The thing is that codes of conduct do not help honest actors “regulate” and deal with troublemakers.
I used to organize meetups and I visited meetups organized by others who had code of conduct, and I just never understood what they were hoping to achieve with that.
If someone behaves poorly, you can point at a document all you want, but it doesn’t help you deal that the problematic individual. A document that you put in a markdown file is not enforceable.
And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.
It is all just a charade to help you pretend that you are impartial.
My experience with a CoC at a meetup was that one day a bunch of people piled on the mailing list for the meetup demanding that the meetup adopt a CoC. The majority of these people were people that either only infrequently showed up, or hadn't ever shown up to the meetup. The CoC they demanded had a bunch of social justice language. When questioned on the mailing list as to the events that had precipitated the demand, one person said they had attended a meeting and had "felt uncomfortable." However, the organizer of the meetup actually took attendance, and it turned out that the complainer had not attended that day. The whole thing seemed like a ploy to turn the meetup from people who all used the same programming language into some sort of social activism group. This was at the height of #MeToo, and it appeared that this was being weaponized to take over successful technical groups through sympathy for women.
There's definitely a subset of people out there that are using CoCs as a way to install levers in organisations they can pull. I'm not completely burnt on the concept of CoCs but I definitely am very wary about them and the people who insist on them.
> And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.
Has it occurred to you that's actually exactly why they exist? :)
I mean. Whenever a code of conduct was installed in a project i was passionate about, i could look up the contributor on twitter/fediverse and see that they are a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.
Not surprised at the downvotes but this also matches my experience exactly.
These people (who push for CoCs so heavily) in my experience tend to hypocritically attack and censor opinions they don’t like, while not understanding why people won’t "accept them for who they are".
They are desperate to be the center of attention and love to play the victim.
It’s like the bullied becomes the bully sort of thing. They spend more time arguing over weaponized CoCs and ideological SJW politics instead of writing code. It doesn’t help that many of them self-admittedly suffer from mental health problems.
It just wasn't a very wholesome crowd. I don't have to like everyone, but I expect everyone to not try to ban people just because they have the unfavorable opinion du jours. Maybe write that in a COC, but it should be a premise to begin with.
On a completely unrelated note, you very, very rarely find real fascists in open source software projects.
And for even less favorable characters it seemed that it was just powerplay by some actors that wouldn't convince their own mother that they are the most untoxic of them all.
I'm the ‘enforcer’ of a fairly large board games meetup, and the CoC is very simple: there's 3 rules. Newcomers are especially likely to ignore some of these rules, so I notify them the first 2 times. 3rd strike and they're out.
What I like about the simplicity of our CoC is that anyone can read it in a few seconds, and we can point it out to people without seeming bureaucratic or annoying.
Happy to share with others. Complicated CoC documents I've seen at other groups don't seem to do anything besides giving the organisers a feeling of power/that they're doing something. Simplicity might be key here.
No need for a link, it's about board games and the rules are (paraphrasing):
1. If you can't make it, let the host know the day before or morning of the event.
2. If you're playing at a venue, try to buy food or drinks from the venue. Don't bring lots of stuff from the outside.
3. Be kind and respect other people. Don't damage their games or act mean towards other players.
We're not super strict, but people have been perma-banned for sexually suggestive remarks or being assholes. I think we've had 3 or 4 really bad cases total. Most people get temporarily kicked out for violating rule #1 a lot.
Having something you can point to and say "This is why you're being removed" often removes some headaches. Some people will claim it's unjustified, moderator abuse, etc, if you don't. At least with some rules, there's less wiggle room. Of course, some people are going to respond poorly even with some rules, but it's also not just about the offenders - other community members being able to see there's some logic and reason to removals is good.
It's never about the rules, it's always about the perceived authority of the moderator or the decision maker.
This is very much so for small communities who don't have the infrastructure to litigate issues in a legalistic manner... but, even in areas like public law, the rules don't really matter, it's the perceived authority and impartiality of the courts that keep a legal system up and running. (think of any controversial Supreme Court decision -- do people really care what the law actually says and whether the legal reasoning is sound... or do they just speculate about the political leanings of the judges?)
Since most people writing up CoCs aren't good lawyers or experts in drafting (and finding loopholes in) rules... having a smaller "attack surface" actually makes a lot of sense.
That said, if the community is large or important enough that it already retains some legal advisors, then maybe yeah, make the rules more specific or something.
Assuming a majority of nice people, explicit rules can be exploited by a few assholes against their "enemies", while trusted human moderators only need to be kept in check with elections.
> often removes some headaches (...) with some rules, there's less wiggle room
... I understand that's the theory, but in practice, I've never seen it working that way.
I don't see how having the CoC affects any of this. If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them. If someone behaves so poorly that you decide you need to remove them, the community (the small portion of people who give a f) should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.
It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say (without pointing to a document you put in your repo when you were bored), that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision".
Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.
People have different level of tolerance to negative behavior. That includes both your team and your community. Having a clear rules allows you to
1) point both involved and uninvolved people to the code of conduct when you end up taking action.
2) avoid disparity of enforcement within your team
3) funnel disagreements (from both teammates or community members) by focusing them on the rule, rather than on a general debate on how should the community should be managed.
If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.
> If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.
Of course it does. If the community/project leaders are not aligned with your ideology, it's better to find one with alignment than to attempt to corner them with a written set of rules.
I'm just having a hard time imagining someone who wants to be racist sexist xenophobe jerk to other people, but they saw you drafted a CoC last year in the root of your repository, so they won't... Or they were racist sexist xenophobe jerks, then you point out that "our community has a CoC", and they will stop.
Written rules aren't for the offenders, they're for the conflict-adverse community members who get uncomfortable when someone needs to be thrown out for community health reasons. They don't really have strong opinions supporting the person's behavior, but they're uncomfortable with the idea of people getting exiled from the community, so come slithering out to protest when an asshole is exiled for being an asshole. Since their primary reason for speaking up in the first place is discomfort with conflict, a quick "they broke the rules" tends defuse further argument.
Why wouldn't "I have taken a dislike to them. Pray I do not take a dislike to you as well" also solve these people's problems? There's surely something more than "dislike of conflict" here, or else they wouldn't invite conflict by disagreeing with the now decided and closed conflict's resolution.
Yeah, if a community has someone with that kind of generally trusted authority, that works great. If a community doesn't, agreed upon rules are the next best thing.
The CoC isn't for them. As you mentioned, they're gonna be assholes no matter what. Kicking someone out of a group is possibly traumnatic but usually a bunch of drama. Having the god king of the group capriciously kick random people out of the group for no clear reason, and without communication as to why leaves the remaining members worried they could be next. I mean, sure, if you want to be the groups dictator and rule by fear, I guess that's fine, but imo that's no way to run things. By having something documented, with a procedure, gives a framework to follow for when you do have to kick someone out that's a bit less made up than "we just didn't like that person".
Not every person who does something problematic is actively seeking to do so in order to hurt someone. Also, there are plenty of people who are looking for spaces that are "okay" with their views, and a CoC that makes it clear the space is not can absolutely make them avoid it.
You are so focused on the strawman of problematic people being mustache-twirling villains trying to disrupt spaces they dislike, that you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for.
> you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for
Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave. My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.
Technology Z meetup / user group is a space for people who are interested in Technology Z. Repository Y is a space for people who are interested in Repository Y.
If someone needs a CoC to figure that out, bad luck.
You want to start discussion about War X, vilify everyone just by being born in that country, please do it outside my repo / user group. Plenty of spaces you can do it and there, you'll be welcome to do so. Want to talk about evil black / white / DEI / right wing people, please also leave my group out of it.
> Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave.
Behavior is who people are. It's the 'content of their character' that MLK spoke of.
> My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.
And yet different communities have vastly different concepts of acceptable behavior. CoCs let people know whether their behavior is acceptable in a community.
In my experience, it absolutely does help. But everyone has their own experiences.
> should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.
It's not a matter of the action being transparent, it's the motivations. Sometimes, it's not clear to community members why the action was taken, if there's no CoC or rules. "They're being an asshole" is a lot more subjective than "They were breaking the rules"
> It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say, without pointing to a document you just put in your repo, that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision". Just my 2c.
Sure, this might work for a small community or group, but the fiasco with Nix seems to suggest this isn't the case at a certain size. Some people apparently want accountability and transparency from their moderators.
> Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.
Great! That's fine! Not every community needs such things. Some do.
> If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them.
I'm sorry, but that's just not true.
You're treating humanity as if it's divided into two distinct sections: Those Who Behave Well, and Those Who Behave Poorly.
In reality, different humans have different ranges of ways they prefer to act, and most are quite amenable to reasonable, clearly-stated codes of conduct for interaction in a particular space.
There is a small subset of people who are either deliberately antisocial for the sake of it (trolls/griefers/etc), and another subset that are genuinely just assholes who will, if given the leeway to do so, cause endless problems in a community.
But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct not because they actively want to, but because their unstated assumptions about how people should interact clash with the unstated assumptions of other people there. Having the code of conduct lets everyone coming in in good faith align their expectations and avoid these unnecessary conflicts. They're like a Session 0 in a TTRPG in that sense.
> But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct
Hard disagree... I've never seen one have this effect. IMO you don't need a CoC to suddenly understand what should already be common sense i.e. don't be a dick. Either they were already going to act that way, or they weren't.
Under normal circumstances, what it would look like from the outside is just...someone not causing friction, because there is a code of conduct. Or someone causing friction, because there isn't one.
The former looks identical to someone who would never have caused trouble in the first place, and the latter looks, if not identical, at least very similar to someone who would have caused trouble, no matter what.
Presumably the code of conduct was introduced to solve a problem. So I'd be interested in hearing about an example of a community that had problems with their social fabric, and then introduced a code of conduct, and then could demonstrate that those issues in their social fabric were addressed.
In the history of the world? Yeah. Anytime you have a communal living space, you're going have to set norms on what constitutes shared community stuff. Is the milk in the fridge George's and no one is allowed to touch it, or do we, as a household, want milk communism and it just goes as shared groceries and we go often enough that there's always milk? There's not a right answer, but it's up to the community to decide what's normal in its culture. People come from different backgrounds, were born in different countries and have totally different expectations as to what constitutes "don't be an asshole". Do you put your elbows on the table? Is slurping your soup a sign of respect or disrespect? What you don't see is people who see a lack of a code of conduct and then just don't join.
The way I see it, the people who would cause friction anyway won't be stopped by a CoC.
And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.
Another commenter (cannot find their name now but I saved the text) said exactly what my experience has been:
> A written code of conduct can legitimize petty disputes based on interpretations of the text, even if the issue itself is something easily addressable like using the word “master” in a programming context. It can become a tool for manipulation (pushing someone out for “CoC violation” vs simply correcting the wording).
I think if someone needs to be told to be nice... it's time to grow up. Open source projects are not your mother and we shouldn't have to treat people like children, nor get chastised for having that (IMO very reasonable) stance.
It's about setting a shared understanding of norms.
It's about whether the kinds of jokes allowed among members are "as raunchy as you please", "polite jokes only," or "none".
It's about whether you're expected to work out differences in private chats, address them in public, or bring them to a moderator.
It's about whether your comments on a code review started by another member have to be addressed by the committer before the review can go forward.
Any time you think the way you do things in the open source project (or any other kind of community) you contribute to or run is The Natural, Obvious Way Everyone Does Things, you're probably wrong, and some other people or projects do things exactly the opposite way and think that's just as natural and obvious.
Right. I've seen a CoC used as a power-grab by people who had barely made any contributions to a project, when the people in charge were too easy-going or naive to shut down dishonest use of it, so they tended to side with the squeaky wheel. Once the bad actors got people they didn't like removed or driven away from the project, they just got worse, saying things like "go kill yourself" without consequence, because they were now in control and could interpret the code however they liked or just ignore it.
You can't write a CoC that will prevent bad behavior from bad actors in charge, so it's worthless at best and a weapon for the unscrupulous at worst. What matters is who enforces standards of behavior, and if those people are decent and honest, no written code is necessary.
I play in a band. Since we're just 4 people a code of conduct would be ridiculous. What isn't ridiculous however is that a group of people who do some shit together need to be somewhat on the same page what is acceptable and what isn't. You don't need that with just friends, but any project beyond friends needs people to agree on what kind of social space this is meant to be. If you don't talk it out the shittiest person is going to define it for you.
And beyond a certain size formalizing that makes sense. Not as a tool for punishment or to point to, but so everybody can be on the same page and you know if someone acts out of line they do so despite better knowledge.
If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?
Yes sure, but what I mean here is stuff, that can start interpersonal conflicts. To stay with the band example, different people will have different sensibilties around their equipment and how to respectfully treat it. If everybody does it their way you basically guarantee some sort of clash. The solution is to make a general rule that may seem overly sensitive to that one punk member that throws their gear on a pile, but everybody else is happy and the conflicts are avoided.
What I want to say here, is that a good code of conduct deals with the stuff that is open to interpretation and defines it. So if our punk-bandmate throws the singers gear on a pile we don't have to argue about different definitions of how we expect others gear to be treated.
So it is needed precisely because everybody thinks they are just acting normal and within bounds, even when the majority thinks they are not.
Literally pointing at a real thing is useful. Yes, rules are not logical binary that absolves you of activity but having no basis for decision making other than hind brains is how you enter the current American morass.
Its the agreement to argue about a topic that is struck when you make rules.
Not seeing this is how..niholists proliferats with variohs plicit ordering liks might is right
What evidence do you have for that? I was involved in adopting a code of conduct for a local tech meetup and we did that because a couple of incidents that weren't handled very well left other people feeling unsafe and unwelcome. Having some guidelines in place reassured folks that we took those concerns seriously and gave us a framework to deal with unwanted behaviour.
From my experience, writing rules directly after incidents and as a reaction to incidents do not produce good results. New members of the community 5-10 years later will have no understanding of what the rules are trying to do or why they exist, and when a new incident occur the rules get rewritten again and again. The only effect is the optics as in sending a message that "we take those concern serious", but without substance, and again from experience, those people who was leaning to leave will still leave regardless.
What has worked in communities I have been active in is to have continuously conversations, in combination with a no-blame culture that provide social safety for people to bring up issues and also room for people to improve without feeling personally attacked (which is the opposite of social safety).
Anti-meritocracy was in in some CoCs, arguing in its favour was a reason for exclusion from an event / project. Even if the argument happened somewhere else on the internet and not in the project.
Whenever I see someone dying on the hill of fighting for 'meritocracy', in the words of another poster in this subthread, I have found them to be:
> ...a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.
... And typically with a giant chip on their shoulder. The real world's a little bit more complicated than the spherical cows that the near-religious faith in it requires.
It highly depends on what you understand that word to mean. At first it was just meant to to pronounce fairness. Nothing more to it. It was used in a context to explicitly disregard who people are and focus on what they do.
And of course it wasn't meant as an instruction manual for how to run a society. It was quite explicitly a message that you are not judged by who you are. That is it, there is no ideology, there is no grand idea. That is media garbage that filled your head with a phantom.
And honestly, that did a much better job than most COC I read.
I'm not sure how your comment is relevant. No one is fighting for meritocracy here. Only providing the requested information about a case where CoC pushed a specific political view and excluded others.
CoC always appeared to me as a US issue which could pretty much be safely ignored by anyone living in the rest of the world. I generally dislike how they tend to be written as objective rules while actually being imperialist but most of them can safely be boiled down to act like a normal professional person.
The implied subtext of "avoid topic the US finds morally objectionable and when in doubt act like an American would" is what I dislike from a theorical point of view but the truth is, it doesn't really matter on a day to day basis.
So yes, CoC seems mostly harmless but also mostly useless. I tend to agree with the article point that if this is the case, keeping them short seems optimal.
The problem I have seen with them is that they get weaponized. Someone can point to a specific rule in the CoC that has very subjective language in it, and claim that you are violating the rules, when really they're just doing that to silence opinions they don't like.
This is further proven when any attempts to discuss said rule/policy are immediately shut down with even more staunch black-and-white opinions and zero empathy... even if you wait until later to discuss it in a different setting.
Good article. This sentence from the conclusion nails it:
> What is needed now is not the unthinking adoption of a one-size-fits-all template, but a “right-sized” approach tailored to the scale, culture, and goals of each individual project.
I feel a lot of the heavy CoCs are a product of low-trust cultures, particularly the US, which attempt to replace interpersonal relationships with legalese. This is honestly not necessary in most projects, which are generally high-trust environments.
I like your comment, I think I get the spirit of it, as opposed to the other reponses to it which sound to me like opening negotiations for codes of conduct
Hopefully! And it takes every kind of weird to make it fun. You don't have to like or hang with everyone in a community. But sometimes the people you don't understand personally wind up being the ones you will respect the most from a skill/talent perspective. A strong foundation of mutual respect built up over time is how you create real tolerance and even change minds.
It really depends whether "weird people" means people with unusual hobbies/sexualities/clothes/hair/etc, or "weird people" means the ones who want to keep all the first category of people out...
Not for people with boundaries. I've done work I was absolutely delighted with in both process and product with people whose views I detest. If you can't grow up enough to do that, you can't have a civilization.
If I have to like you in order for us not to fight, I warn you that we're going to have to fight.
Quite the opposite, the whole point of CoCs is to get actually weird people (i.e. nerds) out of projects and replace them with cultural conformists that all use the same kinds of symbols and language in their bio to describe just how unique they are.
No, the point is to get the bigots out. I don't know of any CoCs that prohibits "nerds" in an open-source project, don't be daft. Also, not fun how you're implying that being from a marginalized group and being a nerd are mutually exclusive.
I really like heavy codes of conduct. They're the Open Source project equivalent of those brightly colored frogs in the tropics. They're kind enough to signal their own toxicity so others know to keep their distance.
A big part of a CoC that this article, as most discussions on the topic, miss is that they provide a signal to new contributors from marginalized groups, who may have faced abuse or violence in other spaces, that this community will be safe for them to contribute to and - as many anti-CoC folk like to say - get on with the tech.
Not having a CoC doesn't mean a project is going to be unsafe to work in. But it means when another community member refuses to work with you, or belittles your work constantly, there is nothing to be done. For many, why take the risk. This means that projects are starving themselves of contributors because they don't create an environment that is safe.
Ruby's "CoC" is actually a fantastic example of why you need to spell it out too. "Participants are expected to be tolerant of opposing views." is often weaponized by abusers who like to paint basic requests like "please use my chosen name" as "not being tolerant".
