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Comment by klmr | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I just missed it in this ranty wall of text but I can’t seem to find an actual concrete complaint about what we supposedly need to unfuck in our codes of conduct.

I’m by no means a big fan of the concept of a code of conduct (it’s basically patronising for functioning adults by spelling out things that should be obvious; and I’ve yet to see evidence that they are actually effective at combating bullying, tribalism and harassment). But by now they’ve simply become a signal in their own right, saying: this place cares about its community. And, in the end, I think that at worst they’re not actively harmful.

So: how are they harmful, and in what regard do they need “unfucking”?

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I think they are harmful in the same way that sexual harassment training is harmful: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/upshot/sexual-harassment-....

It doesn't work at best and it definitely strongly polarises some people into pro/con camps.

That being said, it is funny that nobody would bat an eye at signing a code of conduct when they sign up for a gym membership or to volunteer for the YMCA, but signing a code of conduct to enter a restaurant or pub would feel really obnoxious. In all cases an obnoxious patron would be ejected. Maybe when a code of conduct is presented alongside some other typical agreement it seems more appropriate?

Thanks, this is a very insightful comment (and the NYT article confirms a suspicion of mine about workplace sexual harassment training — although here in Europe the legal situation is a bit different).

> Maybe when a code of conduct is presented alongside some other typical agreement it seems more appropriate?

Funny, this is exactly what I’ve done on personal projects. The CoC is simply a part of the contributors’ guidelines, next to things like submission guidelines and code style.

Yeah, if you put it right there from the start you can avoid the political polarisation event at its introduction.

I feel like in the early days of the internet people acted like the interactions with other people weren't "real" interactions and that people shouldn't be upset at conversations that wouldn't occur at the grimiest of dive bars. It seems this aspect of online culture pervaded some aspects of developer culture as well (it seems some really unprofessional behavior is tolerated in some places). Having a code of conduct that essentially says, "We expect you to behave in our online community like you would at a company barbecue," can get there. I don't think calling attention to particular types of bad behavior is a good idea. Nobody has succeeded in drawing a bright line through gray areas yet.

Yes, that was a large part of my point. In real life most of the time we deal with problems as they come up; you can't fit humans into these cookie cutter molds we are currently attempting to with these CoCs going around.

A code of conduct is absolutely required. My local hackerspace has a rule about proper footwear because some "functioning adult" didn't think he needed to wear shoes. On a shop floor with metal shavings. That's a liability risk no one wants to deal with. And "accidentally" dropping a 5lb hammer on the guy's toes isn't a good solution.

As far as combating bully, tribalism, and harassment. A code of conduct isn't effective unless it's enforced consistently. My local hackerspace has had to remove people. It's been effective. Those people are no longer a part of the community and as a result, the hackerspace is safe place late at night.

I'm not a big fan of Codes of Conduct. I'm not going to put a lot of energy into being against them, but my general feeling is that CoCs are a case of "going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."

Earlier this year, I had a conversation with a guy in charge of a program. He told an anecdote about some bad thing happening and I talked about the need to guard against basing policy on such outliers, that when you write up policy trying to prevent a worst case scenario, you often frame it in a manner that announces to all new people "I expect you to be like That One Guy."

I told my own counter anecdote about dealing with some seriously screwed up guy I met online who wanted to talk me into meeting him in person and he actively hid from me the fact that he was a smoker knowing I have life threatening respiratory problems. When I called him on his messed up bullshit, he told me that if it mattered that much, I should have asked. He took it as some bizarre point of pride that he deceived me without actually directly lying to me.

I briefly spent some time wondering if I needed to post something somewhere essentially saying "No smokers, no tokers." then decided that's about like starting a dating profile and saying in it "No rapists!"

Yeah, that doesn't work. Hopefully, people here chuckle at that like he did.

Social problems tend to be hard problems to solve precisely because direct push back against certain kinds of things can actually deepen the problem and because it neither works to promote a punishment model as your only means to foster good behavior, nor to abandon punishment altogether.

What I got out of it was essentially that they're not fun, and we just need to all stop being mean to each other.

I'm not sure why we didn't just try that in the first place!

my understanding is he was appealing to going back to the informal way of dealing with conflict, where you try to empathise with people being flawed and only reserve the big guns like banning, ostracism etc for people who are being willingly nasty. Because once you codify behaviour standards it can potentially become a weapon in power struggles and political in-fighting, even if the intent is a positive one ( to prevent the creation of a hostile environment).

A lack of codified behavior standards also results in internal confusion on what is acceptable, especially given the higher levels of people in this general community with difficulties in recognizing unspoken social rules. This results in a different sort of in-fighting that has the effect of creating a code of conduct that is unspoken and enforced inconsistently, which tends to work poorly for anyone who happens to knowingly or unknowing violate that code of conduct.

my point was that when someone seemingly violates good conduct, people who are more "in the know" with the community's social values should talk to them from the position that they weren't being intentionally unpleasant (or in other words, with empathy). It's usually pretty obvious when someone has been accidentally rude versus intentionally trolling.

