HACKER Q&A
📣 cheesycod

GitHub shadowbans accounts for no reason now?


A while ago, while working on one of my pet projects, GitHub's AI decided to randomly shadow-ban/'flag' my account (`cheesycod`) for no reason at all. I checked security logs and found nothing. I also haven't made any sort of offensive or spammy comments at all (did their AI just hallucinate up a shadowban then?). I have checked my account thoroughly for hacking etc. but have not found any traces of hacking or anything against Github's TOS whatsoever. To make matters worse, GitHub Support has also refused to respond to my account reinstatement request so it's basically like shouting into a black void.

We really need federated Git hosting to become popular at this point. A company like GitHub should not be able to just shadowban accounts and never reply to support tickets, especially when it has a monopoly in the market and is basically required in the current job market. Are there any potential candidates for Git hosting right now??? Someone should honestly make one...

Has anyone else on Hacker News experienced this abysmal level of support from GitHub before?

  👤 talldayo Accepted Answer ✓
> GitHub's AI decided to

When you say "GitHub's AI", you have to be absolutely crystal clear whether you mean an automated process or an AI-powered system that has gone rogue. The difference in implications is significant and conflating the two isn't likely to help your case.

> We really need federated Git hosting to become popular at this point.

> especially when it has a monopoly in the market and is basically required in the current job market

There are more GitHub alternatives than you can shake a stick at. There are managed Git solutions, self-hosted Git solutions, manually-managed NAS repos, Git/GitHub alternatives and hundreds of methods of file versioning.

I really don't think you can call GitHub a monopoly with a straight face. Maybe you could argue they're an unnecessarily critical part of online infrastructure, but anything hosted on GitHub can be migrated elsewhere with little effort.

👤 keikobadthebad
I had a thing where github for some reason no longer accepted my email was trusted for the github account. It required setting the email again and going through the validation again.

Then it started talking to me as usual.

Not sure if your prob, but worth trying.

👤 is_true
I got in touch with GitHub because someone was using actions to scrape a website too aggressively and they told me they couldn't help me. Haha.