> marginalized groups, who may have faced abuse or violence in other spaces
Can you cite examples of users facing abuse or violence while contributing to a tech project? And how exactly does a CoC guarantee the safety you mentioned?
> when another community member refuses to work with you
Members are free to choose who to work with regardless of whether a CoC exists or not.
> belittles your work constantly
Your work may not be up to the project's standards and anyone pointing that out may hurt your feelings, and that's fine. You can't expect project maintainers to coddle each contributor when there's work to be done. Most CoCs are at odds with that because they value contributors' feelings over clear communication that helps a project advance.
> there is nothing to be done
You could communicate your grievances to the project maintainers directly, but you're not guaranteed a reply even with a CoC. In fact I'd argue that with a CoC it's easier for maintainers to dismiss criticism by labeling it as "non welcoming" or "non inclusive" or any other loose emotionally-driven term.
For software projects that are overwhelmingly conducted online the very concept of "marginalized group" is close to irrelevant and meaningless [1].
I think what happens is that some people want to be very, very vocal about whatever "group" they belong to and want to feel offended and oppressed. In recent years, arguments and campaigns against specific technical terms ('master', 'blacklist', even 'legacy code' spring to mind) are examples of this, IMHO.
> For software projects that are overwhelmingly conducted online the very concept of "marginalized group" is close to irrelevant
I wish this were true, but it simply isn't. If a group is full of white cis heterosexual guys and someone turns up with a random screen name and says nothing about themselves, everyone assumes they are also a white cis hetero guy even if they're not. The implication is "you have to conform, and if you don't then you don't belong".
The reality is that for many people, their mere public existence is seen as a political statement. Often times asking for the most simple of accommodations or changes is seen as "being vocal" or starting an argument.
I'll give you a hypothetical. Let's say a group of developers is all-male, and a leader starts off every meeting with "hey guys". Then, a developer who is a woman joins the project. They ask that leader "When you say it like that it implicitly excludes me, It would mean a lot to me if you said 'everyone' instead." I think that's a pretty reasonable request, it asks very little of the leader (to change one word), has no impact for everyone else, and means a lot to some. But to many, many people that would be viewed as "suppressing speech" or "weaponizing oppression".
> everyone assumes they are also a white cis hetero guy even if they're not
Hard disagree. And how is this even relevant?
> The implication is "you have to conform, and if you don't then you don't belong".
Conform to what, being nice? That was already the case. A group is very unlikely to change their ways regardless, especially just because you barge in and say you are marginalized and start getting offended at things.
For one, "hey guys" is often said by people of every possible group known to humankind, but also if you really wanted to, you can ask them to use a different term without saying you are part of some marginalized (or any) group at all.
The fact that they belong to some group is still (IMO) meaningless in this context, the reality is that they want to play politics and try to get people to change how things operate... you don't need to be part of any group to do that. IMO that's just being difficult.
Maybe you believe it is necessary to identify yourself online as belonging to some group, perhaps in order to force a change, but again I think this is just trying to play politics where it's often not welcome.
If online discourse can exist without people even knowing this much about a person, then I think it's far less likely that they will be targeted for belonging to a group that people are not even aware they belong to.
I'm not saying people need to hide, but I think it's just easier if people can assume "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog"... if nothing else simply because some people suck, and it's easier to get along in a purely technical project if we don't know that much about you personally.
I think that you've made my point really quite well. I gave perhaps the most basic possible example of accommodation, adjusting a single word with no impact on other project members and you were still able to argue about it.
> Maybe you believe it is necessary to identify yourself online as belonging to some group, perhaps in order to force a change, but again I think this is just trying to play politics where it's often not welcome.
People just want to be themselves. If the very act of appearing to be from a different group is "playing politics" then what you actually mean is "you cannot be different".
I think "playing politics" means trying to get people to change something, or how a group of people is managed. Not all projects want other people telling them what to do or what they should or shouldn't do, and I think that's perfectly ok.
If "people being themselves" means making SJW politics their entire identity and spraying it across the internet, then I'd say it's likely they're not going to be welcome in many places, CoC or not.
I think you could argue having any rule that someone happens to disagree with is telling them "you cannot be different"... people have to draw the line somewhere, or there wouldn't be rules. Who are we to say what's right or wrong in someone else's project?
And I think your argument still dismisses the weaponization that many people are seeing... maybe you call it their identity being someone who wants to change things... but that doesn't mean they should always get what they want.
Trying to fight "hey guys" is stupid and tilting at windmills. It's a great example of performative wokeness that achieves nothing but making some people feel good about themselves.
Just say your name and people will call you by that name. Politely request pronoun use if you must, but don't expect everyone to remember or even care -- especially if you're using anything but she/her or he/him.
If we accept either side's definition of who the "real abusers" are, then politics will continue to hobble projects. If you are starved of people to discuss your political views with, it's the wrong thing to do to vomit those out in a programming thread. Go make some real friends if you're looking to do that. Not everyone will see the world the way you do.
Well a big reason this is missed is people discussing it are not part of these groups and mainly saw this as an annoyance.
I can agree that heavy & strict CoCs can be daunting and probably overkill for small open source projects. And they're far from flawless, as shown by the Rust mods resignation incidents. But to say they're useless and anti-meritocratic is to forget (and/or silence) these people that wanted to contribute in an environment where they wouldn't feel threatened (incidentally, sometimes despite being skillful contributors, so much so for the supposed meritocracy of the CoC-less projects).
I'm not sure strict CoCs are the answers to these real problems, but this feels like dismissing these problems altogether.
> But it means when another community member refuses to work with you, or belittles your work constantly, there is nothing to be done.
No it doesn't. It just means that there isn't a formal process. The aggrieved party can always contact the project leaders/maintainers, and lodge a complaint.
Sure, the leaders may not do anything with your complaint, but a CoC doesn't guarantee that they will either (even if it does give you a warm fuzzy feeling up-front that they might).
I find it incredibly infantilizing this idea that people can't be good to each other, or people can't feel safe, without some sort of document that lays out behavior expectations. It's so so simple: don't be a dick to people. If someone is being a dick to you, find someone with authority and send them the evidence. If they handle it to your satisfaction, great. If not, stay away from that project, because it's run by people who at worst don't care about you, or at best are inept at handling this sort of thing (and in either case, a CoC is not going to make it better).
For leaders/maintainers, grow a spine. If someone is behaving badly (regardless of whether or not someone complains), talk to them and give them a chance to improve. If their behavior gets better, great. If not, eject them from the community. If they or others aren't happy with your reaction, that's their problem, not yours.
> Participants are expected to be tolerant of opposing views.
If you can't tolerate that others will have different perspectives to you then it means you're likely to be a very difficult and inflexible person to work with.
This is one of those things that falls apart on the actual content. If you have a trans contributor and someone who comes in with trans-eliminationist rhetoric, you can't then turn round and say the trans person is being "inflexible" for refusing to work with them.
That would be covered under the next part of the Ruby CoC:
> Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free from personal attacks and disparaging remarks.
And anyway, rhetoric which advocates for killing groups of people would be very off-topic for a programming language discussion forum. Unlikely it would come up in conversation except for deliberate trolling.
Holy moly, what kind of open source projects are y'all working on? I don't even understand how these topics could come up in a Pull Request. Are people writing and reviewing code in these projects?
Likely more than 50% of the world's population agrees with viewpoints that some would label "trans-eliminationist rhetoric". So if you are saying anyone who ever expresses such viewpoints–even in forums completely unrelated to the project–is barred from contributing to it, you are potentially excluding more than half of contemporary humanity.
A community doesn't exist for "the majority of the world". It exists for its community. If a community doesn't want bigots (as they shouldn't), they absolutely should exclude them.
I just haven't seen CoCs effectively reduce the bigots in a community; they either are toothless, or have teeth and lead to a j'accuse breakdown.
It is a tiny fraction of the people I know and have interacted with over an extended period of time who has not made a remark that could be construed as bigoted.
I have seen moderators called bigots for suspending (instead of banning) someone who made an inappropriate remark.
My wife and I have been accused (behind our back) of misgendering someone when we were using the pronouns that we had privately confirmed she preferred.
If you create a CoC with real teeth, then instead of the BDFL or core team or whatever controlling who is in the community, it's the people in the community who are most interested in accusing people of violating the CoC that have control over who is in the community.
If a community wants to exclude many millions-even billions-of people around the world, including the population supermajority of dozens of countries, and all those who seriously believe in the traditional teachings of any one of several major religious traditions-and denigrate those people it excludes as “bigots”-well, maybe that in itself is a form of bigotry, and hence their labelling others “bigots” is a case of “the pot calling the kettle black”
So, if a person is a traditionalist/conservative Orthodox Jew, who holds traditional “non-affirming” views on LGBT issues-do those views count as “eliminationist rhetoric”?
If a project decides it won’t welcome people who believe what almost all conservative/traditionalist Orthodox Jews believe (even if they keep those beliefs to themselves in project forums), it is essentially deciding that Jews (of that kind) aren’t welcome-isn’t that antisemitic, and in itself a species of eliminationism? (not with respect to Jews in general, rather with respect to Jews of that kind)
And the same point holds for “Sunni” or “Shi’a” or “Catholic” or “Protestant” or “Eastern Orthodox”
There's a clear difference between respecting people and hate speech; no project should welcome someone who contributes inappropriate insults and off-topic rants.
If that stereotypical Orthodox Jew wants to be a valuable community member, they can keep their hostile opinions to themselves, and nobody will consider them troublemakers.
Obviously they won't feel welcome because they realize that the majority would despise them as bigots if they expressed intolerable opinions, but hopefully it can become a reason to question their ideology.
I think the distinction is whether they express their views in project settings or in unrelated settings. If they express them in project settings, then I can’t see how that could possibly be on-topic, which makes it disruptive behaviour. But if they express them in unrelated settings, and then someone else brings that to the attention of the project-well, then it has nothing to do with the project, so the project should refuse to get involved
I don’t want anyone “eliminated”… the problem is what does “eliminated” mean? If it means “rounding up people and shooting them” then of course I oppose that. But what about the conservative Jew/Christian/Muslim who believes that when Moshiach/Christ/Mahdi comes/returns, gender dysphoria will cease to exist-is that belief also “eliminationist”? I think religious freedom means we need to tolerate the existence of such beliefs even if we believe they are wrong. Excluding someone from an open source community because they hold traditional religious beliefs on gender and sexuality-especially if we assume they keep those beliefs out of project forums where they aren’t relevant-that’s religious discrimination, and in my view it is wrong, and (in some jurisdictions) it may even be unlawful
The correct answer is reacting harshly to "trans-eliminationist rhetoric" from a weird extremist, with an ultimatum or immediate expulsion, before the trans contributor complains.
If someone is posting along the lines of "send them all to the death camps" etc. on the mailing lists or discussion boards, for any group, that would be covered under the other items in the Ruby CoC, where participants are expected not to harass or disparage.
Also it would be very off-topic for a programming language forum.
Someone will say that that person shouldn't be bringing any sort of politics into it, so they should be removed, no CoCs needed for that.
Then someone will point out that they might have this stuff on their Github profile, or website. They're free to do so, of course. But it would be wrong to remove them for that, right? But then any trans contributor that sees this crap is what, forced to work with them anyway?
The latter would be off-topic for a programming language discussion forum, certainly. But working with others that happen to hold differing views on that topic? Not a problem.
It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to have the same perspective on political issues.
It baffles me how much political every aspect of life has become.
We can't just talk about things and hold genuine discussion. It always boils down to "us vs. them" standpoint.
Is genuine discussion typically like this? I'm not really getting a sense of back and forth. It sounds more like wanting to have one side of a conversation without really inviting a response or room for nuance.
I directly addressed your statement. "Trans people existing" is a vague statement that avoids talking about specifics. Discourse is toxic because of rhetorical tricks like this where you desperately try to avoid actual discussion.
Addressing the point. Do you agree or disagree that "trans people existing" is too vague to be meaningful? Alternatively, what exactly do you mean by "existing"?
I don't really know what to tell you, other than that it would help if you stopped being deliberately obtuse.
"Genuine discussion" includes responding to the topic of "trans people existing" by pointing out that "existing" is vague and needs further definition. That is genuine discussion, inviting you to clarify what you mean by "existing". I helpfully included a few other relevant bits of genuine discussion that welcome related tangents, but directly responded to your comment with genuine discussion directly about "trans people existing".
If you're going to no-true-genuine that conversation that's fine I guess, but I don't really understand the point of wasting time on simple rhetorical tricks that don't fool anyone.
I'm asking what you think a genuine response would be from someone who disagrees with you. So far, it appears that that doesn't exist. Is there any response you can construct that you feel would meet the criteria of being genuine? It's a very simple request.
> Do you agree or disagree that "trans people existing" is too vague to be meaningful? Alternatively, what exactly do you mean by "existing"?
A genuine response would be responding to that, not metacommentary while refusing to engage. A simple response of "By existing I mean ..." would be perfectly genuine.
I'm not sure how to make this any clearer. I've asked for an example from the beginning. An example contains both sides. If you wish to provide an example(and I hope you do) it will consist of two interlocutors with 10 to 20 individual statements. The example will demonstrate genuine debate. Do you understand the request?
Do you believe it is normal to be not sure how to make this any clearer. you're not going to engage in debate. you've asked for an example from the beginning. An example contains both sides. If me wish to provide an example( and you hope me do) it will consist of two interlocutors with 10 to 20 individual statements. The example will demonstrate genuine debate. Do you understand the request?
I'm not asking for a chat. I'm asking for an example of a genuine discussion on the aforementioned topic. It's unclear while, being clearly unable to provide one, you don't seem to acknowledge that.
Just FYI, you are wasting your time with this user.
They've done this same tactic and question avoidance, perhaps quite literally hundreds of times on Hacker News. And I am frankly surprised people haven't caught on to this user and that they are even still allowed around here, given that this type of stuff is almost their sole contribution.
Its intentional, as well. I remember reading a comment where I think they just straight up admitted to doing this.
If you want a fun read, go back through their comment history and you'll find a multitude of users having the same problem as you are having with interactions with them.
If said people kept their opinions to themselves, the issue would never arise in the first place. Pretty much the whole problem in semi-public spaces like this is that folks with strong reactionary beliefs don’t tend to leave them at the door
`s/reactionary//` and you'd be right in your second sentence. It doesn't matter if it's action or reaction, people with strong beliefs, strongly held tend to be holding them because of some core set of ethical or moral principles and those things eventually are revealed in the day-to-day work.
As to your first - if people with a strong set of ethical and moral principles "just shut up" about what they considered ethical and moral essentials ... then they wouldn't be who they are. The only people who don't show what they hold good are people who don't hold as good much of anything.
Now if we're just talking "opinions" here (about things that are not ethical and moral, merely matters of taste), then yes, a person with "strong beliefs strongly held as a universal principle" is someone who is just an ass. But if I know someone is a raving Detroit Lions fan "on the internet", what kind of a person am I if I can't work with them?
Except people have enforced CoC's against people for expressing views on other platforms because those views make other people feel unsafe in those collaborative spaces.
I have only ever seen CoC's abused to push out people with anti-social just views.
It's the well known correlation between stupid opinions that can do no good and stupid people that cannot control themselves. We should worry about the bad cases when oppressors are in power and able to do significant harm and/or manipulative sociopaths using hate speech as one of many tools.
It seems some people need to re-read the title and article and consider the words "heavy", "bureaucratic" and the like
No, CoCs - or rules in general - are not inherently bad. HN has some, which the moderators and the community enforce well, and it's generally one of the best platforms on the Internet for intelligent discussion.
Yes, heavy CoCs can be weaponized and abused, if there is little or no trust between the community and its leaders. But with or without a CoC, such a community will always be prone to such abuse. You think moderators need to establish a CoC to push their politics on people if they want? How does that even make sense? Why not just... do that, without a CoC?
A written code of conduct can legitimize petty disputes based on interpretations of the text, even if the issue itself is something easily addressable like using the word “master” in a programming context. It can become a tool for manipulation (pushing someone out for “CoC violation” vs simply correcting the wording).
I don't see how that is an issue with CoCs. Those people would still try this with or without a CoC - whether the moderators/maintainer acquiesce is the real issue, and, again, is separate from having a CoC.
> Those people would still try this with or without a CoC
Perhaps, but I think it may make the moderator more likely to side with the abuser if they are able to point to a specific part of the CoC that is allegedly being violated, even if that requires colorful interpretation.
> You think moderators need to establish a CoC to push their politics on people if they want? How does that even make sense? Why not just... do that, without a CoC?
I don't think this is what generally happens, or what people are wary of. I think group participants [sometimes] coerce moderators into establishing a CoC in order to have a tool to reach for in service of silencing voices they regard as "problematic".
Often the moderator is the project lead (or one of them), who may not be suited to adjudicating personal disputes and probably has better things to do. That can result in siding with the louder faction in the hopes that giving them what they want will satisfy them and let everyone get back to work. Or worse, turning the job of moderation over to them because they seem to want it, and then the petty tyranny is off to the races.
I think that happens less now that people are aware of the danger; but a decade or so ago it was a real problem because no one saw it coming.
I'm going to push past this extraordinarily bad faith framing. I'm going to assume you're referring to people who are made to feel uncomfortable or are harassed by other members of the community.
So if that community doesn't have a CoC, and those members talk to the moderators, and the moderators take action... is that coercion too? Is that the moderators or those members pushing their political views on the community? Should the moderators just not do anything?
> I'm going to assume you're referring to people who are made to feel uncomfortable or are harassed by other members of the community.
It has been my experience that there are both members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who have been harrassed, and also members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who harass others. There are surely more variations of this too.
My most recent experience of this was a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised harassing one of my colleagues — who is also a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised, but perhaps less so if you subscribe to the legitimacy of intersectionality — at a software development conference with an established CoC.
The incident was reported, and the repercussions for the harasser amounted to exactly nil.
> So if that community doesn't have a CoC, and those members talk to the moderators, and the moderators take action... is that coercion too?
No.
> Is that the moderators or those members pushing their political views on the community?
That really depends on the circumstance.
> Should the moderators just not do anything?
Moderators should take action on CoC violations as proportionately, fairly, and impartially as they can.
> I'm going to push past this extraordinarily bad faith framing.
