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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

How else would you codify what is and what isn't acceptable behaviour?

Is it just arbitrary? Do you just depend on more people enforcing their views out to stop harassment? If so, then why not codify it?

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As this whole debacles shows codifying doesn't remove arbitrary standards. Human social interactions are far too complex to codify in a concise way without massive edge cases. So all too often it just gives people a tool with which to better force their own arbitrary standards onto others.

As this blog post [1] lays out, this seems like a case where the CoC was poorly authored exactly for this reason. But this isn't a reason to not have a CoC, it just means this particular one was not done well.

[1]: https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/

There is no way to author a set of rules such that it can't be abused by someone with the power to enforce it. That's why the law has judges, juries, courts of appeal, standards of evidence, disclosure rules, corpus delicti, habeas corpus, and so on.

The problem is not the CoC, but the lack of accountability, oversight, and transparency in enforcement.

I totally agree, but people don't generally claim we should get rid of the law for these reasons. I am responding to the claim that we should get rid of CoCs, which I disagree with. I am not arguing that CoCs are perfect, or that we don't need checks. In this case, it seems that the CoC was pretty poorly written, and the team didn't even follow their own procedure. I think we should fix those problems rather than throw the whole thing out.

Agreed, but I don't see it happening. There's very little chance of any conference organizer setting up some sort of quasi-legal institutions around CoCs.

It is happening before our eyes! The organizers have admitted they made mistakes and are working on improvements. I agree a full-on court system would be ridiculous, but what that means is that the CoC needs to better thought out to reduce ambiguity.

Those are all valuable tools to have in a system where the law can deprive a person of property, liberty, and life.

It's not necessarily the case that you have to spend nearly as much on a code of conduct system where the ultimate worst-case scenario is that an innocent person is denied a platform or has the reputation tarnished in a reversible way.

> Is it just arbitrary?

Yes. Just as "kind" is. To the reporters and the officials, "saying somebody is wrong" is unkind, so it's clearly arbitrary.

The worst thing is when nobody is actually offended or hurt, and someone says your behavior could be considered offensive or insulting or whatever and takes action based on that. That's just someone wanting to exert their power for the wrong reasons.

That reminds me of that event when a person with screen name "Christian", of all things, filed an issue at VS Code around the, ah, New Year festivities, demanding to remove the Santa hat from the status bar because it's offensive. And the VS Code team promptly reacted, by agreeing, changing it for a snowflake (I still have no idea if it was ironic, or not, and whether they've noticed it later) and pushing out an emergency hot fix.

That did piss off quite a number of people, who filed much more hard-pressing (in their opinion) issues (like, some useful editor functionality being broken) and received precisely zero feedback.

You don't get to be the arbiter of who is "actually offended." I agree that there are people who take any amount of power and want to expert it for the wrong reasons, but that isn't an indictment against CoCs, it's an indictment of bad behavior.

That bad behavior is enabled by CoCs though, isn't it? If you leave room for abuse, you'll get abuse.

>> You don't get to be the arbiter of who is "actually offended.

That is exactly my point. Some committee member doesn't get to say "that may be offensive to someone" either. They need to wait until someone actually reports being offended.

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