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Comment by burntsushi | Hacker News Reader

It was 4 people until very recently. But it was only 4 for a long time. It's inaugural size (of which I was a part) was bigger than that. People leave over time and it's hard to get new members.

We acknowledged this in our statement. We suggested that the future mod team do a better job recruiting new members than we did.

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I very much dislike COCs and overbearing moderation teams in open source communities. Good on you that you didn't publicize anything, that is probably the hardest for you than for anyone else.

The Rust leadership doesn't make a good impression to be honest. I like the language itself but it isn't really an open source community I would want to engage in aside from the technical aspects (my involvement is limited in any communities because I mostly write commercial software, just dabble here and there, although I am clearly dependent on open source and try to point that out to those less positively inclined to the concept).

What really interests me is why you believe such COCs are necessary. Do you believe they improve open source communities? It is a necessary evil if a certain popularity is reached? Is formalization an attempt at transparency? As I said I dislike COCs, but the Rust one has less than 300 words. Does this reach any target audiences? Is "professionalism" worth striving for?

In my capacity as a developer I have professional exchange in a corporate setting. Sure that every corporation has their own behavior rules, but there is never a formal framework for such engagements that mostly involves people from different companies. Perhaps people behave better because otherwise their job is on the line, but why does it work here? And I believe for many working in such a setting a more "direct" method of mutual engagement seems kind of refreshing. Would be sad if open source tried to mimic the corporate work. There is no greener grass here.

A code of conduct is there so that everyone knows what the rules are, and can refer to them when moderating (including self-moderating) interactions within the community. I'd consider it a big upgrade over when I was in charge of moderating an online community, and formal COCs weren't a common thing yet. The rules, such as they were, were largely informal and unwritten. In consequence, that mod team was very much a star chamber. It wasn't great. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Inter-corporate communication is not a good analogy here, because inter-corporate communication can't generally be modeled as a set of individuals freely associating with each other. Their status as representatives of their employers significantly changes the landscape. Companies are generally careful not to install people with less-than-stellar communication skills at their interfaces with other companies in the first place. I suppose the maxim to trot out here is, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

My views on Codes of Conduct are pretty nuanced, and frankly, I learned a long time ago that the Internet cannot handle nuance. I was and still am an enthusiastic supporter of Rust's CoC, but you'll also notice that none of my personal projects have a CoC in them. So from that alone, you might at least surmise that I don't necessarily think CoCs are a universally good idea (or more precisely, "worth it") in literally every situation. Equivalently, I think they are a good idea in some situations. But I'm not going to say much more than that.

> I very much dislike COCs and overbearing moderation teams in open source communities.

Same. And I have avoided some such communities in the past.

But, I am not necessarily against overbearing moderation. For example, r/askhistorians is one of my favorite subreddits, and I would attribute that state to their intense moderation.

Thanks for your answer. The Rust COC is certainly short and concise, which I prefer if we really need them at all that is. There certainly are also situations where moderation can keep things on topic. When I say moderation I mostly mean tone policing or sanctioning certain views, not the removal of spam or memes that dillute a topic, although the latter at some point comes down to opinion too.

I had this 2 star repos for a niche problem with perhaps 2-3 visitors per month and someone quite aggressively suggested that I should put one up. At the same time more an more projects put one up and I wondered where this push in OSS came from.

Suddenly projects needed committees to enforce some form of weird compliance. I just think it didn't improve conduct in any community that I saw. Not that you have to look very far to find eccentric personalities but I never thought that to be a problem, on the contrary.

I just went to askhistorians and the front page has no un-deleted answers as far as I can tell. So, utterly dead community that only had a limited time in the spotlight, supported by unsustainable heroic effort of unpaid volunteers.

I don't know what you're talking about. There's one right here[1]. I've been reading that subreddit almost daily for years. I still do. It's not even remotely dead.

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r0en25/what_...

Thanks for your contribution burntsushi. I'm sorry it has come to this.

Thanking the political commissars?

I’m glad to see them resign, and I hope open source can ultimately route around the unearned power grab that the “CoC” movement represents.

I actually disagree with 2 parts of your premise

1. I don't think we're actually talking about that much power, in most instances the issues amount to "not behaving professionally in an environment that wants to have a professional character"

2. What would it need to be for you to consider what power it gives as "earned"? I'm surprised since it seems that power being explicitly delegated by the project should be enough by any measure.

Specifically, how do you feel someone like burntsushi represented an unearned power grab? Go on, I'm listening.

Actually this time it's the opposite. The moderators' refusal to elaborate unfortunately lends itself to your position and it was my knee-jerk reaction too until I found out the conjunctured details.

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