It is extraordinarily tiring and depressing that anything proffered that contradicts the orthodoxy of the culture that most readily endorses the establishment of CoCs is immediately dismissed as an argument in "bad faith".
Yes, claiming to feel harassed or uncomfortable by other people with the aim of forcing a moderator to threaten them with expulsion from the space if they don't recant a political statement is absolutely, 100% a way that many people attempt to push their political views on a community. Making any judgment at all about what moderators should do in this situation is equivalent to asking moderators to take sides in the political conflict at hand.
I feel like this is similar to civil and criminal laws: When codes of conduct are very detailed, lawyers will argue fine points on the wording. When they are simple and general, people can't be 'rules lawyers', but you need to have authority to enforce decisions, and respect for that authority.
CoCs are one of the reasons why I choose to not contribute. I don't enjoy the risk of someone with an axe to grind to drag me into some absurd GitHub comments drama and feel justified by some generic wording on the CoC.
Same, but for slightly different reasons. I was a big open source contributor of a few well known projects, but the CoC stuff just kinda soured me on it all.
Not because I enjoy reading or writing hate speech or anything, but these were places that didn't tend to have any obvious problems with troublemakers, so it felt self congratulatory. And don't even get me started on the sheer amount of bikeshedding the discussions around it became, mostly from people who'd never even contributed to the project.
It suddenly made me realize there were probably more productive and less frustrating ways to spend my time.
This is how I feel. I treat the presence of a code of conduct as a sign that, particularly for small projects, the folks running the project don't have experience leading others. Always comes down to the relationship, the individuals involved, and the way things are communicated.
I'm not very involved in the topic, so my POV might be very wrong - but most effective enforcement, from my overall life experience, is having someone act as a "bad guy" and sharply deal consequences to the people that behave like assholes.
I feel that having a detailed COC, while a very good sentiment in theory, in practice must bring about people who will try their best to skirt around the edge of COC and make trouble for the maintainers - who I expect want to stay "nice", but they're forced to act harshly in the end anyway.
> DHH condemned detailed and strict CoC like the Contributor Covenant as a “trojan horse” that should be purged from projects. ESR went even further, asserting that CoC are nothing more than a “tool for troublemakers” and that the best course of action is to delete them entirely from projects.
At this point, in 2025, does anybody seriously doubt that they're a "tool for troublemakers"? A lot of people who would otherwise contribute see a hyper-particular CoC, written by an HR type or an aspiring lawyer, and walk away. Others don't bother to read the CoC and may later be dragged through coals over something exceedingly minor, despite their contributions.
In open-source, the best policy is to avoid CoCs and avoid those who write and promote them.
Personally, I assume one or more problematic activists behind any prominent project CoC.
Some might be well-intentioned but unreasonable and hard to discuss with, some might be dangerously fanatic and a constant threat, some might be power-hungry manipulators giving themselves leverage, all are a liability for the project.
Normal people shouldn't need anything more than normal morality and acceptable manners to be good project contributors.
Let's restate your points a bit, but using the words "ethics" rather than CoC.
Is publishing an ethical standpoint a "trouble making"? Depends, doesn't it? What if you examine the most common top ethical viewpoints you are aware of. For me, it's loud groups like say, PETA, Extinction Rebellion, etc who are fairly populist.
Are they making trouble? Sure. But for whom? Would you personally do what these people are doing? Probably no. Would you personally do what the people they are "making trouble" for are doing? (In my example, Animal harm, empowering climate change?)
I am going to suggest that you would probably say "no, I don't want to harm things/people/etc; as I would probably feel bad for doing it and being personally responsible".
If thought through like this - even if your examples of ethics are not what I chose - can you see the value in a strong, clear ethical position, even if it's to warn people?
Can you see that it might challenge authority (trouble making), but that is not a bad thing a lot of the time?
> Let's restate your points a bit, but using the words "ethics" rather than CoC. Is publishing an ethical standpoint a "trouble making"?
Most software projects are ethically neutral and don't need a "standpoint." In tech, those "ethical standpoints" are often tacked-on by people who want to use them as a tool to exercise social control over other contributors, including project founders and visionaries. (There tends to be, in any given Western organization over n people in size, a clique that's really into this.)
I have no idea how CoCs are used in PETA, but obviously groups that have ethics as their core focus -- which includes religions and social welfare groups -- have long lists of proscriptions, policies, etc. I don't think that any of it necessarily applies to open-source software, though. It's apples to oranges.
> If thought through like this - even if your examples of ethics are not what I chose - can you see the value in a strong, clear ethical position, even if it's to warn people?
Well, that's precisely my point: The CoC itself is the warning. It's usually bad news in itself -- an exposed surface that's weaponizable against contributors who give to the project in good faith.
I think you should understand quite how bad your examples are. I understand the examples you gave are given in the best of intentions, but this reads as pure blissful ignorance.
PETA literally funded a terrorist convicted of arson.
> A page from the 1995 annual tax return (form 990) of People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), showing a $45,200 payment for
the ``support committee'' of Rodney Coronado, a felon. Mr. Coronado was
convicted of arson in federal court for the 1992 firebombing of a
Michigan State University research lab.
---
> Would you personally do what the people they are "making trouble" for are doing?
Would I eat meat? Yes.
Would I keep animals as pets? Yes.
Do I think it's ethical for humans to use animals for service, e.g., guide dogs for the blind? Yes.
Do I think it's ethical to use animal models in medical research? Yes.
> Not trying to defend anyone, just looking for objective evidence.
Fair.
## guide dogs
> [PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk] regards the use of Seeing Eye dogs as an abdication of human responsibility and, … is wholly opposed to their use. She has had at least one dog taken from its owner.
I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The utter insanity of PETA is actually very well documented, so if you have an evening, grab a bottle of wine and go down that ~rabbit~ hole.
PeTA murders pet animals that are given to their "shelters", because they don't want people to have pets. They are not "perfectly fine" with pets at all.
The examples are deliberately chosen as extremes, where they have an ethical standpoint.
I suggest the examples work even better with the context you add - you do not have to agree with the ethics or like them!
On the "funding terrorism" insinuation...
Did PETA publish an ethical statement about:
- Protecting university infrastructure
- Obeying authorities
- Agreeing with negative media coverage about them
I sincerely doubt it.
Their misdeed in your view is donating $45k for a guy's legal defense, who was the spokesman of the ALF, not PETA.
By that logic, any government funded public defender is the taxpayer condoning murder, robbery, etc. We can both agree objectively that isn't true - guilt by association is the fallacy there; funding a legal defense is separate from the act requiring the legal defense.
I would argue you have this talking point because of a concerted media effort to brand things as "Eco-Terrorism" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare - and that is a coordinated effort to change the focus.
BUT, let's assume PETA are exactly as you say.
Scenario 1: they publish no standpoint, pretending to be a local book club who have simply enjoyed the prose of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation.
Scenario 2: as above, but they publish their ethical standpoint upfront and it is easy to access.
After you have gone a few times, one day a chap stands up, say he's the Lorax; has been a member for years; is head of the Once-ler Action Committee demands everyone hijacks a plane to fly it into the nearest highrise, because he's for the trees; buildings use timber and the North American Squirrel is suffering.
In which scenario are you more surprised? In which scenario were you given the most choice about how you can interact with the group; apply your own standards of behavior or what to expect? In which scenario are you better equipped to object ("we care about the wellbeing of squirrels, but your case is driven by a flimsy ideological argument that has little to do with the shared values!")
In which scenario are you more likely to seek external help from an authority; because it is trivial to identify the extremism is out of place?
This is my point - having no stated ethics or CoC is objectively worse when radical/extremist viewpoints creep in due to malicious actors; vs at least publishing a basic standard.
> By that logic, any government funded public defender is the taxpayer condoning murder, robbery, etc.
No it isn't. We all have to pay our taxes. PETA didn't have to pay Rod Coronado.
> I would argue you have this talking point because of a concerted media effort to brand things as "Eco-Terrorism"
They firebombed research facilities to effect ideological change.
This is the textbook definition of terrorism.
> In which scenario are you more surprised? In which scenario were you given the most choice about how you can interact with the group; apply your own standards of behavior or what to expect?
The problem is the very obvious Motte-and-bailey fallacy that you're falling for here, as so many people do.
You brought up NixOS earlier. I like NixOS. I fund some of the development. I attend some of the conferences and meetups.
Any reasonable person in the community would be against violence, I'm sure you'll agree. The last time I attended a NixOS conference, I saw many attendees with… Actually you know what, I've written about this before. You can read it if you wish, and you might then understand where I'm coming from.
Extinction Rebellion is actually the perfect example, because they are a bunch of protesters so high on their own farts they think blocking ordinary commuters on electric trains will stop Big Oil [1]. And as you can see from the video, bringing this sort of shithead attitude to actual hard working folx will only backfire on you.
So the guy who regularly writes about how brown people are invading his country, and the guy who thinks women in tech are all trying to entrap him with rape accusations... don't think CoCs are a good idea? Colour me surprised
Life is not a high-school debate club. An _ad hominem_ accusation only really works if the attack is unrelated.
I don't know about ESR, but DHH has acted in ways that make it difficult to believe he is making a good-faith, unbiased argument on CoCs, which means I'm not obligated to reciprocate and treat his argument fairly. (DHH oversaw a list at 37Signals making racist fun of customer names, and overruled his employees who complained, eventually leading to a mass walkout.)
To put it in Bayesian terms, the prior that he's making a bad faith argument is higher than any random person, and should be treated as such.
I don't see how that is ad hominem - those are the expressed views of DHH and ESR, as they have repeatedly placed in writing, of their own free will.
They are also explicitly the type of views that CoCs are designed to protect contributors from, hence why DHH and ESR would be opposed to CoCs in general.
Maybe a bit of an unpopular opinion here, but I still think the benevolent dictator is the way to go for open-source projects. If you are unhappy with how things are handled, fork it and do better.
However, there's probably a cutoff point for core infrastructure where we should move away from having a single person in charge.
> Maybe a bit of an unpopular opinion here, but I still think the benevolent dictator is the way to go for open-source projects. If you are unhappy with how things are handled, fork it and do better.
If I start a project that attracts contributors[1], I don't see anything wrong with rejecting someone's CoC "contribution" with "I am the code of conduct. We don't need another one."
> If you are unhappy with how things are handled, fork it and do better.
Yes, but often the projects where this happens are just big enough to where one person cannot realistically maintain their own fork to the same level that users will expect if they are looking to jump ship.
What I've seen happen more often than not, is even if the person does attempt a fork, they either get constantly attacked by existing users, or stop working on it within a year, or both.
I won't go as far as to say "Rise of Ubuntu" a private corporation with a Advertising and PR budget. Is 70,000 packages and indication of the fall of Debian ? A self-governing body (Debian) with a CoC (no matter how imperfect) is worse than a Benevolent (Sic!) Dictator, Really ?
I am beginning to wonder if this blog post is not too different from the raging far right agenda of dismantling all "regulation". "Open Source" has had some nefarious far right loud mouths at least in the past. It would be no surprise if this is another.
CoCs are like having faith in some prerequisite magical spell is first necessary to control and compel people to behave in a proscribed manner when, in reality, they are more like EULAs and Cider House Rules that (almost) no one reads. Paperwork cannot transform people. Perhaps their limited marginal value is existing to show that community is defended and there is a clear and thoughtful process to arbitrate and resolve conflict rather than falling into either extremes of absentee inaction or heavy-handed, summary, expedient, arbitrary expulsion.
I want a code of conduct that explicitly allows debate, disagreement, and normalizes hurting other people’s feelings with your words.
What matters is that people are operating in good faith.
I would also say that IF you have been accepted as a member of a community then you and your feelings must matter to that community unless and until you are ejected from the community. There needs to be a system for accepting and expelling people, and that system should rest on the judgment of people that the community has selected as trustworthy (until and unless those people are expelled).
> normalizes hurting other people’s feelings with your word
This is the Trammel problem: if you want a PvP-enabled project, you discover that people are mostly interested in the part where they hurt others feelings and then go bananas when their own feelings are hurt.
> needs to be a system for accepting and expelling people
The private member's club is an old institution. But people tend to notice and object when it ends up being white guys only.
I guess you are having a problem reading what I wrote. Maybe you are reading someone else’s message and accidentally replied to mine.
I said that a community must be a place where every member’s feelings matter. My feelings matter. Your feelings matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t say things that annoy me (which you just did and I bet you don’t regret it).
You can say hurtful things as long as you are acting in good faith— saying what you believe is true and helpful.
You might think you are disagreeing with me. Nevertheless, you are demonstrating part of what I’m talking about: social life is unsmoothable without draining it of meaning and impact. Let’s instead develop resilience.
Right. Adam tells Ben to go die in a fire, and Ben says, "Come on, moderators, that's obviously a violation of the CoC." Then Adam says, "No, because I was only responding to Ben's offensive and unwelcoming language when he referred to a 'master' repository. I've compiled a list of Ben's violations, and I demand a review according to section 3, subsection D of the code...."
A good moderator will shut that nonsense down immediately, but a good moderator wouldn't need a CoC to do it. All the CoC does is give the troublemaker a tool to start playing rules lawyer, in the hope that the moderator will get tired of it and give in.
Some people think the answer is to have a CoC that's too simple for rules lawyering, like a one line "Be excellent to each other." But even that can be twisted, so it would be better as a project motto than as an official CoC.
I got a thread closed on KDE last year in order to protect the “feelings” of the devs, after joining the side against the removal of ksysguard in favor of their inferior System Monitor. If they’re willing to end discussion over a product they screwed up, rhetorically, what else are they doing over there at KDE in bad faith?
I would like this too, and it sounds like a good idea in theory...
But what I worry about is that it may presume that the staff themselves already operate in (your interpretation of) good faith, and I don't think that is always the case.
What is a user's recourse when they disagree with the mods? And what says they will comply with any decision reached from said recourse?
You could say "we must allow disagreements", but at some point this becomes a paradox of tolerance and then you risk it devolving into pointless arguments on either side.
I think the whole "good faith" part could only be enforced by a universally trusted party, like maybe a robot. But even then, people will disagree about how it operates... so maybe this problem is impossible to solve.
It’s not just theory. It’s how things work in the actual world that you live in. My “theory” is an attempt to harmonize our procedures with the way we all live in the world right now.
I am a pluralist (a person who accepts that he must live with people he doesn’t necessarily like) not because I want to be, but because the alternative is constant rage and war.
Take any social group, anywhere, ever. Whichever one you choose: there are people who care about each other to some degree, and who hurt each other to some degree, and who have some sort of procedures and heuristics for dealing with that.
I suggest heuristics based on accepting the fact that people will behave in ways that irritate each other, even when a community is maximally healthy. Let’s accept that as normal. Then what? Then let’s work on what it means to be a member of the community. Let’s establish a protocol for membership based on a hierarchy of trust, or prestige, if you will.
Yes, if the trusted people are actually corrupt then your community is screwed. Go and make a new one.
Focus on building personal tolerance and resilience. Distinguish between matters of taste and matters of conscience.
To anyone who says this system leads to discrimination: ALL systems lead to discrimination. Yours does, too. Humans are like that. This problem can only be solved from the heart outward.
I’ve been wondering why there seems to be bugs in “everything” these days, and I am seeing this has some to do with the coddling of non-talented programmers in the wake of this activisim.
Posts like this always remind me of Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless". You are completely misunderstanding the original purpose behind the CoC. Here's the relevant part:
"The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrong with the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology."
Havel was writing about life under Soviet occupation. The open source project CoC does not come from a party official who demands you post it in your shop window (public repo.)
It comes from people who believe shitty behavior hurts projects and needs to stop.
> DHH condemned detailed and strict CoC like the Contributor Covenant as a “trojan horse” that should be purged from projects.
Of course he would, he has made several transphobic remarks in the past. Normal people shouldn't take issue with the mere existence of a markdown document that basically says "don't be a dick to people because of who they are". Ostracizing people from projects because you are prejudiced against them, now that hinders open-source. How many potential contributors were scared away by such remarks?
I agree with you in general with your automatic skepticism with something DHH might say on this topic, but:
> Normal people shouldn't take issue with the mere existence of a markdown document that basically says "don't be a dick to people because of who they are".
But that's not what it says. Maybe you can in some squinty way reduce it to that, but that's not all these sorts of documents say, and that's the problem. Most CoCs are fairly specific and strict in what they say people should and shouldn't do, and some of them (like the Contributor Covenant) even includes a process for submitting complaints, and addressing those complaints.
A CoC that just says -- explicitly, without a huge amount of other language -- "don't be a dick" is more or less what ESR and DHH are advocating for. The article goes into detail as to why the author believes that a long, detailed CoC is harmful, and why even if it does essentially just say "don't be a dick", that can cause lots of problems for projects.
I think the issue with CoC is that they have been used in the past by politically motivated (notably on the left) activists to take control of a project and ensure a political line. You may agree with such a political line like anti-fascism, inclusion and what not. But the issue is that you have opened the door to politics inside what ought to be a technical area, and historically, politics change, the ideas you agree on today will be pushed to more extremes (some you might disagree with) you will not be comfortable with and eventually you will be alienated from them completely. But when that happens, you will have no recourse and will eventually be purged (like those before you, being called the trendy workd of the moment, fascist or woke) too because you accepted the opening of the door to such behaviours, your only solution will be silence.
As for examples of that happening, NixOS comes to mind, the Rust debacle too.
Also another issue you might not see, you are ironically also enforcing a dominant idea (your american culture) onto the rest of the world thus creating a hierarchy where your ideas are right and the other cultural operating systems are wrong.
> the issue is that you have opened the door to politics inside what ought to be a technical area
Unless you're willing and able to enforce a BDFL stance, I don't think there is actually any alternative.
As soon as people start disagreeing with any choices you make, and it's not well-understood that "what I say goes", you're going to have people who want to try to change how you run things, and that is the definition of politics.
Either you force your own politics on people, or you open yourself up to accepting changes from other people... which is still politics.
I actually agree, which is why I have high hopes for Ladybird and such. The best type of government is not a democracy but an benevolent dictatorship (also historically called the philosopher-king). You force the politics of neutrality on people, but doing so leads to people on the extremes attacking you and labelling you with unacceptable names like what is happening with DHH and the Omarchy thing
I am not American, and I don't think that "trans people have a right to participate in society" is a political take. The real issue is with people thinking that "trans people shouldn't exist" is a valid opinion to hold, and I don't feel particularly bad for them being "silenced".
