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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see the competing claims:

- the kernel community is comprised entirely of people who will never be abusive, so it doesn't need a code of conduct

- the project is surrounded by people who are so dangerous that they will abuse any kind of process, even a code of conduct

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1. The CoC normalizes abuse. 2. If someone is abusive without a CoC thryvcan ve easily removed. 3. They aren’t abusing the code of conduct when they use it to attack people, that’s what itcwas designed for. It was designed by a person with an axe to grind who makes no secret of their agenda.

> The CoC normalizes abuse.

Please explain how an anti-abuse system normalises abuse?

> If someone is abusive without a CoC thryvcan ve easily removed.

It has long been argued that Linus was abusive, and he wasn't removed at all let alone "easily".

Anti-abuse system allows abusers to live in its cracks. The article explains that at length, with examples of offensive (though superficially compliant) language used by US managers.

If the CoC has cracks large enough to sustain an abuser ecosystem, those cracks will be identified and paved over.

That approach is called “Enumerating Badness”, and is known to never completely work.

It doesn't need to be perfect, as long as there are no false positives and few valse negatives.

... which is very much an unsolved problem wrt regulation of human behavior.

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