CoCs are like HoAs. The people behind them are usually well-intentioned, and they certainly have their place, yet they're still quite dangerous. If the wrong kind of person gets into a position of enforcement, they can basically do whatever they wish, with no due process, recourse or principles of law being observed.

You get penalised in some ways if you don't have a code of conduct. For example github will nag you about having one.

> HR is to protect the company, not the employee

The CoC is not there to protect the community, but to protect all the bad actors and give ammunition to attack the good ones.

Happens every time, the maintainers who add CoCs to projects have no problem being an ahole to others.

Update: I know some people love their CoCs, but answer me this, how is this kind of childish name calling allowed and still online, if what I wrote above is not true?

Just FYI github nags projects to have a code of conduct.

US leftists, or non-US leftists?

Ah yes, asking people to behave like decent human beings is much less common to the right

In my experience it's the opposite of helpful, because it's actually a lot easier to reach consensus on whether someone's being an asshole than on whether they have violated the code in the document.

Is it really? In this example, could you not see anything wrong with calling employees losers and monkeys, until someone linked you the CoC?

I've got skin in this game: Grew up in UK's social services with undiagnosed mental health quirks; too "smart" for ADHD, too "social" for autism, per my assessors. Ended up in classes thick with neurodivergent kids, from non-verbal to quirky misfits. Plus, I've moderated an IRC community for 20 years, where text chats strip away nuance like a bad compression algorithm, leaving everything ripe for misinterpretation.

I'm sharing these facts not to "credential-dump", but to underscore: This comment comes from compassion, not condescension.

Vague CoCs bug me because they're well-intentioned landmines. Take "don't be an asshole"; it could mean "act in good faith" (why not just say that?), or morph into "don't seem condescending" based on who's reading.

Pair that with commitments to safe spaces for neurodivergence, like autism (where social cues in text can be a foggy maze), and you've got a recipe for unintended clashes.

An earnest comment misfires, gets flagged as jerkish, and boom: escalation via subjective enforcement.

I've flagged this before: good faith-vague inclusivity can ironically exclude through feelings-based policing, which is how communities often roll anyway. So, why not tighten rules for clarity? Swap "don't be an asshole" for "assume good intent and clarify misunderstandings." It'd make safe spaces safer for all, autists included.

I don't doubt I'll get a tirade of "how can you call Autistic people assholes" just like always, totally missing the point on purpose.

All companies are 'a group of people'. But that's not how you treat them. You should treat the individual employees of microsoft as the people they are. You should treat microsoft as a whole as the evil entity it is (TBF they're not worse than apple or google or etc...)

What would you say about people who knowingly do actions that will lead to widespread harm and future deaths even though they're killing no one directly?

Murdering can be done very well without ever having to touch weapon.

I don't always get it right but I try not go on the internet and contribute even more anger and negativity that is already there. Try not to be a dick to other people.

It's not really for anybody's sake except my own, because I'm the one who has to sit with a mind full of shit at the end of the day and I'm just going to wear myself down. Nobody who matters is gonna read any of the bile I could write and change who they are, after all.

I think it's healthy, even necessary, to utterly distrust microsoft (or any large compny, for that matter). And while I don't think it's a-ok to call an individual microsft employee a monkey by name I think it IS a-ok to say any microsoft product is 'written by monkeys' or any other suitable derogatory term.

The way github develops is steered by microsoft-the-company and not so much by it's individual employees. A company, especially such a huge one, is not to be trusted and can (should) be made fun of.

It's interesting that maturing and growing up for me has resulted in opposite conclusions to yours. We're all different, of course, but I'd like to offer a different perspective.

> And anyway, because most people are trying their best, regardless of how the outcomes line up to affect my life and my interests personally, really do not deserve my scorn and derision.

The fact that most people are "trying their best" doesn't mean that their goals and interests can't be selfish, or that their actions can't negatively impact others. Particularly people who pursue positions of power, in politics or corporations, often treat others with hostility. And unlike most hostile people, it's these high-rank individuals that have the capability to impact millions of people.

So while I agree with your overall sentiment that well-intentioned people don't deserve my scorn and derision, the real world has taught me that governments and corporations often abuse my trust, my rights, my freedoms, and my quality of life. And for that, the least I can do is speak freely about how I feel about them as people on an online forum. I'm sure that my actions have practically zero impact on their lives, unlike theirs on mine.