If this view falls in the American left's umbrella, then I'm sorry to say: they're objectively right and fuck the guys who hold anti-human views.
The actual divisive issue is whether people who say they are the opposite sex to what they really are should be granted access to spaces that are designated for the sole use of the opposite sex.
This gets relabelled by activists for the trans ideological cause with phrases like "the right to participate in society" and even "the right to exist", but these are so far from what is actually being demanded that it's essentially just misinformation and false appeal to emotion.
> The actual divisive issue is whether people who say they are the opposite sex to what they really are should be granted access to spaces that are designated for the sole use of the opposite sex.
And of course that shouldn't matter for an online virtual space.
But that's unfortunately not it. There are many many people who believe that being trans isn't real, and that anyone who claims to be trans has a mental illness. In addition to denying trans people access to gendered spaces, they also want to deny them medical care, and do things like aggressively (sometimes even gleefully) call them by a name and pronouns that are painful to hear. (Which would still be reprehensible even if being trans was a mental illness!)
And that latter bit is something I have seen happen in online spaces. It's a form of harassment. If the simple "don't be a dick to others"-type CoC is one we can agree on, that's definitely a violation. It's not a "political stance" to say that people should call others by their preferred name and pronouns. It's just basic human decency to do that, and if there's someone who can't even do that basic human thing in a community I manage, then they are not welcome there, regardless of what informs them (often misguided religious beliefs) that they should be hateful like that.
> > The actual divisive issue is whether people who say they are the opposite sex to what they really are should be granted access to spaces that are designated for the sole use of the opposite sex.
> And of course that shouldn't matter for an online virtual space.
Depends on the space. It will matter sometimes. For instance: pregnancy forums, prostate cancer support groups.
But I agree this shouldn't be relevant for online spaces used to organise work on software development projects. These, almost always, are not intended as single-sex spaces, nor as venues for discussing people's differing views on this topic.
> It's not a "political stance" to say that people should call others by their preferred name and pronouns. It's just basic human decency to do that
I think that's more a philosophical stance. Appealing to "basic human decency" seems too subjective, both culturally and personally. There are many perspectives on what this might mean in practice.
Unfortunately the pronouns issue is difficult to avoid when communicating in English, because we have separate words to refer to female and male, and for most English speakers it's natural to use these to describe a person's sex. Overriding it because someone prefers (or demands) an opposite sex pronoun, or even some esoteric pronoun outside of the usual closed set, can be difficult even if that's something you've chosen to accede to. It's like a variation of the Stroop test but in everyday speech.
There are some reasonable arguments to be made for choosing otherwise too, though I expect you probably would not agree.
> It's not a "political stance" to say that people should call others by their preferred name and pronouns. It's just basic human decency to do that,
You're fighting for the right to be a dick to people for no other reasons than because you are prejudiced against them. Frankly, that sounds rather pathetic, maybe do a little introspection?
Spaces such as online open-source communities? This is nonsensical, listen to yourself. Your anti-human bias shows and it's actually disturbing. What spaces are you even talking about and why do you think people that look, act, talk and think exactly like their members should be barred from them?
> trans ideological cause
Got it, demanding human rights apply to trans people is now an "ideological stance". The American Overton window is so far right, it's crazy people can hold such views and think they're being reasonable.
No, typically this issue is focused around spaces like female-only refuges and safe spaces, locker rooms and changing rooms, prisons, sports competitions, and so on. The divisive point being whether males who say they are female should be refused or granted access.
That you have chosen to characterise this with wording like "anti-human bias" and "demanding human rights apply" further illustrates my point.
In the UK, where I am from, the counter to the trans ideological position tends to be from a feminist-influenced perspective, emphasising women's sex-based rights.
Notice how all these so-called TERFs ally themselves with the most anti-feminist crowd, and finally realize it has absolutely nothing to do with feminism.
That's not true. JK Rowling is a good counterexample to your claim, as are the women who brought the FWS case to the UK's Supreme Court (and won), and as are so many other women whose feminist advocacy involves this topic.
JK Rowling accused Nigel Farage of being too "woke", which suggests multiple interesting facts about her political views:
* She thinks "woke" is a bad word, which would put her on the right.
* She thinks Reform UK is woke, which puts her on the far right.
* She's a very confused person, which I would expect from someone claiming to be a feminist while making her prejudice against an already persecuted minority her whole personality.
> JK Rowling accused Nigel Farage of being too "woke"
No she didn't.
What she actually said, in response to someone expressing surprise that Farage supports incarcerating males in the female prison estate, was this:
"Genuinely surprised anyone's shocked by this. Just because huge swathes of the left have revealed themselves to be dripping in misogyny doesn't mean a massive chunk of the right doesn't remain exactly as indifferent to women's rights and issues as it's always been."
She also wrote:
"All those people who tell me support for women's single sex spaces means I must support Reform (which I don't) appear to share exactly the same opinion on women's single-sex spaces as Reform."
Sorry but you've mischaracterised and misquoted her words, and used this to reach a false conclusion.
Most historical feminists would be labelled TERFs today, just like the most liberal 19th century politicians would be seen as conservative. TERFS are still feminists. Communists also allied themselves with fascists during the inter-war period yet you can still consider them as separate.
> Most historical feminists would be labelled TERFs today, just like the most liberal 19th century politicians would be seen as conservative.
Who cares?
> TERFS are still feminists.
You can't be a feminist and side with the people standing against legal abortions, lesbian marriage, gender equality, equal opportunity, equal pay, equal access to education, etc. Simple as that.
The conservative idea of a woman is one of a servile housewife who never leaves the house. No matter how you frame it, these people are anti-feminist, and so are the TERFs that consistently side with them.
> Communists also allied themselves with fascists during the inter-war period yet you can still consider them as separate.
What the hell are you going on about? I would consider the Soviets fascists, but how is that relevant in any way to TERFs not being feminists?
If vegetarians did side with Hitler, then yeah, I would have an issue with them as a group. But that's completely different, can't you see? TERFs are consistently found to be supporting right-wing candidates, a lot of whom hold anti-feminist views. That's the issue.
You speak of "all these so-called TERFs", but the article you linked, in the very first sentence, qualifies this with "some":
"Some trans-exclusionary radical feminists have allied with conservative or far-right groups and politicians who oppose legislation that would expand transgender rights in the United States."
As for "TERFs are consistently found to be supporting right-wing candidates", which you claim, the two articles in the citations for the Wikipedia quote above talk about how right-wing groups in the US are listening to feminists on this specific issue. So really it's the opposite way around to what you're saying.
Wow, you really got me with that "some". Are you seriously now claiming that TERFs aren't mostly found on the right? Ever heard of a left-wing TERF? I won't waste anymore time arguing with someone who refuses basic facts. The truth is, that TERFs have done nothing to further the feminist cause. At best they give ammos to the right, who in this day and age, is acting openly anti-feminist, and amping up rhetoric against an already stigmatized minority who is 4 times as likely to be on the receiving end of violent crimes.
> Are you seriously now claiming that TERFs aren't mostly found on the right? Ever heard of a left-wing TERF?
Yes of course, and I know several personally. It's a fairly common set of views in the UK.
Over here it's not like it is the US where there's such a strong party political divide over this issue and as a consequence feminist groups (like WoLF, mentioned in the Wikipedia citations of the section you linked) decided to appeal to politicians on the right because the left has been so captured by trans ideological beliefs. Though not all on the left. If you're interested, look up Kara Dansky, radical feminist and lifelong Democrat, who has been trying to convince her party for years of the case for women's sex-based rights.
You are most certainly Western, or if not part of the educated and Western brought elites of the Global South. But I most certainly assure you that in the other grand civilizations, the idea you expounded is the standard and just as you feel this idea is the objectively right one, in the other societies with other codes and ethics (Confucian, Vedic/Buddhist, Islamic or non Western Christian), the people living in them have as strong attachment to those ideas as you do. For you the 2 most important values are equality and freedom (deeply liberal values) which are not the same elsewhere.
You also have to understand that just as you are imposing your ideas as "objectively right", in the other societies the other side is doing the same. Thus you are making a political take because it is a value judgement on how societies should operate. You might not like it or not but not only is it a value judgement incompatible with most people in the world, but it is also part of a faction inside your own arena (left wing coded Western politics)
I am indeed "Western" as you put it, and generally adhere to the description you gave of me. I do recognize my statement is political, although I did not use the word "objectively" lightly and feel like I can justify my position quite solidly. So, while the other side may claim their ideas as "objectively right" too, I am yet to see any reasoning that would give credance to such claims. Here is a succint overview of the reasoning I used to arrive at my current position on trans-identity:
Facts (that you should be able to verify easily through e.g. a quick Google Scholar session):
1. Gender dysphoria is real and touches a significant part of the population. It makes those affected by it suffer mentally.
2. Transition is the only known way to cure gender dysphoria, and it does indeed work.
3. People very rarely regret transitioning (<1% of them, less than the rate of people regretting having their children, and most of these "detransitions" come from religious or social pressures).
4. Trans people are no more susceptible to committing crime (sexual or else) than the average person, if not slightly less so (they are, on the other hand, ~4 times as likely to be victims of violent crimes, because of the prejudice and rhetoric targeted at them).
Axioms (that I hope we both agree on):
1. Helping people feel better, or at least not hindering them while they try to, is good.
2. Ostracizing people because of something they can't change is bad.
Conlusions (that you have to agree with if you accept my axioms and my reasoning):
1. Facts 1, 2 and 3 + Axiom 1 => We should let trans people transition, and whenever possible, even help them to.
2. Fact 4 + Axiom 2 + Conclusion 1 => We should let trans people participate in society as no one gets hurt in doing so, and trans people have to transition for their own good, so it would be unfair to attack them on that basis.
this whole article and the resulting hn thread is a nerd snipe. of course esr and DHH are against codes of conduct. they act like bigoted assholes and then throw a fit when people treat them as such.
To the folks that say they won't contribute if there's a CoC: this just proves they're working. If you can't avoid the behavior called out in a CoC, then we don't want you to contribute. Thank you for self-selecting yourself away from us.
I dealt with abusive contributors at Wikimedia Foundation for years, and it wasn't until a CoC was added that coordinators were actually empowered to ban those abusive volunteers. Can you guess which members of the community were also the most vehemently against the CoCs?
False equivalence IMO... you're implying that people who don't want a CoC will actually behave badly, and I don't think that's accurate at all, at least not for the majority.
> it wasn't until a CoC was added that coordinators were actually empowered to ban those abusive volunteers
IMO that is just bad leadership... they could (and should) have taken action against abusive people regardless.
> you're implying that people who don't want a CoC will actually behave badly, and I don't think that's accurate at all, at least not for the majority
If you fight against a code of conduct, which has a more listed out version of "don't harass people", then you're already acting badly. It's at minimum a red flag. There's very little that should be controversial in a CoC.
> IMO that is just bad leadership... they could (and should) have taken action against abusive people regardless.
It's hard to justify kicking someone out of a community without being able to point to a rule they've broken, which is the entire point of the CoC.
None of us want to have to make these things, or enforce them. We just want to work on projects together. These things exist because shitty people cause problems, and then when we try to eject them, they act like victims. When we set rules up front, then enforce them, it takes part of the problem out of the equation.
It doesn't fully solve the "playing the victim" part, because folks then start claiming they're being selectively targeted, and start pointing out super minor violations often using out of context quotes, but it's impossible to solve for everything.
Codes of Conduct are pushed by corporate types you want open source projects to act and behave more corporate fashion. I've never seen them make things better.
... devolves into a massive outcry because a bunch of folks not behaving in good faith didn't like "we don't support fascism or bigotry".
It reached the level of
* Vile sock puppet attacks on a trans individual, who merely kept saying "Fascism, no thanks in this community"
* "Denounce the Marxists!" As a rallying cry becomes a talking point
If you reflect on the behaviours seen there and ask why is this so heated for proposing consequences for bad behaviour; you may come to the realisation that the advocates of bad behaviour... don't want to be accountable.
This post is translated, perhaps some of the nuance is lost. But it hand waves away dhh's behaviour as "controversial figures in the community"
If that's genuinely what is believed, I'd like a replacement on this Overton window, thanks! It has been fractured.
The article does not consider the consequences or implications of malicious acts, and the harm on others adequately.
A clear CoC or similar outlines expected norms, and does not have to be copypasta/is infact better if it is derived from a consensus. It's a statement of what the people with power will hold themselves to, and if that turns out to be a lie - a performative document that is not actually used - newcomers can view the behaviour they observe against that standard; and leave or demand justice if they are wronged.
By not publishing an ethical or moral standard you abide by, even if it's a text file with "get bent" in it; you invite people to interact with you with expectations. If you are part of the 1-4% of the population who are sociopaths, you are advocating to hurt people without consequence. If they are part of the 1-4% you are permitting behaviour without recourse.
Could you imagine a post advocating for "don't fix security holes because 92-98% of people don't know about exploiting them?"
Would that be acceptable?
> If you reflect on the behaviours seen there and ask why is this so heated for proposing consequences for bad behaviour; you may come to the realisation that the advocates of bad behaviour... don't want to be accountable.
It seems the problem is that what amounts to "bad behaviour" is poorly defined, and that the detractors of "bad behaviour" can also be guilty of bad behaviour.
I don't think your rebuttal is all that convincing, though. What belief do we have that a CoC would have prevented the behavior you note in that pull request? That sock puppet account was either 1) a random drive-by person who isn't associated with NixOS at all, and is just a hateful troll, or 2) is an actual NixOS community member who created a throwaway account to spew garbage.
How does a a CoC fix either of those problems? I'll answer that myself: it doesn't. Random hateful trolling is going to happen everywhere, and all you can do is stamp it out as quickly as possible by deleting comments and banning accounts.
The second possibility is more insidious: that there's a member of the NixOS community with these hateful views, and has otherwise managed to keep those views to themselves in their interactions with the community. Or they sorta maybe kinda keep it under wraps most of the time, and people sorta maybe kinda know about it, but look the other way for whatever reason. If project leadership knows about something like that and doesn't take action, a CoC isn't going to fix that, either.
The thing is that codes of conduct do not help honest actors “regulate” and deal with troublemakers.
I used to organize meetups and I visited meetups organized by others who had code of conduct, and I just never understood what they were hoping to achieve with that.
If someone behaves poorly, you can point at a document all you want, but it doesn’t help you deal that the problematic individual. A document that you put in a markdown file is not enforceable.
And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.
It is all just a charade to help you pretend that you are impartial.
My experience with a CoC at a meetup was that one day a bunch of people piled on the mailing list for the meetup demanding that the meetup adopt a CoC. The majority of these people were people that either only infrequently showed up, or hadn't ever shown up to the meetup. The CoC they demanded had a bunch of social justice language. When questioned on the mailing list as to the events that had precipitated the demand, one person said they had attended a meeting and had "felt uncomfortable." However, the organizer of the meetup actually took attendance, and it turned out that the complainer had not attended that day. The whole thing seemed like a ploy to turn the meetup from people who all used the same programming language into some sort of social activism group. This was at the height of #MeToo, and it appeared that this was being weaponized to take over successful technical groups through sympathy for women.
There's definitely a subset of people out there that are using CoCs as a way to install levers in organisations they can pull. I'm not completely burnt on the concept of CoCs but I definitely am very wary about them and the people who insist on them.
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> And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.
Has it occurred to you that's actually exactly why they exist? :)
I mean. Whenever a code of conduct was installed in a project i was passionate about, i could look up the contributor on twitter/fediverse and see that they are a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.
Not surprised at the downvotes but this also matches my experience exactly.
These people (who push for CoCs so heavily) in my experience tend to hypocritically attack and censor opinions they don’t like, while not understanding why people won’t "accept them for who they are".
They are desperate to be the center of attention and love to play the victim.
It’s like the bullied becomes the bully sort of thing. They spend more time arguing over weaponized CoCs and ideological SJW politics instead of writing code. It doesn’t help that many of them self-admittedly suffer from mental health problems.
It just wasn't a very wholesome crowd. I don't have to like everyone, but I expect everyone to not try to ban people just because they have the unfavorable opinion du jours. Maybe write that in a COC, but it should be a premise to begin with.
On a completely unrelated note, you very, very rarely find real fascists in open source software projects.
And for even less favorable characters it seemed that it was just powerplay by some actors that wouldn't convince their own mother that they are the most untoxic of them all.
I have seen multiple CoC being installed with completely good intentions so no.
Have you ever heard the saying about good intentions? And just because you perceive something that way doesn't mean that's the reality
If someone files a lawsuit, does it implicitly mean it was filed with good intentions? Sadly, no.
There are people who will attempt to exploit any system.
I'm the ‘enforcer’ of a fairly large board games meetup, and the CoC is very simple: there's 3 rules. Newcomers are especially likely to ignore some of these rules, so I notify them the first 2 times. 3rd strike and they're out.
What I like about the simplicity of our CoC is that anyone can read it in a few seconds, and we can point it out to people without seeming bureaucratic or annoying.
Happy to share with others. Complicated CoC documents I've seen at other groups don't seem to do anything besides giving the organisers a feeling of power/that they're doing something. Simplicity might be key here.
Yes, please share. Can you post a link to your CoC?
No need for a link, it's about board games and the rules are (paraphrasing):
1. If you can't make it, let the host know the day before or morning of the event.
2. If you're playing at a venue, try to buy food or drinks from the venue. Don't bring lots of stuff from the outside.
3. Be kind and respect other people. Don't damage their games or act mean towards other players.
We're not super strict, but people have been perma-banned for sexually suggestive remarks or being assholes. I think we've had 3 or 4 really bad cases total. Most people get temporarily kicked out for violating rule #1 a lot.
Having something you can point to and say "This is why you're being removed" often removes some headaches. Some people will claim it's unjustified, moderator abuse, etc, if you don't. At least with some rules, there's less wiggle room. Of course, some people are going to respond poorly even with some rules, but it's also not just about the offenders - other community members being able to see there's some logic and reason to removals is good.
It's never about the rules, it's always about the perceived authority of the moderator or the decision maker.
This is very much so for small communities who don't have the infrastructure to litigate issues in a legalistic manner... but, even in areas like public law, the rules don't really matter, it's the perceived authority and impartiality of the courts that keep a legal system up and running. (think of any controversial Supreme Court decision -- do people really care what the law actually says and whether the legal reasoning is sound... or do they just speculate about the political leanings of the judges?)
