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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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