I can't find the article where I read it, many years ago now, but it was about strategies that small communities can adopt to keep their culture from being subsumed by the mainstream.

One was to pick a set of norms repugnant to the mainstream that everyone currently in the community can tolerate and enforce them rigorously on all new members. This will limit the appeal of the community to people like the ones currently there and will make sure that it never grows too big.

Thus your community is as appetising to activists attempting a hostile takeover as a toxic slug is to a bird.

As an example from six years ago, when the code of conduct madness had just reached its peak:

>I believe OpenBSD's code of conduct can be summed up as "if you are the type of person who needs a code of conduct to teach to you how to human then you are not welcome here".

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wat10000 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Trouble is, the people who are most likely to need a code of conduct to tell them how to behave are also the most likely ones to strongly object to one on the basis that they don’t need a CoC to tell them how to behave.

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Brian_K_White 3 days ago | parent [-]

So what? You have simply stated that jerks exist.

True, but what you have ignored is that jerks exist equally on all sides of any CoC.

It's just as often as not that the producers and promulgators of some CoC are the jerks. In other words CoC's don't fix anything by merely existing. A few lines in a charter or mission statement already does the same to have something to point to just for formality and documentation sake.

[edit to expand or re-state a little...]

It's not that there is no problem and everything is fine already. It's that CoC's are almost always a thoughtless and ineffective, even actively counter-productive response to the problem.

A coc is an attempt to make an easy solution for something that there probably IS no easy solution for.

The problem takes the form of a continual fresh stream source of problem. IE a forever stream of new jerks, and existing jerks who dodn't just do one thing today but continue to exist tomorrow and the next day.

And so the solution can only be a matching continual case-by-case counter-effort, from intelligent insightful people who have good judgement.

Yeah, that doesn't scale and isn't easy and only some people do even a half-way good job of it.

It's just not a problam that you can bash script away.

But trying to do so is an example of being just a different color of jerk making life worse for others, but just in a different way and employing different mechanisms.

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wat10000 3 days ago | parent [-]

It's not just that jerks exist. It's that this "we welcome anyone who doesn't need a CoC to behave" is functionally equivalent to "we welcome jerks."

It's true that you can't just throw together a CoC and declare the problem to be solved. But there is value in writing down some ground rules. The purpose is not to "script" enforcement, it's to have something concrete you can point to. Having a CoC that says "no personal attacks" won't stop personal attacks, but it will let you very quickly shut down anyone who comes back with something like, "you just need to have a thicker skin."

	▲	3 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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lelanthran 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> >I believe OpenBSD's code of conduct can be summed up as "if you are the type of person who needs a code of conduct to teach to you how to human then you are not welcome here".

Nice.

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locknitpicker 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I believe OpenBSD's code of conduct can be summed up as "if you are the type of person who needs a code of conduct to teach to you how to human then you are not welcome here".

I think that the goal of any code of conduct is to prevent any semblance of arbitrary and whimsical punishment, which can kill entire communities.

Linux unfortunately has to endure with toxic contributors and even maintainers, and history showed that when those maintainers fail to human and consequently the community banishes them, they go on a tirade arguing all kinds of conspiracies. A code of conduct is a form of checks and balances, and code of conduct violation processes serve as processes to collect and present objectively verifiable paper trails of exactly when snd how those maintainers failed to human, and how bad at it they were. Those types can't simply argue their way out of a list of messages they were awful to others, how exactly they violated the code of conduct, and how bad it was. Thus any stunt they pull is immediately rendered moot by the deliverables from the project.

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jorvi 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I think that the goal of any code of conduct is to prevent any semblance of arbitrary and whimsical punishment, which can kill entire communities.

Quite ironic then that CoCs overwhelmingly lead to arbitrary and whimsical punishment.

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Iridiumkoivu 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

To me this seems to be true. From what I’ve seen CoCs are overwhelmingly used as a tool to enforce and reinforce a certain kind of ideological point of view.

As a result of this typically CoCs are used to block contributions or block contributors from projects where the people enforcing the CoC they wrote wield it as a weapon against men whose perceived personal politics they disagree with. And typically rumours are enough to trigger CoC proceedings against them.

	▲	locknitpicker 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> To me this seems to be true. From what I’ve seen CoCs are overwhelmingly used as a tool to enforce and reinforce a certain kind of ideological point of view. I don't know which codes of conduct you have been exposed to. The ones in Linux cover basic things like not being cool to attack other maintainers with posts like: > Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit. https://lwn.net/Articles/999197/ This is hardly what I would label as an ideological debate.
	▲	hitarpetar 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		sounds like it's WAI

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locknitpicker 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Quite ironic then that CoCs overwhelmingly lead to arbitrary and whimsical punishment.

I don't agree. I think it has been working quite well in spite of the conspiratorial bullshit excuses made up by those who failed so hard to human to the point they were slapped with one.

Nevertheless, one of the values of a code of conduct is that people like you and me can check the deliberation and hear what all interested parties had to say. Without a code of conduct, the one with the loudest voice and the more interest to subvert code of conduct deliberations could basically dedicate their life shit-talking the project.

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lelanthran 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> A code of conduct is a form of checks and balances, and code of conduct violation processes serve as processes to collect and present objectively verifiable paper trails of exactly when snd how those maintainers failed to human, and how bad at it they were.

That's the opposite goal; the CoC is to be as broad as possible while still being as vague as possible.

It's a tool that has been repeatedly weaponised against the out-group by the in-group - there is never any sense of even-handed usage of a CoC against the community.

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mycall 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Failed to human is an odd phrase as humans are always just that. I prefer "don't be a dick" but I guess it is less civil.

	▲	locknitpicker 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are levels to being a dick. I think that chronically online types tend to forget that at the other side of the screen there are real flesh-and-bone people who would find it unacceptable to be addressed in a disrespectful way.

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Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Funny, I had heard about that concept to explain the rigorous rules in religions.

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201984 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for the explanation!

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lynx97 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That sounds like a very convincing reason to switch over to OpenBSD. Great system, minimalist, good documentation, and NO ACTIVISTS!!!!!!!!!!!