Since most people writing up CoCs aren't good lawyers or experts in drafting (and finding loopholes in) rules... having a smaller "attack surface" actually makes a lot of sense.
That said, if the community is large or important enough that it already retains some legal advisors, then maybe yeah, make the rules more specific or something.
Assuming a majority of nice people, explicit rules can be exploited by a few assholes against their "enemies", while trusted human moderators only need to be kept in check with elections.
> often removes some headaches (...) with some rules, there's less wiggle room
... I understand that's the theory, but in practice, I've never seen it working that way.
I don't see how having the CoC affects any of this. If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them. If someone behaves so poorly that you decide you need to remove them, the community (the small portion of people who give a f) should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.
It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say (without pointing to a document you put in your repo when you were bored), that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision".
Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.
People have different level of tolerance to negative behavior. That includes both your team and your community. Having a clear rules allows you to
1) point both involved and uninvolved people to the code of conduct when you end up taking action.
2) avoid disparity of enforcement within your team
3) funnel disagreements (from both teammates or community members) by focusing them on the rule, rather than on a general debate on how should the community should be managed.
If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.
> If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.
Of course it does. If the community/project leaders are not aligned with your ideology, it's better to find one with alignment than to attempt to corner them with a written set of rules.
> If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them
I think you mean, "if someone is behaving poorly, the coc did not deter them".
The people who it did deter aren't behaving poorly.
I'm just having a hard time imagining someone who wants to be racist sexist xenophobe jerk to other people, but they saw you drafted a CoC last year in the root of your repository, so they won't... Or they were racist sexist xenophobe jerks, then you point out that "our community has a CoC", and they will stop.
None of these things happen in real life.
Written rules aren't for the offenders, they're for the conflict-adverse community members who get uncomfortable when someone needs to be thrown out for community health reasons. They don't really have strong opinions supporting the person's behavior, but they're uncomfortable with the idea of people getting exiled from the community, so come slithering out to protest when an asshole is exiled for being an asshole. Since their primary reason for speaking up in the first place is discomfort with conflict, a quick "they broke the rules" tends defuse further argument.
Why wouldn't "I have taken a dislike to them. Pray I do not take a dislike to you as well" also solve these people's problems? There's surely something more than "dislike of conflict" here, or else they wouldn't invite conflict by disagreeing with the now decided and closed conflict's resolution.
Yeah, if a community has someone with that kind of generally trusted authority, that works great. If a community doesn't, agreed upon rules are the next best thing.
The CoC isn't for them. As you mentioned, they're gonna be assholes no matter what. Kicking someone out of a group is possibly traumnatic but usually a bunch of drama. Having the god king of the group capriciously kick random people out of the group for no clear reason, and without communication as to why leaves the remaining members worried they could be next. I mean, sure, if you want to be the groups dictator and rule by fear, I guess that's fine, but imo that's no way to run things. By having something documented, with a procedure, gives a framework to follow for when you do have to kick someone out that's a bit less made up than "we just didn't like that person".
Not every person who does something problematic is actively seeking to do so in order to hurt someone. Also, there are plenty of people who are looking for spaces that are "okay" with their views, and a CoC that makes it clear the space is not can absolutely make them avoid it.
You are so focused on the strawman of problematic people being mustache-twirling villains trying to disrupt spaces they dislike, that you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for.
> you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for
Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave. My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.
Technology Z meetup / user group is a space for people who are interested in Technology Z. Repository Y is a space for people who are interested in Repository Y.
If someone needs a CoC to figure that out, bad luck.
You want to start discussion about War X, vilify everyone just by being born in that country, please do it outside my repo / user group. Plenty of spaces you can do it and there, you'll be welcome to do so. Want to talk about evil black / white / DEI / right wing people, please also leave my group out of it.
> Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave.
Behavior is who people are. It's the 'content of their character' that MLK spoke of.
> My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.
And yet different communities have vastly different concepts of acceptable behavior. CoCs let people know whether their behavior is acceptable in a community.
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In my experience, it absolutely does help. But everyone has their own experiences.
> should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.
It's not a matter of the action being transparent, it's the motivations. Sometimes, it's not clear to community members why the action was taken, if there's no CoC or rules. "They're being an asshole" is a lot more subjective than "They were breaking the rules"
> It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say, without pointing to a document you just put in your repo, that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision". Just my 2c.
Sure, this might work for a small community or group, but the fiasco with Nix seems to suggest this isn't the case at a certain size. Some people apparently want accountability and transparency from their moderators.
> Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.
Great! That's fine! Not every community needs such things. Some do.
> If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them.
I'm sorry, but that's just not true.
You're treating humanity as if it's divided into two distinct sections: Those Who Behave Well, and Those Who Behave Poorly.
In reality, different humans have different ranges of ways they prefer to act, and most are quite amenable to reasonable, clearly-stated codes of conduct for interaction in a particular space.
There is a small subset of people who are either deliberately antisocial for the sake of it (trolls/griefers/etc), and another subset that are genuinely just assholes who will, if given the leeway to do so, cause endless problems in a community.
But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct not because they actively want to, but because their unstated assumptions about how people should interact clash with the unstated assumptions of other people there. Having the code of conduct lets everyone coming in in good faith align their expectations and avoid these unnecessary conflicts. They're like a Session 0 in a TTRPG in that sense.
> But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct
Hard disagree... I've never seen one have this effect. IMO you don't need a CoC to suddenly understand what should already be common sense i.e. don't be a dick. Either they were already going to act that way, or they weren't.
> I've never seen one have this effect.
How do you think you would see it?
Under normal circumstances, what it would look like from the outside is just...someone not causing friction, because there is a code of conduct. Or someone causing friction, because there isn't one.
The former looks identical to someone who would never have caused trouble in the first place, and the latter looks, if not identical, at least very similar to someone who would have caused trouble, no matter what.
Presumably the code of conduct was introduced to solve a problem. So I'd be interested in hearing about an example of a community that had problems with their social fabric, and then introduced a code of conduct, and then could demonstrate that those issues in their social fabric were addressed.
In the history of the world? Yeah. Anytime you have a communal living space, you're going have to set norms on what constitutes shared community stuff. Is the milk in the fridge George's and no one is allowed to touch it, or do we, as a household, want milk communism and it just goes as shared groceries and we go often enough that there's always milk? There's not a right answer, but it's up to the community to decide what's normal in its culture. People come from different backgrounds, were born in different countries and have totally different expectations as to what constitutes "don't be an asshole". Do you put your elbows on the table? Is slurping your soup a sign of respect or disrespect? What you don't see is people who see a lack of a code of conduct and then just don't join.
Don't these tend to be discussions between the people involved?
Whether or not anything needs to be written down afterwards seems like it would be a separate thing.
The way I see it, the people who would cause friction anyway won't be stopped by a CoC.
And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.
Another commenter (cannot find their name now but I saved the text) said exactly what my experience has been:
> A written code of conduct can legitimize petty disputes based on interpretations of the text, even if the issue itself is something easily addressable like using the word “master” in a programming context. It can become a tool for manipulation (pushing someone out for “CoC violation” vs simply correcting the wording).
> The way I see it, the people who would cause friction anyway won't be stopped by a CoC.
> And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.
Both correct. By definition, in fact.
CoCs are for the people in the middle of those. Who do, in fact, exist.
I think if someone needs to be told to be nice... it's time to grow up. Open source projects are not your mother and we shouldn't have to treat people like children, nor get chastised for having that (IMO very reasonable) stance.
It's not about being "told to be nice".
It's about setting a shared understanding of norms.
It's about whether the kinds of jokes allowed among members are "as raunchy as you please", "polite jokes only," or "none".
It's about whether you're expected to work out differences in private chats, address them in public, or bring them to a moderator.
It's about whether your comments on a code review started by another member have to be addressed by the committer before the review can go forward.
Any time you think the way you do things in the open source project (or any other kind of community) you contribute to or run is The Natural, Obvious Way Everyone Does Things, you're probably wrong, and some other people or projects do things exactly the opposite way and think that's just as natural and obvious.
Right. I've seen a CoC used as a power-grab by people who had barely made any contributions to a project, when the people in charge were too easy-going or naive to shut down dishonest use of it, so they tended to side with the squeaky wheel. Once the bad actors got people they didn't like removed or driven away from the project, they just got worse, saying things like "go kill yourself" without consequence, because they were now in control and could interpret the code however they liked or just ignore it.
You can't write a CoC that will prevent bad behavior from bad actors in charge, so it's worthless at best and a weapon for the unscrupulous at worst. What matters is who enforces standards of behavior, and if those people are decent and honest, no written code is necessary.
I play in a band. Since we're just 4 people a code of conduct would be ridiculous. What isn't ridiculous however is that a group of people who do some shit together need to be somewhat on the same page what is acceptable and what isn't. You don't need that with just friends, but any project beyond friends needs people to agree on what kind of social space this is meant to be. If you don't talk it out the shittiest person is going to define it for you.
And beyond a certain size formalizing that makes sense. Not as a tool for punishment or to point to, but so everybody can be on the same page and you know if someone acts out of line they do so despite better knowledge.
If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?
>If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?
Maybe he don't want to exclude people who are outside of the CoC norms, but can still be valuable contributors.
> If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?
If it would contain stuff you're within bounds of anyways, then it's entirely unneeded. :)
Yes sure, but what I mean here is stuff, that can start interpersonal conflicts. To stay with the band example, different people will have different sensibilties around their equipment and how to respectfully treat it. If everybody does it their way you basically guarantee some sort of clash. The solution is to make a general rule that may seem overly sensitive to that one punk member that throws their gear on a pile, but everybody else is happy and the conflicts are avoided.
What I want to say here, is that a good code of conduct deals with the stuff that is open to interpretation and defines it. So if our punk-bandmate throws the singers gear on a pile we don't have to argue about different definitions of how we expect others gear to be treated.
So it is needed precisely because everybody thinks they are just acting normal and within bounds, even when the majority thinks they are not.
Literally pointing at a real thing is useful. Yes, rules are not logical binary that absolves you of activity but having no basis for decision making other than hind brains is how you enter the current American morass.
Its the agreement to argue about a topic that is struck when you make rules.
Not seeing this is how..niholists proliferats with variohs plicit ordering liks might is right
Yeah I'd like to see some examples of "these code of conducts did good thing" before I buy into these things.
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What evidence do you have for that? I was involved in adopting a code of conduct for a local tech meetup and we did that because a couple of incidents that weren't handled very well left other people feeling unsafe and unwelcome. Having some guidelines in place reassured folks that we took those concerns seriously and gave us a framework to deal with unwanted behaviour.
From my experience, writing rules directly after incidents and as a reaction to incidents do not produce good results. New members of the community 5-10 years later will have no understanding of what the rules are trying to do or why they exist, and when a new incident occur the rules get rewritten again and again. The only effect is the optics as in sending a message that "we take those concern serious", but without substance, and again from experience, those people who was leaning to leave will still leave regardless.
What has worked in communities I have been active in is to have continuously conversations, in combination with a no-blame culture that provide social safety for people to bring up issues and also room for people to improve without feeling personally attacked (which is the opposite of social safety).
Anti-meritocracy was in in some CoCs, arguing in its favour was a reason for exclusion from an event / project. Even if the argument happened somewhere else on the internet and not in the project.
Whenever I see someone dying on the hill of fighting for 'meritocracy', in the words of another poster in this subthread, I have found them to be:
> ...a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.
... And typically with a giant chip on their shoulder. The real world's a little bit more complicated than the spherical cows that the near-religious faith in it requires.
It highly depends on what you understand that word to mean. At first it was just meant to to pronounce fairness. Nothing more to it. It was used in a context to explicitly disregard who people are and focus on what they do.
And of course it wasn't meant as an instruction manual for how to run a society. It was quite explicitly a message that you are not judged by who you are. That is it, there is no ideology, there is no grand idea. That is media garbage that filled your head with a phantom.
And honestly, that did a much better job than most COC I read.
Er, at first it was a purely pejorative term - most famously used to describe a dystopia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
I'm not sure how your comment is relevant. No one is fighting for meritocracy here. Only providing the requested information about a case where CoC pushed a specific political view and excluded others.
CoC always appeared to me as a US issue which could pretty much be safely ignored by anyone living in the rest of the world. I generally dislike how they tend to be written as objective rules while actually being imperialist but most of them can safely be boiled down to act like a normal professional person.
The implied subtext of "avoid topic the US finds morally objectionable and when in doubt act like an American would" is what I dislike from a theorical point of view but the truth is, it doesn't really matter on a day to day basis.
So yes, CoC seems mostly harmless but also mostly useless. I tend to agree with the article point that if this is the case, keeping them short seems optimal.
The problem I have seen with them is that they get weaponized. Someone can point to a specific rule in the CoC that has very subjective language in it, and claim that you are violating the rules, when really they're just doing that to silence opinions they don't like.
This is further proven when any attempts to discuss said rule/policy are immediately shut down with even more staunch black-and-white opinions and zero empathy... even if you wait until later to discuss it in a different setting.
The bigger the CoC, the more toxic the project - this is bog-standard law.
> could pretty much be safely ignored by anyone living in the rest of the world.
While it would be nice if all the ignorant assholes in the world lived in America... this is not the case :)
No, but Americans are more litigious than everyone else
Good article. This sentence from the conclusion nails it:
> What is needed now is not the unthinking adoption of a one-size-fits-all template, but a “right-sized” approach tailored to the scale, culture, and goals of each individual project.
I feel a lot of the heavy CoCs are a product of low-trust cultures, particularly the US, which attempt to replace interpersonal relationships with legalese. This is honestly not necessary in most projects, which are generally high-trust environments.
Is programming lame enough yet that we can get away from everything being done by hr and get back to doing cool things with weird people?
I like your comment, I think I get the spirit of it, as opposed to the other reponses to it which sound to me like opening negotiations for codes of conduct
Hopefully! And it takes every kind of weird to make it fun. You don't have to like or hang with everyone in a community. But sometimes the people you don't understand personally wind up being the ones you will respect the most from a skill/talent perspective. A strong foundation of mutual respect built up over time is how you create real tolerance and even change minds.
It really depends whether "weird people" means people with unusual hobbies/sexualities/clothes/hair/etc, or "weird people" means the ones who want to keep all the first category of people out...
Not for people with boundaries. I've done work I was absolutely delighted with in both process and product with people whose views I detest. If you can't grow up enough to do that, you can't have a civilization.
If I have to like you in order for us not to fight, I warn you that we're going to have to fight.
What was the most detestable view?
to me, the most detestable view is the view that he should go first
and by whom?
Define "weird people".
Nerds.
The irony of deriding CoCs while reminiscing about doing things with "weird people"
"Weird people" being discriminated against and harassed is why CoCs exist.
Quite the opposite, the whole point of CoCs is to get actually weird people (i.e. nerds) out of projects and replace them with cultural conformists that all use the same kinds of symbols and language in their bio to describe just how unique they are.
No, the point is to get the bigots out. I don't know of any CoCs that prohibits "nerds" in an open-source project, don't be daft. Also, not fun how you're implying that being from a marginalized group and being a nerd are mutually exclusive.
I really like heavy codes of conduct. They're the Open Source project equivalent of those brightly colored frogs in the tropics. They're kind enough to signal their own toxicity so others know to keep their distance.
A big part of a CoC that this article, as most discussions on the topic, miss is that they provide a signal to new contributors from marginalized groups, who may have faced abuse or violence in other spaces, that this community will be safe for them to contribute to and - as many anti-CoC folk like to say - get on with the tech.
Not having a CoC doesn't mean a project is going to be unsafe to work in. But it means when another community member refuses to work with you, or belittles your work constantly, there is nothing to be done. For many, why take the risk. This means that projects are starving themselves of contributors because they don't create an environment that is safe.
Ruby's "CoC" is actually a fantastic example of why you need to spell it out too. "Participants are expected to be tolerant of opposing views." is often weaponized by abusers who like to paint basic requests like "please use my chosen name" as "not being tolerant".
> marginalized groups, who may have faced abuse or violence in other spaces
Can you cite examples of users facing abuse or violence while contributing to a tech project? And how exactly does a CoC guarantee the safety you mentioned?
> when another community member refuses to work with you
Members are free to choose who to work with regardless of whether a CoC exists or not.
> belittles your work constantly
Your work may not be up to the project's standards and anyone pointing that out may hurt your feelings, and that's fine. You can't expect project maintainers to coddle each contributor when there's work to be done. Most CoCs are at odds with that because they value contributors' feelings over clear communication that helps a project advance.
> there is nothing to be done
You could communicate your grievances to the project maintainers directly, but you're not guaranteed a reply even with a CoC. In fact I'd argue that with a CoC it's easier for maintainers to dismiss criticism by labeling it as "non welcoming" or "non inclusive" or any other loose emotionally-driven term.
> to new contributors from marginalized groups,
For software projects that are overwhelmingly conducted online the very concept of "marginalized group" is close to irrelevant and meaningless [1].
I think what happens is that some people want to be very, very vocal about whatever "group" they belong to and want to feel offended and oppressed. In recent years, arguments and campaigns against specific technical terms ('master', 'blacklist', even 'legacy code' spring to mind) are examples of this, IMHO.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Do you believe that online harassment is completely made up and never happened to anyone ever? Because it sounds like you do.
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> For software projects that are overwhelmingly conducted online the very concept of "marginalized group" is close to irrelevant
I wish this were true, but it simply isn't. If a group is full of white cis heterosexual guys and someone turns up with a random screen name and says nothing about themselves, everyone assumes they are also a white cis hetero guy even if they're not. The implication is "you have to conform, and if you don't then you don't belong".
The reality is that for many people, their mere public existence is seen as a political statement. Often times asking for the most simple of accommodations or changes is seen as "being vocal" or starting an argument.
I'll give you a hypothetical. Let's say a group of developers is all-male, and a leader starts off every meeting with "hey guys". Then, a developer who is a woman joins the project. They ask that leader "When you say it like that it implicitly excludes me, It would mean a lot to me if you said 'everyone' instead." I think that's a pretty reasonable request, it asks very little of the leader (to change one word), has no impact for everyone else, and means a lot to some. But to many, many people that would be viewed as "suppressing speech" or "weaponizing oppression".
> everyone assumes they are also a white cis hetero guy even if they're not
Hard disagree. And how is this even relevant?
> The implication is "you have to conform, and if you don't then you don't belong".