The problem I see with these codes of conduct is it can turn the haziness and ambiguity of human communication (especially across cultural boundaries and with people with social difficulties) into black-and-white "if you do X you are a bad person and should be banned". Especially if "X" is defined in a very politicised way or the people who choose to call out offenders are doing so as political enforcers rather than trying to foster good communication.

> It's usually pretty obvious when someone has been accidentally rude versus intentionally trolling.

It's difficult to know this for certain due to the variety of neurodiversity we see in our community. While I agree that codes of conduct have cons, not having a code of conduct also has cons that should be discussed.

I also believe that there is definitely a case for black-and-white "if you do X you should be banned". For example, I believe people who call other people ethnic or sexuality-related slurs should be banned, 100%, and anyone who calls anyone else a slur should be considered hostile to the community. There's very little positive communication to be had if someone refuses to stop using slurs, and they should be banned. Of course, there is a gradient of reasonability to this, but I can see in the most basic points where "if you do X you are a bad person and you should be banned" where X is also political (like homosexual people) where calling anyone a gay slur should be bannable.

Thanks for actually phrasing one of my points far better than I did, haha.

I admit you caught my own clickbaity title usage in hopes it would get enough people to actually open it and elicit some discussion about it but in a different direction than has been so far :) I'm still reading through the other comments but so far I feel like I got a few people thinking about it, which makes me fairly glad.

Whenever I see a code of conduct I check if "political opinion" is a "protected class". Then I ask, "Could Brendan Eich have been excommunicated under this code?".

I rarely find the first. The second is less clear cut, as far as I can tell the new Linux contributor code of conduct would not have directly applied to him.

None the less, the harm is in that it empowers exactly the same group of people who got Eich fired in the first place.

Much like progressives try to "de-platform" conservatives, these codes of conduct "en-platform" progressives. And while some of their points are valid, it's hard to endorse their camp when they go around hit and run blackmailing others under the threat of shouting Racist! Misogynist! Shitlord! to force them to do things like changing master/slave database terminology or even more insane, changing blacklist/whitelist terminology.

> Whenever I see a code of conduct I check if "political opinion" is a "protected class".

My guess is that you’ll rarely find this as it’s not a protected characteristic under the law (and, as far as I can see, CoCs essentially follow discrimination law).

> None the less, the harm is in that it empowers exactly the same group of people who got Eich fired in the first place.

But Eich wasn’t fired, he stepped down and resigned of his own volition. Both he and others at Mozilla maintain this version of events, and it’s — as far as I can see — uncontested. You seem to be saying that you want a code of conduct that explicitly prohibits protest against political opinions. Good luck with that.

> Much like progressives try to "de-platform" conservatives

This is a myth: “Deplatforming” is neither exclusive nor even particularly prevalent on the left.

> to doing shit like changing master/slave database terminology or even more insane, changing blacklist/whitelist terminology

Fighting against such nonsense seems eminently more sensible (and more winnable!) than fighting for the prohibition of political protest in codes of conduct.

My guess is that you’ll rarely find this as it’s not a protected characteristic under the law (and, as far as I can see, CoCs essentially follow discrimination law).

Whether that's the law wasn't my point. And actually some progressive states do have laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on political opinion. They probably came from the Hollywood Blacklists, and are now amusingly ignored and irrelevant as a moral principle now that the shoe is on the other foot.

The progressive demanded he lose his job and conducted a campaign until he did. Potato potato.

his is a myth: “Deplatforming” is neither exclusive nor even more prevalent on the left.

"They both do it" does not imply "the left doesn't do it". My point was just to introduce the tactic, which is relevant.

Fighting against such nonsense seems eminently more sensible (and more winnable!) than fighting for the prohibition of political protest in codes of conduct.

It is not winnable. Look at recent events, eg redis. And allowing codes of conduct that don't protect unrelated, out of scope, and otherwise politely expressed political opinions makes it even less winnable.

> The progressive demanded he lose his job and conducted a campaign until he did. Potato potato.

So what you’re saying is that you want a code of conduct to protect Eich’s free speech but not that of the people who campaigned against him. That … simply doesn’t work.

FWIW, I'm also a database researcher (or I used to be, in industry now) and at least in my sphere we tried to avoid master/slave terminology, and in fact I learned this from my advisor at the time, a well-respected professor, who mentioned it was racially insensitive. So, I don't think this is being forced by anyone except the people in the database community already. It's not like progressive mindsets don't exist in the database research community. Databases aren't exactly a great space to imply that conservatism is the mainstream and that progressives are foreign; several prominent current and former researchers are/have been women and the gender ratio is quite a bit different compared to other sub-fields.

That is to say, I don't understand the rhetorical implication here that progressives, or people who want to change master/slave terminology in general, are not part of the community they want to see change in. When that happens, it's just a community discussing about terminological use in their own sphere, which is also exactly what the blog post here is doing. I feel this should be welcomed within any community.

> but I can’t seem to find an actual concrete complaint about what we supposedly need to unfuck in our codes of conduct.

Pretty much "I am allowed to say what I like because freedom of speech. Fuck you you fragile snowflake. Also, you're not allowed to use that same freedom of speech to criticise my ideas oh my god I'm being oppressed it's a terrible terrible thing that is happening to me".

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