| ▲ | MaKey 14 hours ago |
| Overall I think Code of Conducts are a net negative. Alleged violations of them seem to be used to lend credibility to actions that otherwise would be hard(er) to justify. |
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| ▲ | seanhunter 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Overall I wish we lived in a world where they are not needed. But in every community, some people are assholes so they are often needed. |
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| ▲ | MaKey 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions. | | |
| ▲ | mrgoldenbrown 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Communities were not doing fine. CoC didn't come out of nowhere because someone was bored. Having a CoC doesn't absolve moderators any more than having laws absolves judges from having to make good rulings. | | |
| ▲ | MaKey 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I've been part of a lot of communities and never have I felt that a CoC was missing or needed. CoCs didn't come because they were needed but because of a social justice fad. Have a look at the Tim Peters incident with the Python community. The decision to suspend him, a core maintainer (he wrote the Zen of Python), was justified by made-up absurd alleged CoC violations. Without a CoC they couldn't have suspended him as easily without totally losing their face. |
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| ▲ | KaiserPro 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Communities were doing just fine without a CoC I mean kinda, but also not. CoCs just codify what the moderators think. Even Hacker news has a CoC: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html its just called a guide. A community has to have a set of rules which most people agree on. One of the most common attacks in a moderated forum is "Oh but X did Y" and "thats not fair X can do it" A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick. It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well. In an ideal world, you'd just have a thing that says "don't be a dick" but that doesn't work for many and hilarious reasons. Engineers who who either have a god complex, parsing issues or empathy gaps (either learnt or inherent ) are notoriously difficult as a community to keep from getting into frothy arguments that colour everything and give off a bad smell. CoCs are a tool, that can sometimes help. | | |
| ▲ | none_to_remain 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I perceive "guidelines" or "rules" having a very different connotation compared to a "code of conduct." See for, example, the SQLite team adopting the Rule of St. Benedict as their "Code of Conduct," getting criticized for it, and changing it to a "Code of Ethics" in accordance with the Rule about seeking accommodation with your adversaries. |
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| ▲ | Brian_K_White 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would say incorrect. All that is true is that something is needed, but there is nothing about the problem that requires that particular poor framework for dealing with it. | |
| ▲ | account42 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It just means you get different kinds of assholes who are better at navigating around the CoC or even weaponizing it. | | |
| ▲ | seanhunter 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes but it was always this way. Any organisation with rules can suffer from rules lawyers as a lot of people who have tried to contribute to wilipedia/serve on a committee of a voluntary organisation etc will testify. |
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| ▲ | chasd00 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”. |
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| ▲ | MaKey 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters. | | |
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| ▲ | micromacrofoot 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find. |
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| ▲ | pamcake 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There are bad CoCs and ways to abuse them and people who do. That doesn't mean the concept of setting social expectations for a collaborative project is inherently bad. Same as for discussion forum guidelines and moderation. No CoC is better than a bad CoC or one where interpretation is centralized to someone with an agenda. But many times a decent CoC can help newcomers in reading the room and support well-intended moderators in making judgement calls. I also think good CoCs are small and mostly reactive. It's premature social engineering to spend energy on formulating general policies for things that happened once or twice if ever for the project. Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy. |
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| ▲ | calvinmorrison 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is nothing to do with Code of Conduct and just one business chosing not to do business with another. |
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| ▲ | 15155 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in. |
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| ▲ | KaiserPro 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Mate, thats just rules. rules you don't agree with. | | |
| ▲ | Brian_K_White 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, the problem with CoCs is exactly that they are not "just rules". They are something else hijacking the legitimacy of normal justified functional articulable rules. | |
| ▲ | 15155 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Often these "rules" extend to conduct far outside of the purview of a project - typically crossing into identity politics. "If you espouse views I don't like on your personal Twitter, you can't contribute to this entirely unrelated software project." | | |
| ▲ | thunderfork 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This can sometimes, in practice, be reasonable. If letting muh_dick_1488 open PRs means everyone else stops contributing, well, you're gonna have to pick a group to keep. | |
| ▲ | oytis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, that probably depends on how extreme are the views? If you write a blog post about there being too many colored people in London, how are non-white developers supposed to collaborate with you? | | |
| ▲ | 15155 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps by minding your own business and focusing on the work? Nobody is forcing you to view that person's blog or to even know it exists. If that individual's viewpoints somehow visibly leak into their work or professional communications, then you might have a case for complaint or concern. |
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| ▲ | swed420 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And "social justice" is often a weapon of capital interests in disguise. | |
| ▲ | fortran77 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I was once told I couldn’t present a calorie counting/diet app at an Elm conference because it violated their CoC about discrimination based on “body size”. |
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