Conform to what, being nice? That was already the case. A group is very unlikely to change their ways regardless, especially just because you barge in and say you are marginalized and start getting offended at things.
For one, "hey guys" is often said by people of every possible group known to humankind, but also if you really wanted to, you can ask them to use a different term without saying you are part of some marginalized (or any) group at all.
The fact that they belong to some group is still (IMO) meaningless in this context, the reality is that they want to play politics and try to get people to change how things operate... you don't need to be part of any group to do that. IMO that's just being difficult.
Maybe you believe it is necessary to identify yourself online as belonging to some group, perhaps in order to force a change, but again I think this is just trying to play politics where it's often not welcome.
If online discourse can exist without people even knowing this much about a person, then I think it's far less likely that they will be targeted for belonging to a group that people are not even aware they belong to.
I'm not saying people need to hide, but I think it's just easier if people can assume "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog"... if nothing else simply because some people suck, and it's easier to get along in a purely technical project if we don't know that much about you personally.
I think that you've made my point really quite well. I gave perhaps the most basic possible example of accommodation, adjusting a single word with no impact on other project members and you were still able to argue about it.
> Maybe you believe it is necessary to identify yourself online as belonging to some group, perhaps in order to force a change, but again I think this is just trying to play politics where it's often not welcome.
People just want to be themselves. If the very act of appearing to be from a different group is "playing politics" then what you actually mean is "you cannot be different".
This behavior is exactly why a CoC is needed.
I think "playing politics" means trying to get people to change something, or how a group of people is managed. Not all projects want other people telling them what to do or what they should or shouldn't do, and I think that's perfectly ok.
If "people being themselves" means making SJW politics their entire identity and spraying it across the internet, then I'd say it's likely they're not going to be welcome in many places, CoC or not.
I think you could argue having any rule that someone happens to disagree with is telling them "you cannot be different"... people have to draw the line somewhere, or there wouldn't be rules. Who are we to say what's right or wrong in someone else's project?
And I think your argument still dismisses the weaponization that many people are seeing... maybe you call it their identity being someone who wants to change things... but that doesn't mean they should always get what they want.
> I think "playing politics" means trying to get people to change something, or how a group of people is managed.
That's probably where the disagreement/misunderstanding is. I don't think that's a definition of "playing politics" that most people would agree with.
IDK, it seems to fit with the definition to me:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/politics
> the activities of ... people who try to influence the way a country is governed
Britannica says politics is "the opinions that someone has about what should be done."
"playing politics" itself apparently also has its own definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/play%20politics
But I moreso meant the plain politics definition.
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Trying to fight "hey guys" is stupid and tilting at windmills. It's a great example of performative wokeness that achieves nothing but making some people feel good about themselves.
Just say your name and people will call you by that name. Politely request pronoun use if you must, but don't expect everyone to remember or even care -- especially if you're using anything but she/her or he/him.
If we accept either side's definition of who the "real abusers" are, then politics will continue to hobble projects. If you are starved of people to discuss your political views with, it's the wrong thing to do to vomit those out in a programming thread. Go make some real friends if you're looking to do that. Not everyone will see the world the way you do.
Well a big reason this is missed is people discussing it are not part of these groups and mainly saw this as an annoyance.
I can agree that heavy & strict CoCs can be daunting and probably overkill for small open source projects. And they're far from flawless, as shown by the Rust mods resignation incidents. But to say they're useless and anti-meritocratic is to forget (and/or silence) these people that wanted to contribute in an environment where they wouldn't feel threatened (incidentally, sometimes despite being skillful contributors, so much so for the supposed meritocracy of the CoC-less projects).
I'm not sure strict CoCs are the answers to these real problems, but this feels like dismissing these problems altogether.
> But it means when another community member refuses to work with you, or belittles your work constantly, there is nothing to be done.
No it doesn't. It just means that there isn't a formal process. The aggrieved party can always contact the project leaders/maintainers, and lodge a complaint.
Sure, the leaders may not do anything with your complaint, but a CoC doesn't guarantee that they will either (even if it does give you a warm fuzzy feeling up-front that they might).
I find it incredibly infantilizing this idea that people can't be good to each other, or people can't feel safe, without some sort of document that lays out behavior expectations. It's so so simple: don't be a dick to people. If someone is being a dick to you, find someone with authority and send them the evidence. If they handle it to your satisfaction, great. If not, stay away from that project, because it's run by people who at worst don't care about you, or at best are inept at handling this sort of thing (and in either case, a CoC is not going to make it better).
For leaders/maintainers, grow a spine. If someone is behaving badly (regardless of whether or not someone complains), talk to them and give them a chance to improve. If their behavior gets better, great. If not, eject them from the community. If they or others aren't happy with your reaction, that's their problem, not yours.
This, from the Ruby CoC, is key:
> Participants are expected to be tolerant of opposing views.
If you can't tolerate that others will have different perspectives to you then it means you're likely to be a very difficult and inflexible person to work with.
This is one of those things that falls apart on the actual content. If you have a trans contributor and someone who comes in with trans-eliminationist rhetoric, you can't then turn round and say the trans person is being "inflexible" for refusing to work with them.
That would be covered under the next part of the Ruby CoC:
> Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free from personal attacks and disparaging remarks.
And anyway, rhetoric which advocates for killing groups of people would be very off-topic for a programming language discussion forum. Unlikely it would come up in conversation except for deliberate trolling.
Holy moly, what kind of open source projects are y'all working on? I don't even understand how these topics could come up in a Pull Request. Are people writing and reviewing code in these projects?
Two ways I've seen it come up:
1. Someone posts something on twitter that someone else finds offensive
2. Someone proposes a CoC rule banning bigots from the community, which raises the question of "who defines who is a bigot"
TFA mentions a third way; a remark at a conference is overheard.
Likely more than 50% of the world's population agrees with viewpoints that some would label "trans-eliminationist rhetoric". So if you are saying anyone who ever expresses such viewpoints–even in forums completely unrelated to the project–is barred from contributing to it, you are potentially excluding more than half of contemporary humanity.
A community doesn't exist for "the majority of the world". It exists for its community. If a community doesn't want bigots (as they shouldn't), they absolutely should exclude them.
I just haven't seen CoCs effectively reduce the bigots in a community; they either are toothless, or have teeth and lead to a j'accuse breakdown.
It is a tiny fraction of the people I know and have interacted with over an extended period of time who has not made a remark that could be construed as bigoted.
I have seen moderators called bigots for suspending (instead of banning) someone who made an inappropriate remark.
My wife and I have been accused (behind our back) of misgendering someone when we were using the pronouns that we had privately confirmed she preferred.
If you create a CoC with real teeth, then instead of the BDFL or core team or whatever controlling who is in the community, it's the people in the community who are most interested in accusing people of violating the CoC that have control over who is in the community.
If a community wants to exclude many millions-even billions-of people around the world, including the population supermajority of dozens of countries, and all those who seriously believe in the traditional teachings of any one of several major religious traditions-and denigrate those people it excludes as “bigots”-well, maybe that in itself is a form of bigotry, and hence their labelling others “bigots” is a case of “the pot calling the kettle black”
Would you feel the same way if it were eliminationist language, but against Jews, or African-Americans, or Irish-Americans, or Men?
So, if a person is a traditionalist/conservative Orthodox Jew, who holds traditional “non-affirming” views on LGBT issues-do those views count as “eliminationist rhetoric”?
If a project decides it won’t welcome people who believe what almost all conservative/traditionalist Orthodox Jews believe (even if they keep those beliefs to themselves in project forums), it is essentially deciding that Jews (of that kind) aren’t welcome-isn’t that antisemitic, and in itself a species of eliminationism? (not with respect to Jews in general, rather with respect to Jews of that kind)
And the same point holds for “Sunni” or “Shi’a” or “Catholic” or “Protestant” or “Eastern Orthodox”
There's a clear difference between respecting people and hate speech; no project should welcome someone who contributes inappropriate insults and off-topic rants.
If that stereotypical Orthodox Jew wants to be a valuable community member, they can keep their hostile opinions to themselves, and nobody will consider them troublemakers.
Obviously they won't feel welcome because they realize that the majority would despise them as bigots if they expressed intolerable opinions, but hopefully it can become a reason to question their ideology.
I think the distinction is whether they express their views in project settings or in unrelated settings. If they express them in project settings, then I can’t see how that could possibly be on-topic, which makes it disruptive behaviour. But if they express them in unrelated settings, and then someone else brings that to the attention of the project-well, then it has nothing to do with the project, so the project should refuse to get involved
"someone else brings that to the attention of the project"
This is what an intolerant troublemaker would do, demonstrating that they are worse than the restrained bigot they are denouncing.
The will to hurt people is, or should be, a good indicator of which side is more wrong.
Do you want me eliminated?
I don’t want anyone “eliminated”… the problem is what does “eliminated” mean? If it means “rounding up people and shooting them” then of course I oppose that. But what about the conservative Jew/Christian/Muslim who believes that when Moshiach/Christ/Mahdi comes/returns, gender dysphoria will cease to exist-is that belief also “eliminationist”? I think religious freedom means we need to tolerate the existence of such beliefs even if we believe they are wrong. Excluding someone from an open source community because they hold traditional religious beliefs on gender and sexuality-especially if we assume they keep those beliefs out of project forums where they aren’t relevant-that’s religious discrimination, and in my view it is wrong, and (in some jurisdictions) it may even be unlawful
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The correct answer is reacting harshly to "trans-eliminationist rhetoric" from a weird extremist, with an ultimatum or immediate expulsion, before the trans contributor complains.
If someone is posting along the lines of "send them all to the death camps" etc. on the mailing lists or discussion boards, for any group, that would be covered under the other items in the Ruby CoC, where participants are expected not to harass or disparage.
Also it would be very off-topic for a programming language forum.
Someone will say that that person shouldn't be bringing any sort of politics into it, so they should be removed, no CoCs needed for that.
Then someone will point out that they might have this stuff on their Github profile, or website. They're free to do so, of course. But it would be wrong to remove them for that, right? But then any trans contributor that sees this crap is what, forced to work with them anyway?
Too bad. People you interact with every day have views that are abhorrent to you. Suck it up. The community is not your internet police.
[dead]
Something, something, paradox of tolerance.
Diverse views on software development? Great. Diverse views on whether various groups deserve human rights? Not great.
The latter would be off-topic for a programming language discussion forum, certainly. But working with others that happen to hold differing views on that topic? Not a problem.
It would be unreasonable to expect everyone to have the same perspective on political issues.
It baffles me how much political every aspect of life has become. We can't just talk about things and hold genuine discussion. It always boils down to "us vs. them" standpoint.
What would genuine discussion look like on the topic of trans people existing? I'm not sure I would know how to identify it even if it existed.
You have demonstrated exactly the point I am making.
[flagged]
Sorry it's difficult to tell, but is this part of the genuine discussion?
Yes
Is genuine discussion typically like this? I'm not really getting a sense of back and forth. It sounds more like wanting to have one side of a conversation without really inviting a response or room for nuance.
I directly addressed your statement. "Trans people existing" is a vague statement that avoids talking about specifics. Discourse is toxic because of rhetorical tricks like this where you desperately try to avoid actual discussion.
What would a good faith response look like to you?
Addressing the point. Do you agree or disagree that "trans people existing" is too vague to be meaningful? Alternatively, what exactly do you mean by "existing"?
You misunderstand the exercise. I'm asking for a demonstration, an example of genuine discussion.
I don't really know what to tell you, other than that it would help if you stopped being deliberately obtuse.
"Genuine discussion" includes responding to the topic of "trans people existing" by pointing out that "existing" is vague and needs further definition. That is genuine discussion, inviting you to clarify what you mean by "existing". I helpfully included a few other relevant bits of genuine discussion that welcome related tangents, but directly responded to your comment with genuine discussion directly about "trans people existing".
If you're going to no-true-genuine that conversation that's fine I guess, but I don't really understand the point of wasting time on simple rhetorical tricks that don't fool anyone.
I'm asking what you think a genuine response would be from someone who disagrees with you. So far, it appears that that doesn't exist. Is there any response you can construct that you feel would meet the criteria of being genuine? It's a very simple request.
As per my previous comment:
> Do you agree or disagree that "trans people existing" is too vague to be meaningful? Alternatively, what exactly do you mean by "existing"?
A genuine response would be responding to that, not metacommentary while refusing to engage. A simple response of "By existing I mean ..." would be perfectly genuine.
Are you capable of providing an example? yes or no? Happy to read what you think it would constitute.
"By existing I mean ..."
I'm sorry. It appears your response was cut off prematurely. Can you finish it please?
Perhaps you would like to be able to finish it please? Are We going to Chat? I can't help you without a dialog!
I'm not sure how to make this any clearer. I've asked for an example from the beginning. An example contains both sides. If you wish to provide an example(and I hope you do) it will consist of two interlocutors with 10 to 20 individual statements. The example will demonstrate genuine debate. Do you understand the request?
Do you believe it is normal to be not sure how to make this any clearer. you're not going to engage in debate. you've asked for an example from the beginning. An example contains both sides. If me wish to provide an example( and you hope me do) it will consist of two interlocutors with 10 to 20 individual statements. The example will demonstrate genuine debate. Do you understand the request?
You seem to be broken. Thank you for your time.
We were discussing you, not me. Are We going to Chat?
I'm not asking for a chat. I'm asking for an example of a genuine discussion on the aforementioned topic. It's unclear while, being clearly unable to provide one, you don't seem to acknowledge that.
Does talking about this bother you?
I just don't understand why. Is this what winning looks like to you or something?
Just FYI, you are wasting your time with this user.
They've done this same tactic and question avoidance, perhaps quite literally hundreds of times on Hacker News. And I am frankly surprised people haven't caught on to this user and that they are even still allowed around here, given that this type of stuff is almost their sole contribution.
Its intentional, as well. I remember reading a comment where I think they just straight up admitted to doing this.
If you want a fun read, go back through their comment history and you'll find a multitude of users having the same problem as you are having with interactions with them.
I think we are likely to disagree on whether "group X is not entitled to human rights" is a legitimate political view
As long as these views aren't thrashed out in the collaborative spaces to which the CoC applies, it doesn't really matter.
(As a personal preference, I'd rather not know the political views, legitimate or otherwise, of people I work with. It's not relevant.)
If said people kept their opinions to themselves, the issue would never arise in the first place. Pretty much the whole problem in semi-public spaces like this is that folks with strong reactionary beliefs don’t tend to leave them at the door
`s/reactionary//` and you'd be right in your second sentence. It doesn't matter if it's action or reaction, people with strong beliefs, strongly held tend to be holding them because of some core set of ethical or moral principles and those things eventually are revealed in the day-to-day work.
As to your first - if people with a strong set of ethical and moral principles "just shut up" about what they considered ethical and moral essentials ... then they wouldn't be who they are. The only people who don't show what they hold good are people who don't hold as good much of anything.
Now if we're just talking "opinions" here (about things that are not ethical and moral, merely matters of taste), then yes, a person with "strong beliefs strongly held as a universal principle" is someone who is just an ass. But if I know someone is a raving Detroit Lions fan "on the internet", what kind of a person am I if I can't work with them?
Except people have enforced CoC's against people for expressing views on other platforms because those views make other people feel unsafe in those collaborative spaces.
I have only ever seen CoC's abused to push out people with anti-social just views.
It's almost like theese two should not collide in any context from either side...
It's not been my experience that racists/sexists/homophobes/antisemites/etc can keep it strictly professional with members of the group they hate
It's the well known correlation between stupid opinions that can do no good and stupid people that cannot control themselves. We should worry about the bad cases when oppressors are in power and able to do significant harm and/or manipulative sociopaths using hate speech as one of many tools.
It seems some people need to re-read the title and article and consider the words "heavy", "bureaucratic" and the like
No, CoCs - or rules in general - are not inherently bad. HN has some, which the moderators and the community enforce well, and it's generally one of the best platforms on the Internet for intelligent discussion.
Yes, heavy CoCs can be weaponized and abused, if there is little or no trust between the community and its leaders. But with or without a CoC, such a community will always be prone to such abuse. You think moderators need to establish a CoC to push their politics on people if they want? How does that even make sense? Why not just... do that, without a CoC?
A written code of conduct can legitimize petty disputes based on interpretations of the text, even if the issue itself is something easily addressable like using the word “master” in a programming context. It can become a tool for manipulation (pushing someone out for “CoC violation” vs simply correcting the wording).
I don't see how that is an issue with CoCs. Those people would still try this with or without a CoC - whether the moderators/maintainer acquiesce is the real issue, and, again, is separate from having a CoC.
> Those people would still try this with or without a CoC
Perhaps, but I think it may make the moderator more likely to side with the abuser if they are able to point to a specific part of the CoC that is allegedly being violated, even if that requires colorful interpretation.
> You think moderators need to establish a CoC to push their politics on people if they want? How does that even make sense? Why not just... do that, without a CoC?
I don't think this is what generally happens, or what people are wary of. I think group participants [sometimes] coerce moderators into establishing a CoC in order to have a tool to reach for in service of silencing voices they regard as "problematic".
Often the moderator is the project lead (or one of them), who may not be suited to adjudicating personal disputes and probably has better things to do. That can result in siding with the louder faction in the hopes that giving them what they want will satisfy them and let everyone get back to work. Or worse, turning the job of moderation over to them because they seem to want it, and then the petty tyranny is off to the races.
I think that happens less now that people are aware of the danger; but a decade or so ago it was a real problem because no one saw it coming.
> silencing voices they regard as "problematic".
I'm going to push past this extraordinarily bad faith framing. I'm going to assume you're referring to people who are made to feel uncomfortable or are harassed by other members of the community.
So if that community doesn't have a CoC, and those members talk to the moderators, and the moderators take action... is that coercion too? Is that the moderators or those members pushing their political views on the community? Should the moderators just not do anything?
> I'm going to assume you're referring to people who are made to feel uncomfortable or are harassed by other members of the community.
It has been my experience that there are both members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who have been harrassed, and also members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who harass others. There are surely more variations of this too.
My most recent experience of this was a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised harassing one of my colleagues — who is also a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised, but perhaps less so if you subscribe to the legitimacy of intersectionality — at a software development conference with an established CoC.
The incident was reported, and the repercussions for the harasser amounted to exactly nil.
> So if that community doesn't have a CoC, and those members talk to the moderators, and the moderators take action... is that coercion too?
