
If $500K is such great PR that it's worth it to the company, I hope we can see a bunch of other companies (and, hey, divisions of Microsoft) do it too!
Presumably people are just as or even more upset at all the other companies who use open source internally but don't give cash like this to large numbers of open source projects? Right? [insert Anakin Padme meme] If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?
I have noticed for a while that HN comments lean really anti-Github. I don't really understand why.
> If all big companies donated $500K a year to open source, that'd be a pretty significant change in the environment, wouldn't it?
If those other companies stood to gain as much for $500K spent on marketing, they'd be doing it too.
GitHub isn't somehow more benevolent than all the others. I happen to like GitHub for the product it provides. I just find corporate marketing using maintainers as a proxy is lame. But good for the people who received the money, however.
Thing is, had GitHub done nothing, there's no discussion at all right now on HN about how little they're doing.
But because they put $500k toward those people whose projects they rely upon, there is now a discussion of what a pittance it is (whether or not you append "good job, hopefully you do more in the future" doesn't change the critical tone you set with all your other words you said before you said that).
The lesson: Almost no act of generosity goes without criticism on social media or discussion sites.
(Note: I hold a pragmatic view of generosity. I don't care what a person or company's motivations are for being generous. PR? Great! Let's show it makes for great PR to be generous! Selfishness, bolstering one's sense of grandeur? Great, feel whatever you want about yourself, as others benefited! Trying to out-compete a rival or friend by giving more than they? Great competition to be in! Did GitHub give to one person? Great! Did they give to 900 people? Great! Did they give each person $10? Great! Did they give each person $550? Great!)
I think companies or individuals contributing money to projects they rely on is great, and I personally do it and incentivize OSS development in my own consulting practice (through lower fees and philanthropy).
Now, should it be the main source of income for an OSS project, especially when it’s “critical infrastructure” (let’s just pretend that term is well defined and means whatever it means to each of us)? Probably not, and there should probably be a better way.
Whether science funding in particular is a good model I would debate, since it can be such a beauty pageant at times.
I am not, but what I know is, it involves lots of buerocracy and still lets lots of science unfunded. But this is understandable, as science is unlimited and the question remains, who decides what is worth funding? And remember that funding is tax payer money.
It might be a little glib, but that’s the main incentive I see here, especially since they’re exclusively using their own system, Github Sponsors, to direct the money. It makes sense, but if it was truly only about the maintainers, wouldn’t it be better to get the money to them through whatever means they choose to implement?
But you’re right: in the end trying to find out what their actual motives are is purely speculation, and I shouldn’t have phrased it as if it were a fact.
The question is, how many other companies do that? Would be great if more companies could go through their used libraries and spend $500k. Github doesn't have to make up for all the other users not paying.
It seems like you are pretty angry at me trying to get the notion across that this is good, but they could do better. That’s okay, I can deal with that.
But I want to make one thing clear: I’m not doing this for HN karma. I haven’t commented on here in years, and this article prompted a reaction. Trying to somehow shoehorn that into "you’re only doing this for points” is invalidating that in a way that I find troubling, because, really, how can I prove you wrong? I might just have an opinion on something and wanted to engage with a community about it, or I might not. Only I can tell (and you, apparently).
EDIT: Correction. I submitted two comments 2 months ago that I forgot about, the comments before that are from 2019.
I presume the author is referring to this blogpost[1]. The proposed name of the system is actually "Feudle", which might have made it harder to find for you.
The word "woke" did indeed not make an appearence, but this choice quote: "Eventually, all desirable content will move out of the anarchic slums and into this new, happy gated community. And junkies will be shooting up in the old Google building." His idea seems to have been that hierarchic—or "feudal"—arrangements would be preferrable to the "anarchic" ways of information indexing Google uses.
To be fair I do not think of the proposed search as particularly “feudal”. He is basically just describing what people do by appending “Reddit” to their Google searches. I think Yarvin diagnoses partt if the problem correctly, but misses (1) the massive amount of money that can be generated from paid manipulation of rankings (by Google or others), and (2) the adversarial environment this creates.
I wasn’t particularly interested in entering the discussion (mainly providing the link and an explanation), but I used the word "feudal" because Yarvin himself used it, in the name as well as in the description of the system.
Yarvin was talking about Google Search in 2010 as a mutated but recognizable version of PageRank. That's correct, I think, but it was already heading in a different direction. By the end of the year the NYT was reporting on malicious manipulation of search results for profit¹ and Google responded quickly by changing their algorithm². Then, as the "don't be evil" era draws to a close, Google gets more and more aggressive about extracting user value and the 'democratic' PageRank (which Yarvin was by no means alone in identifying as such³) is totally subverted. In 2016 Trump wins and 'fake news' – successively renamed to 'false news', 'misinformation', and now 'disinformation' – becomes the issue, and Google responds to that, too⁴. So post-2016 there really is a kind of sociological health and safety factor in the algorithm, and it's only then that Morozov's 'woke' becomes applicable to Google Search.
Now if anyone was going to guess that something like that would happen, it'd be Yarvin – but none of that is in that 2010 blog. When he said 'democratic' he meant exactly what Wired did in the article linked below – the action of masses of people. It's Morozov that makes the association between 'woke' (i.e. P.C.) and 'democratic', which has all sorts of implications. A woke-democratic Google Search isn't one that is powered by democracy, but one which protects democracy – meaning, protects the masses from manipulation by exposure to sociologically harmful 'content'. Sensu Yarvin, that is neither feudal nor democratic. It is in fact oligarchic.
The final irony is that when Morozov fudged the name Feudle, wittingly or no, and omitted a link to the blog in question, it was entirely in accord with the idea of exercising democratic power by not giving UR any link juice, but the result of that when posted to HN – a site not lacking in markers of community reputation – is that two people find the link (thanks again) and a small discussion ensues which otherwise would not have happened.
Thanks for suggesting him! I was unaware of his talks, and instantly fell in love! The first talk just made the list, and I’m planning on looking through more of his talks in the coming days.
At one point I just stopped adding people to the list, but I guess that doesn’t make much sense. Gary Bernhardt and more than just a few other people from your scrape deserve to be on that list!
