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Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen a CoC used to help protect a community, only to protect certain already powerful members within a community and give them a tool with which to beat others.

Lately I've been actively avoiding giving my time to open source projects that have CoC's like the Contributor Covenant[1], mainly because - if my experience is anything to go by - they are a strong signal that the kind of people I wish to avoid will be involved. I want to contribute things that (hopefully) improve the world in objective ways, not be involved in the wrangling and petty politics of a fiefdom just so I can get something like a bug report considered.

If I had to choose one CoC to implement, it would be NCoc[2].

[1] https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/0/code_of_con... [2] https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC

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I've been wondering about this. Obviously there's a demand for CoCs coming from somewhere, or there wouldn't be a supply of them. What is driving this demand?

Is this demand driven by good intentions? By a genuine desire to improve diversity? To attract those who might otherwise feel less safe?

Is this demand driven by a "fear of being left out" because big names in tech are setting an example?

Is this demand entirely artificial, driven by power hungry people wallowing in self importance?

I don't have any answers here. I'm just curious. I can certainly agree with wanting to help rid the world of sexism and racism. I'm not sure whether a tech conference or open source project is the best forum for that change.

It would be interesting to see if there's any evidence that these CoCs improve diversity of any sort, the lack of which is partly why I'm against them, but mainly because of the division I've seen them sow.

As to their intentions, I'm not sure they're that relevant (I'm sure they'd believe they were good intentions anyway), but I think our intentions are. They say "we want to increase diversity" and "we want to end sexism and racism", so in comes a "kind" CoC, and because the majority do have good intentions and share these laudable goals there is agreement, forgetting that famous old adage "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" and before you know it the definitions of racism and sexism have been changed to a point that vilifies the majority and a small group are wielding outsized power via terms and conditions that we all signed.

I've a feeling it mirrors the culture wars[1] on social media, and even contains some of the same members of the 12% minority cited there.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894248

My hypothesis: a minority of adults with poor judgement cause legitimate problems. Organizers react appropriately and remove the person. Being expelled is scary! This person, or others fearing the same, ask "what rule did they break, is this rule applied fairly?". And the easiest way to make it less scary is to publish "rules".

If it isn't obvious that the person is a bigger problem than everyone else yet still get kicked out then the community isn't a place I'd like to be in. Either it is full of shitty people or people get kicked out for dubious reasons.

More hypothesis: Not all big problems are obvious. Perhaps I saw person 1 touch person 2's bottom, and person 1 was never seen again. If organizers resolved the situation quietly, and the casual observer doesn't have context (was the bottom touching consentual?) that could lead to uncertainty. Perhaps: I like touching bottoms (with consent), is /that/ going to get me kicked out? (Work: yes. Dance: no)

If you can accept that a small portion of adults have judgement poor enough to cause big problems, then it doesn't seem like a big leap to accept that another larger portion of adults have judgement at a level which lacks confidence to trust assumptions in uncomfortable, high risk situations. Perhaps this is the group served by CoC?

I have seen it demanded basically as lipservice to an odd idea of justice. "Well, it's very easy to add, and there are some good ones, and X,Y and Z have it, and only a monster wouldn't adopt one!"

And then you start listing some of the issues that arise with these and defenders quickly respond that the problems are edge cases and usually the conversationd devolves from there.

My impression is that it's a mix of bad faith and misunderstanding by those pushing it (a lot are bad faith and know they just want a tool to give themselves power, but others believe that it's a good idea and are ignorant of the former, very forgiving when they see examples of their usage, "this is an individual mistake, it's not systemic in coc" etc), and a general attitude of "what's the harm in saying we expect everyone to be kind" on the side of maintainers agreeing to adopt them.

> Obviously there's a demand for CoCs coming from somewhere

It's coming from SJW's and similar far leftists who virtue signal. Yet people keep pandering to them, and now they're paying the price.

One of the things I find useful is when the project includes a list of active contributors along with their general responsibilities. If the project is relatively small yet includes multiple "full time" moderators I know that it's not a project worth my time. At the extreme end I've come across projects where moderators outnumber active developers.

NCoc is a bit too edgy for my liking.

The actual CoC is fine, but the FAQ breaks things down.

I think the best approach is not to include any "code of conduct" at all in a project.

> improve the world in objective ways

Not to get all relativist, but "improve" and "objective" in the same sentence is quite the oxymoron. Ask any two randomly picked people in the world how to improve said world and you'll find they have very different, subjective, ideas of what that means.

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