No.
> Is that the moderators or those members pushing their political views on the community?
That really depends on the circumstance.
> Should the moderators just not do anything?
Moderators should take action on CoC violations as proportionately, fairly, and impartially as they can.
> I'm going to push past this extraordinarily bad faith framing.
It is extraordinarily tiring and depressing that anything proffered that contradicts the orthodoxy of the culture that most readily endorses the establishment of CoCs is immediately dismissed as an argument in "bad faith".
It's likewise tiring and depressing that you framed everybody who wants CoCs the way you did.
> No.
Then I'm not sure why it would be coercion for them to talk to the moderators about writing down the rules.
It's strange — I wrote "sometimes", and you wrote "everybody".
If I had meant "everybody", I would not have written "sometimes".
Yes, claiming to feel harassed or uncomfortable by other people with the aim of forcing a moderator to threaten them with expulsion from the space if they don't recant a political statement is absolutely, 100% a way that many people attempt to push their political views on a community. Making any judgment at all about what moderators should do in this situation is equivalent to asking moderators to take sides in the political conflict at hand.
I feel like this is similar to civil and criminal laws: When codes of conduct are very detailed, lawyers will argue fine points on the wording. When they are simple and general, people can't be 'rules lawyers', but you need to have authority to enforce decisions, and respect for that authority.
CoC are like club rules. Useless - except for when you want to make an example of someone.
> CoC are like club rules. Useless - except for when you want to make an example of someone.
That, and also for selective enforcement.
CoCs are one of the reasons why I choose to not contribute. I don't enjoy the risk of someone with an axe to grind to drag me into some absurd GitHub comments drama and feel justified by some generic wording on the CoC.
Same, but for slightly different reasons. I was a big open source contributor of a few well known projects, but the CoC stuff just kinda soured me on it all.
Not because I enjoy reading or writing hate speech or anything, but these were places that didn't tend to have any obvious problems with troublemakers, so it felt self congratulatory. And don't even get me started on the sheer amount of bikeshedding the discussions around it became, mostly from people who'd never even contributed to the project.
It suddenly made me realize there were probably more productive and less frustrating ways to spend my time.
Serious question - Why do you contribute to HN, which has a CoC?
But could they not do the same without a CoC?
> But could they not do the same without a CoC?
Sure, but someone who went to the trouble to get their view enforced in writing is probably already a zealot I don't want to deal with.
Depends a lot on the group size, too - a few hundred contributors probably needs some rules written down. A few dozen? Not so much.
Yes, that's the point of why CoCs are essentially useless.
Humans should be able to interact politely in any setting and if they don't, the issue needs to be settled with good old human interaction anyways.
This is how I feel. I treat the presence of a code of conduct as a sign that, particularly for small projects, the folks running the project don't have experience leading others. Always comes down to the relationship, the individuals involved, and the way things are communicated.
They could, but then it’s their word vs yours, not you vs sacred Code-of-Conduct.
I'm not very involved in the topic, so my POV might be very wrong - but most effective enforcement, from my overall life experience, is having someone act as a "bad guy" and sharply deal consequences to the people that behave like assholes.
I feel that having a detailed COC, while a very good sentiment in theory, in practice must bring about people who will try their best to skirt around the edge of COC and make trouble for the maintainers - who I expect want to stay "nice", but they're forced to act harshly in the end anyway.
> DHH condemned detailed and strict CoC like the Contributor Covenant as a “trojan horse” that should be purged from projects. ESR went even further, asserting that CoC are nothing more than a “tool for troublemakers” and that the best course of action is to delete them entirely from projects.
At this point, in 2025, does anybody seriously doubt that they're a "tool for troublemakers"? A lot of people who would otherwise contribute see a hyper-particular CoC, written by an HR type or an aspiring lawyer, and walk away. Others don't bother to read the CoC and may later be dragged through coals over something exceedingly minor, despite their contributions.
In open-source, the best policy is to avoid CoCs and avoid those who write and promote them.
Personally, I assume one or more problematic activists behind any prominent project CoC. Some might be well-intentioned but unreasonable and hard to discuss with, some might be dangerously fanatic and a constant threat, some might be power-hungry manipulators giving themselves leverage, all are a liability for the project.
Normal people shouldn't need anything more than normal morality and acceptable manners to be good project contributors.
Let's restate your points a bit, but using the words "ethics" rather than CoC.
Is publishing an ethical standpoint a "trouble making"? Depends, doesn't it? What if you examine the most common top ethical viewpoints you are aware of. For me, it's loud groups like say, PETA, Extinction Rebellion, etc who are fairly populist.
Are they making trouble? Sure. But for whom? Would you personally do what these people are doing? Probably no. Would you personally do what the people they are "making trouble" for are doing? (In my example, Animal harm, empowering climate change?) I am going to suggest that you would probably say "no, I don't want to harm things/people/etc; as I would probably feel bad for doing it and being personally responsible".
If thought through like this - even if your examples of ethics are not what I chose - can you see the value in a strong, clear ethical position, even if it's to warn people? Can you see that it might challenge authority (trouble making), but that is not a bad thing a lot of the time?
> Let's restate your points a bit, but using the words "ethics" rather than CoC. Is publishing an ethical standpoint a "trouble making"?
Most software projects are ethically neutral and don't need a "standpoint." In tech, those "ethical standpoints" are often tacked-on by people who want to use them as a tool to exercise social control over other contributors, including project founders and visionaries. (There tends to be, in any given Western organization over n people in size, a clique that's really into this.)
I have no idea how CoCs are used in PETA, but obviously groups that have ethics as their core focus -- which includes religions and social welfare groups -- have long lists of proscriptions, policies, etc. I don't think that any of it necessarily applies to open-source software, though. It's apples to oranges.
> If thought through like this - even if your examples of ethics are not what I chose - can you see the value in a strong, clear ethical position, even if it's to warn people?
Well, that's precisely my point: The CoC itself is the warning. It's usually bad news in itself -- an exposed surface that's weaponizable against contributors who give to the project in good faith.
I think you should understand quite how bad your examples are. I understand the examples you gave are given in the best of intentions, but this reads as pure blissful ignorance.
PETA literally funded a terrorist convicted of arson.
> A page from the 1995 annual tax return (form 990) of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), showing a $45,200 payment for the ``support committee'' of Rodney Coronado, a felon. Mr. Coronado was convicted of arson in federal court for the 1992 firebombing of a Michigan State University research lab.
---
> Would you personally do what the people they are "making trouble" for are doing?
Would I eat meat? Yes.
Would I keep animals as pets? Yes.
Do I think it's ethical for humans to use animals for service, e.g., guide dogs for the blind? Yes.
Do I think it's ethical to use animal models in medical research? Yes.
All of these things, PETA are against.
Further:
- https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/testimony/animal-righ...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Coronado
- https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-107hhrg77615/html/C...
Can you provide sources for these claims?
> animals as pets
This seems to say they are perfectly fine with pets: https://www.peta.org/about-peta/why-peta/pets/
> guide dogs
Seems to imply they are not against service animals in general: https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/monkeys-arent-pets-...
Not trying to defend anyone, just looking for objective evidence.
> Not trying to defend anyone, just looking for objective evidence.
Fair.
## guide dogs
> [PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk] regards the use of Seeing Eye dogs as an abdication of human responsibility and, … is wholly opposed to their use. She has had at least one dog taken from its owner.
- https://archive.is/6IIo1
## medical testing
> Medical research is immoral even it it's essential
> Even If Animal Research Resulted In A Cure For AIDS, We’d Be Against It
- https://consumerfreedom.com/press-releases/153-even-if-anima...
## animals as pets
- https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ingrid_Newkirk
- https://www.naiaonline.org/articles/article/quotes-from-the-...
## Bonus fun story
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/17/peta-sorry-f...
---
I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The utter insanity of PETA is actually very well documented, so if you have an evening, grab a bottle of wine and go down that ~rabbit~ hole.
PeTA murders pet animals that are given to their "shelters", because they don't want people to have pets. They are not "perfectly fine" with pets at all.
source?
The examples are deliberately chosen as extremes, where they have an ethical standpoint.
I suggest the examples work even better with the context you add - you do not have to agree with the ethics or like them!
On the "funding terrorism" insinuation...
Did PETA publish an ethical statement about: - Protecting university infrastructure - Obeying authorities - Agreeing with negative media coverage about them
I sincerely doubt it.
Their misdeed in your view is donating $45k for a guy's legal defense, who was the spokesman of the ALF, not PETA. By that logic, any government funded public defender is the taxpayer condoning murder, robbery, etc. We can both agree objectively that isn't true - guilt by association is the fallacy there; funding a legal defense is separate from the act requiring the legal defense.
I would argue you have this talking point because of a concerted media effort to brand things as "Eco-Terrorism" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare - and that is a coordinated effort to change the focus.
BUT, let's assume PETA are exactly as you say.
Scenario 1: they publish no standpoint, pretending to be a local book club who have simply enjoyed the prose of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation.
Scenario 2: as above, but they publish their ethical standpoint upfront and it is easy to access.
After you have gone a few times, one day a chap stands up, say he's the Lorax; has been a member for years; is head of the Once-ler Action Committee demands everyone hijacks a plane to fly it into the nearest highrise, because he's for the trees; buildings use timber and the North American Squirrel is suffering.
In which scenario are you more surprised? In which scenario were you given the most choice about how you can interact with the group; apply your own standards of behavior or what to expect? In which scenario are you better equipped to object ("we care about the wellbeing of squirrels, but your case is driven by a flimsy ideological argument that has little to do with the shared values!") In which scenario are you more likely to seek external help from an authority; because it is trivial to identify the extremism is out of place?
This is my point - having no stated ethics or CoC is objectively worse when radical/extremist viewpoints creep in due to malicious actors; vs at least publishing a basic standard.
> By that logic, any government funded public defender is the taxpayer condoning murder, robbery, etc.
No it isn't. We all have to pay our taxes. PETA didn't have to pay Rod Coronado.
> I would argue you have this talking point because of a concerted media effort to brand things as "Eco-Terrorism"
They firebombed research facilities to effect ideological change.
This is the textbook definition of terrorism.
> In which scenario are you more surprised? In which scenario were you given the most choice about how you can interact with the group; apply your own standards of behavior or what to expect?
The problem is the very obvious Motte-and-bailey fallacy that you're falling for here, as so many people do.
You brought up NixOS earlier. I like NixOS. I fund some of the development. I attend some of the conferences and meetups.
Any reasonable person in the community would be against violence, I'm sure you'll agree. The last time I attended a NixOS conference, I saw many attendees with… Actually you know what, I've written about this before. You can read it if you wish, and you might then understand where I'm coming from.
https://jezenthomas.com/2024/11/I-feel-unsafe/
Extinction Rebellion is actually the perfect example, because they are a bunch of protesters so high on their own farts they think blocking ordinary commuters on electric trains will stop Big Oil [1]. And as you can see from the video, bringing this sort of shithead attitude to actual hard working folx will only backfire on you.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHOr2WH7V1k
So the guy who regularly writes about how brown people are invading his country, and the guy who thinks women in tech are all trying to entrap him with rape accusations... don't think CoCs are a good idea? Colour me surprised
You can address the contents of the article and the views expressed by the author directly without resorting to ad hominem.
Life is not a high-school debate club. An _ad hominem_ accusation only really works if the attack is unrelated.
I don't know about ESR, but DHH has acted in ways that make it difficult to believe he is making a good-faith, unbiased argument on CoCs, which means I'm not obligated to reciprocate and treat his argument fairly. (DHH oversaw a list at 37Signals making racist fun of customer names, and overruled his employees who complained, eventually leading to a mass walkout.)
To put it in Bayesian terms, the prior that he's making a bad faith argument is higher than any random person, and should be treated as such.
I don't see how that is ad hominem - those are the expressed views of DHH and ESR, as they have repeatedly placed in writing, of their own free will.
They are also explicitly the type of views that CoCs are designed to protect contributors from, hence why DHH and ESR would be opposed to CoCs in general.
If having a CoC keeps folks like DHH and ESR out of a particular project, then I think the CoC is serving a valuable purpose.
I wonder what folks think when they're flagging stories like this.
Maybe a bit of an unpopular opinion here, but I still think the benevolent dictator is the way to go for open-source projects. If you are unhappy with how things are handled, fork it and do better.
However, there's probably a cutoff point for core infrastructure where we should move away from having a single person in charge.
> Maybe a bit of an unpopular opinion here, but I still think the benevolent dictator is the way to go for open-source projects. If you are unhappy with how things are handled, fork it and do better.
If I start a project that attracts contributors[1], I don't see anything wrong with rejecting someone's CoC "contribution" with "I am the code of conduct. We don't need another one."
==================
[1] I try not to do that, btw.
"I am the law!" :D
> If you are unhappy with how things are handled, fork it and do better.
Yes, but often the projects where this happens are just big enough to where one person cannot realistically maintain their own fork to the same level that users will expect if they are looking to jump ship.
What I've seen happen more often than not, is even if the person does attempt a fork, they either get constantly attacked by existing users, or stop working on it within a year, or both.
I won't go as far as to say "Rise of Ubuntu" a private corporation with a Advertising and PR budget. Is 70,000 packages and indication of the fall of Debian ? A self-governing body (Debian) with a CoC (no matter how imperfect) is worse than a Benevolent (Sic!) Dictator, Really ?
I am beginning to wonder if this blog post is not too different from the raging far right agenda of dismantling all "regulation". "Open Source" has had some nefarious far right loud mouths at least in the past. It would be no surprise if this is another.
A relevant blog post posted recently among the Nix drama
https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
CoCs are like having faith in some prerequisite magical spell is first necessary to control and compel people to behave in a proscribed manner when, in reality, they are more like EULAs and Cider House Rules that (almost) no one reads. Paperwork cannot transform people. Perhaps their limited marginal value is existing to show that community is defended and there is a clear and thoughtful process to arbitrate and resolve conflict rather than falling into either extremes of absentee inaction or heavy-handed, summary, expedient, arbitrary expulsion.
> Perhaps their limited marginal value is existing to show there is a clear and thoughtful process to arbitrate and resolve conflict
and I have a slightly used bridge to sell.
I want a code of conduct that explicitly allows debate, disagreement, and normalizes hurting other people’s feelings with your words.
What matters is that people are operating in good faith.
I would also say that IF you have been accepted as a member of a community then you and your feelings must matter to that community unless and until you are ejected from the community. There needs to be a system for accepting and expelling people, and that system should rest on the judgment of people that the community has selected as trustworthy (until and unless those people are expelled).
> normalizes hurting other people’s feelings with your word
This is the Trammel problem: if you want a PvP-enabled project, you discover that people are mostly interested in the part where they hurt others feelings and then go bananas when their own feelings are hurt.
> needs to be a system for accepting and expelling people
The private member's club is an old institution. But people tend to notice and object when it ends up being white guys only.
I guess you are having a problem reading what I wrote. Maybe you are reading someone else’s message and accidentally replied to mine.
I said that a community must be a place where every member’s feelings matter. My feelings matter. Your feelings matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t say things that annoy me (which you just did and I bet you don’t regret it).
You can say hurtful things as long as you are acting in good faith— saying what you believe is true and helpful.
You might think you are disagreeing with me. Nevertheless, you are demonstrating part of what I’m talking about: social life is unsmoothable without draining it of meaning and impact. Let’s instead develop resilience.
> What matters is that people are operating in good faith.
Any asshole can claim to be acting in good faith, regardless of what they've done.
You're getting downvoted but I think this is absolutely right... people are simply going to disagree with each others' definition of "good faith."
Right. Adam tells Ben to go die in a fire, and Ben says, "Come on, moderators, that's obviously a violation of the CoC." Then Adam says, "No, because I was only responding to Ben's offensive and unwelcoming language when he referred to a 'master' repository. I've compiled a list of Ben's violations, and I demand a review according to section 3, subsection D of the code...."
A good moderator will shut that nonsense down immediately, but a good moderator wouldn't need a CoC to do it. All the CoC does is give the troublemaker a tool to start playing rules lawyer, in the hope that the moderator will get tired of it and give in.
Some people think the answer is to have a CoC that's too simple for rules lawyering, like a one line "Be excellent to each other." But even that can be twisted, so it would be better as a project motto than as an official CoC.
Jerks will be jerks without a CoC, and jerks will try to turn the CoC into a weapon when there is one. Yeah, that figures.
Sooner or later it boils down to someone reasonable enforcing some boundaries, with or without a CoC.
I got a thread closed on KDE last year in order to protect the “feelings” of the devs, after joining the side against the removal of ksysguard in favor of their inferior System Monitor. If they’re willing to end discussion over a product they screwed up, rhetorically, what else are they doing over there at KDE in bad faith?
I would like this too, and it sounds like a good idea in theory...
But what I worry about is that it may presume that the staff themselves already operate in (your interpretation of) good faith, and I don't think that is always the case.
What is a user's recourse when they disagree with the mods? And what says they will comply with any decision reached from said recourse?
You could say "we must allow disagreements", but at some point this becomes a paradox of tolerance and then you risk it devolving into pointless arguments on either side.
I think the whole "good faith" part could only be enforced by a universally trusted party, like maybe a robot. But even then, people will disagree about how it operates... so maybe this problem is impossible to solve.
It’s not just theory. It’s how things work in the actual world that you live in. My “theory” is an attempt to harmonize our procedures with the way we all live in the world right now.
I am a pluralist (a person who accepts that he must live with people he doesn’t necessarily like) not because I want to be, but because the alternative is constant rage and war.
Take any social group, anywhere, ever. Whichever one you choose: there are people who care about each other to some degree, and who hurt each other to some degree, and who have some sort of procedures and heuristics for dealing with that.
I suggest heuristics based on accepting the fact that people will behave in ways that irritate each other, even when a community is maximally healthy. Let’s accept that as normal. Then what? Then let’s work on what it means to be a member of the community. Let’s establish a protocol for membership based on a hierarchy of trust, or prestige, if you will.
Yes, if the trusted people are actually corrupt then your community is screwed. Go and make a new one.
Focus on building personal tolerance and resilience. Distinguish between matters of taste and matters of conscience.
To anyone who says this system leads to discrimination: ALL systems lead to discrimination. Yours does, too. Humans are like that. This problem can only be solved from the heart outward.
If you want to see weaponising code of conduct, just look at what happened to Tim Peters in the Python discussion forums from a few months ago.
