Can you give any examples of witch hunting based on CoC? Ignoring the famous example of pycon a few years ago is there another?
I feel there's a common feeling about the potential "badness" of a code of conduct, but very few actual examples.
I feel there's a common feeling about the potential "badness" of a code of conduct, but very few actual examples.
https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
There is this other very interesting example where Coraline got called out doing the very things she despises: https://github.com/ContributorCovenant/contributor_covenant/... This is of course perfectly acceptable.
To be clear, the behavior that upset them was a contributor tweeting things on twitter under his private name. They wanted this person to be removed from the open source projects they were working on because of that.
The people who are pushing CoCs want to be able to punish people for perceived injustices. These injustices can be tweeting on twitter, and if the PC warriors get their way the punishment is to be ostracized from all open source projects.
"strand referenced this issue on Jun 18, 2015 Closed Create a Code of Conduct #942"
Even worse: "Coraline Ada" works for GitHub (also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13667829).
The mentality of "that person said something I disagree with [on other media] and they should be banned here [on a random project that I don't have anything to do with] or else..." is incredible toxic.
If you don't agree with "assholes" writing code or using code that was written by an "asshole", you'll have a hard time using anything open source at all.
This is a common theme among proponents of codes of conduct.
See also Twitter's ban on many people, including Milo Yiannopoulos. He was banned for "violating the rules". But I've looked, and no one anywhere can point out which exact tweet violated which particular rule. Even more extreme, no one can point out where he said any of things he's accused of saying.
So... Twitter blocked him for "abuse", when there is zero evidence of such abuse.
I'll say this:
The more extreme the code of conduct, the more likely it will be broken by the people enforcing it.
CoCs are worrisome because they tend to emulate that behaviour, and I certainly do not condone overreaching TOS, but you can't equate those two situations. It's the behaviour of people vs. the behaviour of companies.
When you have such a legalese disclaimer as above, you don't need to lie about why you're banning someone. You just say "Under the Twitter ToS, we've banned Milo."
The fact that they chose to lie about the justification for the ban shows not only that the ban was politically motivated (and not based on reality), but that they are so incompetent that they can't even spin it in their favor.
Their bias is leaking. They don't really care about their own ToS. They don't care about following the rules they put in. They do care about banning anyone who they don't like.
I find such behavior unethical, and morally repugnant.
As others have posted here, some people pushing "codes of conduct in open source" end up violating those codes themselves, and abusing their authority. These people do this not only in open source forums, but in other places, too.
The underlying topic then, cannot be about the CoC. In reality, the topic being discussed is who gets to control the conversation. Along with that, who gets to decide what topics are acceptable. Not just which topics are OK for a list / forum, but which topics are "good think", and which ones are "bad think".
The question for someone running an open source project, then, is will your project be taken over by people who are pushing a particular ideological agenda, and who are using your project to do so?
My answer is "No.". Perhaps "over my dead body" is more accurate.
"We have adopted the Open Code of Conduct for the open source projects that we maintain, including Atom, Electron, Git LFS, and many others."
https://github.com/blog/2039-adopting-the-open-code-of-condu...
I have cancelled all my private repos with GitHub as I just don't like their ethics.
Yet, the person who created this issue has been hunting down people whose opinions they don't agree with and trying to exclude them from participating in a technical community. The scariest part: this person works for GitHub.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scalaz/9X_putSGoCY
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/scalaz/code$20of$...
https://twitter.com/shajra/status/544712807220908032
Basically a CoC was quietly created and applied retroactively to so that Typelevel (a major Scala consultancy) could try and kick Tony Morris (founder of Scalaz) off his own project.
From what I understand, having a colorful community of weirdos made the open source project they based their company on seem unattractive to big corporate customers.
I'd have to agree with you that the reaction seems absurd. He was unprofessional, sure, meriting a temporary kicking from IRC or something, but IMHO he who has never been a know-it-all (unheard-of on HN, ofc) or lost his temper over something silly on the internet should cast the first stone.
"Its Atheism PLUS morality, sensitivity, acceptance, diversity, etc."
Things which are all well and good, but that turned out to not be the point. The point seemed to be that creation and enforcement of CoC rules was more important than anything else.
People argued endlessly about which rules should be created, what the rules meant, and how to enforce the rules. Which in practice, meant witch hunting, and a totalitatian enforcement of vaguely-defined values.
i.e. nasty, toxic, behavior.
This negative behavior was pointed out to one of the main proponents. To prove the nay-sayers wrong, he created a sock puppet account which asked a simple question "Hey guys, what's this thing about?"
Cue hysterics and shaming of the newbie.
He publicly came out and said the account was his, and that this behavior was bad.
Cue hysterics and shaming of him.
He was banned (both accounts) from the forum. A thread was set up specifically for people to discuss how they were betrayed / hurt / abused by his behavior.
Another major proponent who talked endlessly about the need to be inclusive towards women and not sexually harass them... has now been accused of repeated sexual harassment. And his public statements pretty much say "yeah... that actually happened, but it was all a misunderstanding"
And what are the results of this new movement? Well, a few years later, it's dead. The forums are dead. The proponents are fighting each other. One was drummed out, and then publicly admitted that the people she was against were nicer to her than her ex-allies.
When the "bad" people are more moral than the "good" people, I think you have your labels reversed.
I've advocated for this before. Codes of conduct should be simple. Technical forums should have a code of conduct that says "Technical topics are on topic. Others are not. Off-topic conversations will be stopped. Continued off-topic conversations will result in a warning, and a ban."
Anything else devolves into a morality play. Where the proponents argue about which moral standards are correct, and which ones are evil and wrong.
In short, people who obsess about enforcing codes of conduct are toxic. They don't get anything done. They largely have never gotten anything done.
Let me tell a story about off-topic postings in a forum that I was active at.
There was a member who often posted (let's say) controversial, but very reasoned answers in this forum. They were often against the official consensus of the forum, which lead to strong reactions and controversies (I can even imagine that he loved this controversies); but as I said: his arguments were very well reasoned. So there were some moderator(s?) who rather would have liked to ban him from the forum (but they couldn't easily, since there were people who rightfully said that though his postings are controversial, they come from a completely different side of view, so they have value for the community).
So the moderators gave him a warning (I think there were two warnings were before ban) because of some off-topic posts (there were some terms hidden in the forum rules, which really nobody read). This lead to an outcry in the forum since there were other (less controversial) forum members who also accidentally wrote off-topic posts, so people sensed an agenda.
One of the moderators (a very recognised one) did the (IMHO) only correct thing that one can do in this emotionally charged situation as a moderator: She gave an official warning to herself in the "warnings thread", for the reason that she accidentally wrote some off-topic posts, too.