> What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way
This is a really interesting framing and I appreciate it.
As a Caucasian American, I have been perplexed by this issue. The terminology change itself didn't especially annoy me - you don't have to change your existing repositories after all - but it didn't seem to really accomplish anything useful. My instinct was that this served no purpose beyond PR ("virtue signaling") and might be mildly harmful at worst (as a distraction from important structural issues, a constant reminder to right-wing people how annoying liberal scolds can be to them) without any upside I could actually envision.
I feel like what you describe was very far from the original intent, whatever it might have been, but I appreciate that it may help in some small way I did not envision.
I agree that it served no purpose, and yet this thread appears to have found one: the virulence of the objection is so out of proportion to the magnitude of the change that it raises the question of just what is really at the root of it.
It is entirely about those "annoying liberal scolds"... and the way anything they say will be turned into an existential crisis. I feel like this is less about any actual change as a constant search for a thing to be aggrieved about, and when found, pounced on with absolutely maximum force.
I think of it as "vice signaling": performing the objections without even a moment's thought, not for the purpose of refuting it but to be seen as being the most, loudest, most obnoxious opposition.
> the virulence of the objection is so out of proportion to the magnitude of the change that it raises the question of just what is really at the root of it....I think of it as "vice signaling": performing the objections without even a moment's thought, not for the purpose of refuting it but to be seen as being the most, loudest, most obnoxious opposition.
I don't feel like we're reading the same thread. There are plenty of reasonable objections in these comments, and dismissing as you do is, to me, as intellectually shallow as the change in question.
I think the same could be said in reverse: if this change is truly so small and insignificant, why was it done in the first place? The frustration is at the paternalistic and placating nature of it - really, Github did their part by renaming version control tree titles? It reads like an Onion article, but it’s actually just a serious change by people too out of touch to realize how ridiculous it is. That’s where the frustration comes from. Nobody would care if they changed master to main to boost efficiencies, the annoyance is that they were motivated to do so in some brainlesss attempt to fight racism, but just revealed themselves to be vacuous
This is a really interesting framing and I appreciate it.
As a Caucasian American, I have been perplexed by this issue. The terminology change itself didn't especially annoy me - you don't have to change your existing repositories after all - but it didn't seem to really accomplish anything useful. My instinct was that this served no purpose beyond PR ("virtue signaling") and might be mildly harmful at worst (as a distraction from important structural issues, a constant reminder to right-wing people how annoying liberal scolds can be to them) without any upside I could actually envision.
I feel like what you describe was very far from the original intent, whatever it might have been, but I appreciate that it may help in some small way I did not envision.