My theory is that this is designed to kill open source.
I’ve been wondering why there seems to be bugs in “everything” these days, and I am seeing this has some to do with the coddling of non-talented programmers in the wake of this activisim.
Posts like this always remind me of Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless". You are completely misunderstanding the original purpose behind the CoC. Here's the relevant part:
"The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrong with the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology."
Havel was writing about life under Soviet occupation. The open source project CoC does not come from a party official who demands you post it in your shop window (public repo.)
It comes from people who believe shitty behavior hurts projects and needs to stop.
> DHH condemned detailed and strict CoC like the Contributor Covenant as a “trojan horse” that should be purged from projects.
Of course he would, he has made several transphobic remarks in the past. Normal people shouldn't take issue with the mere existence of a markdown document that basically says "don't be a dick to people because of who they are". Ostracizing people from projects because you are prejudiced against them, now that hinders open-source. How many potential contributors were scared away by such remarks?
I agree with you in general with your automatic skepticism with something DHH might say on this topic, but:
> Normal people shouldn't take issue with the mere existence of a markdown document that basically says "don't be a dick to people because of who they are".
But that's not what it says. Maybe you can in some squinty way reduce it to that, but that's not all these sorts of documents say, and that's the problem. Most CoCs are fairly specific and strict in what they say people should and shouldn't do, and some of them (like the Contributor Covenant) even includes a process for submitting complaints, and addressing those complaints.
A CoC that just says -- explicitly, without a huge amount of other language -- "don't be a dick" is more or less what ESR and DHH are advocating for. The article goes into detail as to why the author believes that a long, detailed CoC is harmful, and why even if it does essentially just say "don't be a dick", that can cause lots of problems for projects.
I think the issue with CoC is that they have been used in the past by politically motivated (notably on the left) activists to take control of a project and ensure a political line. You may agree with such a political line like anti-fascism, inclusion and what not. But the issue is that you have opened the door to politics inside what ought to be a technical area, and historically, politics change, the ideas you agree on today will be pushed to more extremes (some you might disagree with) you will not be comfortable with and eventually you will be alienated from them completely. But when that happens, you will have no recourse and will eventually be purged (like those before you, being called the trendy workd of the moment, fascist or woke) too because you accepted the opening of the door to such behaviours, your only solution will be silence.
As for examples of that happening, NixOS comes to mind, the Rust debacle too.
Also another issue you might not see, you are ironically also enforcing a dominant idea (your american culture) onto the rest of the world thus creating a hierarchy where your ideas are right and the other cultural operating systems are wrong.
> the issue is that you have opened the door to politics inside what ought to be a technical area
Unless you're willing and able to enforce a BDFL stance, I don't think there is actually any alternative.
As soon as people start disagreeing with any choices you make, and it's not well-understood that "what I say goes", you're going to have people who want to try to change how you run things, and that is the definition of politics.
Either you force your own politics on people, or you open yourself up to accepting changes from other people... which is still politics.
I actually agree, which is why I have high hopes for Ladybird and such. The best type of government is not a democracy but an benevolent dictatorship (also historically called the philosopher-king). You force the politics of neutrality on people, but doing so leads to people on the extremes attacking you and labelling you with unacceptable names like what is happening with DHH and the Omarchy thing
I am not American, and I don't think that "trans people have a right to participate in society" is a political take. The real issue is with people thinking that "trans people shouldn't exist" is a valid opinion to hold, and I don't feel particularly bad for them being "silenced".
If this view falls in the American left's umbrella, then I'm sorry to say: they're objectively right and fuck the guys who hold anti-human views.
The actual divisive issue is whether people who say they are the opposite sex to what they really are should be granted access to spaces that are designated for the sole use of the opposite sex.
This gets relabelled by activists for the trans ideological cause with phrases like "the right to participate in society" and even "the right to exist", but these are so far from what is actually being demanded that it's essentially just misinformation and false appeal to emotion.
> The actual divisive issue is whether people who say they are the opposite sex to what they really are should be granted access to spaces that are designated for the sole use of the opposite sex.
And of course that shouldn't matter for an online virtual space.
But that's unfortunately not it. There are many many people who believe that being trans isn't real, and that anyone who claims to be trans has a mental illness. In addition to denying trans people access to gendered spaces, they also want to deny them medical care, and do things like aggressively (sometimes even gleefully) call them by a name and pronouns that are painful to hear. (Which would still be reprehensible even if being trans was a mental illness!)
And that latter bit is something I have seen happen in online spaces. It's a form of harassment. If the simple "don't be a dick to others"-type CoC is one we can agree on, that's definitely a violation. It's not a "political stance" to say that people should call others by their preferred name and pronouns. It's just basic human decency to do that, and if there's someone who can't even do that basic human thing in a community I manage, then they are not welcome there, regardless of what informs them (often misguided religious beliefs) that they should be hateful like that.
> > The actual divisive issue is whether people who say they are the opposite sex to what they really are should be granted access to spaces that are designated for the sole use of the opposite sex.
> And of course that shouldn't matter for an online virtual space.
Depends on the space. It will matter sometimes. For instance: pregnancy forums, prostate cancer support groups.
But I agree this shouldn't be relevant for online spaces used to organise work on software development projects. These, almost always, are not intended as single-sex spaces, nor as venues for discussing people's differing views on this topic.
> It's not a "political stance" to say that people should call others by their preferred name and pronouns. It's just basic human decency to do that
I think that's more a philosophical stance. Appealing to "basic human decency" seems too subjective, both culturally and personally. There are many perspectives on what this might mean in practice.
Unfortunately the pronouns issue is difficult to avoid when communicating in English, because we have separate words to refer to female and male, and for most English speakers it's natural to use these to describe a person's sex. Overriding it because someone prefers (or demands) an opposite sex pronoun, or even some esoteric pronoun outside of the usual closed set, can be difficult even if that's something you've chosen to accede to. It's like a variation of the Stroop test but in everyday speech.
There are some reasonable arguments to be made for choosing otherwise too, though I expect you probably would not agree.
> It's not a "political stance" to say that people should
I think trying to tell people what they should or shouldn't do is kindof the definition of politics.
Full quote:
> It's not a "political stance" to say that people should call others by their preferred name and pronouns. It's just basic human decency to do that,
You're fighting for the right to be a dick to people for no other reasons than because you are prejudiced against them. Frankly, that sounds rather pathetic, maybe do a little introspection?
Spaces such as online open-source communities? This is nonsensical, listen to yourself. Your anti-human bias shows and it's actually disturbing. What spaces are you even talking about and why do you think people that look, act, talk and think exactly like their members should be barred from them?
> trans ideological cause
Got it, demanding human rights apply to trans people is now an "ideological stance". The American Overton window is so far right, it's crazy people can hold such views and think they're being reasonable.
No, typically this issue is focused around spaces like female-only refuges and safe spaces, locker rooms and changing rooms, prisons, sports competitions, and so on. The divisive point being whether males who say they are female should be refused or granted access.
That you have chosen to characterise this with wording like "anti-human bias" and "demanding human rights apply" further illustrates my point.
No, that's not the typical focus of the issue, and repeating that over and over won't make it so.
What do you see it as?
In the UK, where I am from, the counter to the trans ideological position tends to be from a feminist-influenced perspective, emphasising women's sex-based rights.
Notice how all these so-called TERFs ally themselves with the most anti-feminist crowd, and finally realize it has absolutely nothing to do with feminism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-critical_feminism#Polit...
That's not true. JK Rowling is a good counterexample to your claim, as are the women who brought the FWS case to the UK's Supreme Court (and won), and as are so many other women whose feminist advocacy involves this topic.
JK Rowling accused Nigel Farage of being too "woke", which suggests multiple interesting facts about her political views:
* She thinks "woke" is a bad word, which would put her on the right.
* She thinks Reform UK is woke, which puts her on the far right.
* She's a very confused person, which I would expect from someone claiming to be a feminist while making her prejudice against an already persecuted minority her whole personality.
> JK Rowling accused Nigel Farage of being too "woke"
No she didn't.
What she actually said, in response to someone expressing surprise that Farage supports incarcerating males in the female prison estate, was this:
"Genuinely surprised anyone's shocked by this. Just because huge swathes of the left have revealed themselves to be dripping in misogyny doesn't mean a massive chunk of the right doesn't remain exactly as indifferent to women's rights and issues as it's always been."
She also wrote:
"All those people who tell me support for women's single sex spaces means I must support Reform (which I don't) appear to share exactly the same opinion on women's single-sex spaces as Reform."
Sorry but you've mischaracterised and misquoted her words, and used this to reach a false conclusion.
Most historical feminists would be labelled TERFs today, just like the most liberal 19th century politicians would be seen as conservative. TERFS are still feminists. Communists also allied themselves with fascists during the inter-war period yet you can still consider them as separate.
> Most historical feminists would be labelled TERFs today, just like the most liberal 19th century politicians would be seen as conservative.
Who cares?
> TERFS are still feminists.
You can't be a feminist and side with the people standing against legal abortions, lesbian marriage, gender equality, equal opportunity, equal pay, equal access to education, etc. Simple as that.
The conservative idea of a woman is one of a servile housewife who never leaves the house. No matter how you frame it, these people are anti-feminist, and so are the TERFs that consistently side with them.
> Communists also allied themselves with fascists during the inter-war period yet you can still consider them as separate.
What the hell are you going on about? I would consider the Soviets fascists, but how is that relevant in any way to TERFs not being feminists?
Hitler was a vegetarian. This does not imply that vegetarians in general are siding with Nazis. To assert that would be an error of logic.
You're making a similarly incorrect fallacy of association between TERFs and anti-feminist conservatives.
If vegetarians did side with Hitler, then yeah, I would have an issue with them as a group. But that's completely different, can't you see? TERFs are consistently found to be supporting right-wing candidates, a lot of whom hold anti-feminist views. That's the issue.
Again, and please read it this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-critical_feminism#Polit...
You speak of "all these so-called TERFs", but the article you linked, in the very first sentence, qualifies this with "some":
"Some trans-exclusionary radical feminists have allied with conservative or far-right groups and politicians who oppose legislation that would expand transgender rights in the United States."
As for "TERFs are consistently found to be supporting right-wing candidates", which you claim, the two articles in the citations for the Wikipedia quote above talk about how right-wing groups in the US are listening to feminists on this specific issue. So really it's the opposite way around to what you're saying.
Wow, you really got me with that "some". Are you seriously now claiming that TERFs aren't mostly found on the right? Ever heard of a left-wing TERF? I won't waste anymore time arguing with someone who refuses basic facts. The truth is, that TERFs have done nothing to further the feminist cause. At best they give ammos to the right, who in this day and age, is acting openly anti-feminist, and amping up rhetoric against an already stigmatized minority who is 4 times as likely to be on the receiving end of violent crimes.
> Are you seriously now claiming that TERFs aren't mostly found on the right? Ever heard of a left-wing TERF?
Yes of course, and I know several personally. It's a fairly common set of views in the UK.
Over here it's not like it is the US where there's such a strong party political divide over this issue and as a consequence feminist groups (like WoLF, mentioned in the Wikipedia citations of the section you linked) decided to appeal to politicians on the right because the left has been so captured by trans ideological beliefs. Though not all on the left. If you're interested, look up Kara Dansky, radical feminist and lifelong Democrat, who has been trying to convince her party for years of the case for women's sex-based rights.
You are most certainly Western, or if not part of the educated and Western brought elites of the Global South. But I most certainly assure you that in the other grand civilizations, the idea you expounded is the standard and just as you feel this idea is the objectively right one, in the other societies with other codes and ethics (Confucian, Vedic/Buddhist, Islamic or non Western Christian), the people living in them have as strong attachment to those ideas as you do. For you the 2 most important values are equality and freedom (deeply liberal values) which are not the same elsewhere.
You also have to understand that just as you are imposing your ideas as "objectively right", in the other societies the other side is doing the same. Thus you are making a political take because it is a value judgement on how societies should operate. You might not like it or not but not only is it a value judgement incompatible with most people in the world, but it is also part of a faction inside your own arena (left wing coded Western politics)
I am indeed "Western" as you put it, and generally adhere to the description you gave of me. I do recognize my statement is political, although I did not use the word "objectively" lightly and feel like I can justify my position quite solidly. So, while the other side may claim their ideas as "objectively right" too, I am yet to see any reasoning that would give credance to such claims. Here is a succint overview of the reasoning I used to arrive at my current position on trans-identity:
Facts (that you should be able to verify easily through e.g. a quick Google Scholar session):
1. Gender dysphoria is real and touches a significant part of the population. It makes those affected by it suffer mentally.
2. Transition is the only known way to cure gender dysphoria, and it does indeed work.
3. People very rarely regret transitioning (<1% of them, less than the rate of people regretting having their children, and most of these "detransitions" come from religious or social pressures).
4. Trans people are no more susceptible to committing crime (sexual or else) than the average person, if not slightly less so (they are, on the other hand, ~4 times as likely to be victims of violent crimes, because of the prejudice and rhetoric targeted at them).
Axioms (that I hope we both agree on):
1. Helping people feel better, or at least not hindering them while they try to, is good.
2. Ostracizing people because of something they can't change is bad.
Conlusions (that you have to agree with if you accept my axioms and my reasoning):
1. Facts 1, 2 and 3 + Axiom 1 => We should let trans people transition, and whenever possible, even help them to.
2. Fact 4 + Axiom 2 + Conclusion 1 => We should let trans people participate in society as no one gets hurt in doing so, and trans people have to transition for their own good, so it would be unfair to attack them on that basis.
this whole article and the resulting hn thread is a nerd snipe. of course esr and DHH are against codes of conduct. they act like bigoted assholes and then throw a fit when people treat them as such.
The only code of conduct that was ever required was the license.md file.
To the folks that say they won't contribute if there's a CoC: this just proves they're working. If you can't avoid the behavior called out in a CoC, then we don't want you to contribute. Thank you for self-selecting yourself away from us.
I dealt with abusive contributors at Wikimedia Foundation for years, and it wasn't until a CoC was added that coordinators were actually empowered to ban those abusive volunteers. Can you guess which members of the community were also the most vehemently against the CoCs?
False equivalence IMO... you're implying that people who don't want a CoC will actually behave badly, and I don't think that's accurate at all, at least not for the majority.
> it wasn't until a CoC was added that coordinators were actually empowered to ban those abusive volunteers
IMO that is just bad leadership... they could (and should) have taken action against abusive people regardless.
> you're implying that people who don't want a CoC will actually behave badly, and I don't think that's accurate at all, at least not for the majority
If you fight against a code of conduct, which has a more listed out version of "don't harass people", then you're already acting badly. It's at minimum a red flag. There's very little that should be controversial in a CoC.
> IMO that is just bad leadership... they could (and should) have taken action against abusive people regardless.
It's hard to justify kicking someone out of a community without being able to point to a rule they've broken, which is the entire point of the CoC.
None of us want to have to make these things, or enforce them. We just want to work on projects together. These things exist because shitty people cause problems, and then when we try to eject them, they act like victims. When we set rules up front, then enforce them, it takes part of the problem out of the equation.
It doesn't fully solve the "playing the victim" part, because folks then start claiming they're being selectively targeted, and start pointing out super minor violations often using out of context quotes, but it's impossible to solve for everything.
Codes of Conduct are pushed by corporate types you want open source projects to act and behave more corporate fashion. I've never seen them make things better.
They are even harmful. Very harmful
Arch Linux has a code of conduct. And no one that enforces it. Really too sad, as some of their most active members regularly violate it.
Yeah, nah.
Watch how an open discussion here: https://github.com/nixos/rfcs/pull/98
... devolves into a massive outcry because a bunch of folks not behaving in good faith didn't like "we don't support fascism or bigotry".
It reached the level of
* Vile sock puppet attacks on a trans individual, who merely kept saying "Fascism, no thanks in this community" * "Denounce the Marxists!" As a rallying cry becomes a talking point
If you reflect on the behaviours seen there and ask why is this so heated for proposing consequences for bad behaviour; you may come to the realisation that the advocates of bad behaviour... don't want to be accountable.
This post is translated, perhaps some of the nuance is lost. But it hand waves away dhh's behaviour as "controversial figures in the community"
If that's genuinely what is believed, I'd like a replacement on this Overton window, thanks! It has been fractured.
The article does not consider the consequences or implications of malicious acts, and the harm on others adequately.
A clear CoC or similar outlines expected norms, and does not have to be copypasta/is infact better if it is derived from a consensus. It's a statement of what the people with power will hold themselves to, and if that turns out to be a lie - a performative document that is not actually used - newcomers can view the behaviour they observe against that standard; and leave or demand justice if they are wronged.
By not publishing an ethical or moral standard you abide by, even if it's a text file with "get bent" in it; you invite people to interact with you with expectations. If you are part of the 1-4% of the population who are sociopaths, you are advocating to hurt people without consequence. If they are part of the 1-4% you are permitting behaviour without recourse.
Could you imagine a post advocating for "don't fix security holes because 92-98% of people don't know about exploiting them?" Would that be acceptable?
Why would you not state a policy?
> If you reflect on the behaviours seen there and ask why is this so heated for proposing consequences for bad behaviour; you may come to the realisation that the advocates of bad behaviour... don't want to be accountable.
It seems the problem is that what amounts to "bad behaviour" is poorly defined, and that the detractors of "bad behaviour" can also be guilty of bad behaviour.
I don't think your rebuttal is all that convincing, though. What belief do we have that a CoC would have prevented the behavior you note in that pull request? That sock puppet account was either 1) a random drive-by person who isn't associated with NixOS at all, and is just a hateful troll, or 2) is an actual NixOS community member who created a throwaway account to spew garbage.
How does a a CoC fix either of those problems? I'll answer that myself: it doesn't. Random hateful trolling is going to happen everywhere, and all you can do is stamp it out as quickly as possible by deleting comments and banning accounts.
The second possibility is more insidious: that there's a member of the NixOS community with these hateful views, and has otherwise managed to keep those views to themselves in their interactions with the community. Or they sorta maybe kinda keep it under wraps most of the time, and people sorta maybe kinda know about it, but look the other way for whatever reason. If project leadership knows about something like that and doesn't take action, a CoC isn't going to fix that, either.
Just fire people who suck. It’s really not that difficult.
The reason this conversation is possible out in the open is that CoCs are woke, and there has been a backlash against woke: woke is out.