Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamescostian | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and what some call daring, others call scary. One thing many people loved about Node was its openness to everyone. But when a leader of a group shows distaste for CoCs, one can see how that might mean the group's CoC may be threatened. Without CoCs, many people in the Node community wouldn't feel as safe.

You may still feel just as safe, and that's great for you. But it's not very hard to understand why people aren't happy. Even if you vehemently despise CoCs, you should still be able to see how a mass exodus, for whatever reason, could be bad for a project's future.

View on HN

What's so special about the Node community then?

I've been doing open source work for 15+ years and I don't recall any of the projects I worked on having a CoC. Nor did it ever come up as an issue. I did see aggressive list moderation be abused to distort the technical path of a project though.

You talk about a "mass exodus". I find myself skeptical of this claim. If the NodeJS contributors are so dependent on a CoC then it seems like they went badly wrong somewhere. Somehow other projects thrive without one.

"mass exodus" = exaggerated figure to create the impression of a crisis in an otherwise healthy community, in order to increase the drama.

Visit Twitter and look at Node's "thought leaders" and you'll see those words weren't just made up for fun and drama

The culture has changed, and many projects have codes of conducts now.

Could you cite evidence of aggressive list moderation being abused to distort the technical path of a project? Is the project in question the Node.js project, or another?

It wasn't node.js, I have never contributed to node.js

The project is fairly well known to have serious issues with censorship of community forums and moderation. I don't wish to name it here because this is my anonymous account.

And yes, there are a lot of OS software projects that prospered without a CoC. Linux - coincidentally one of the most famous, successful and long-lived open source projects - is one of them.

(And yes, now they have a CoC, which is not what the perennially-offended camp would like it to be: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-linux-camp-conflict-...).

> I don't recall any of the projects I worked on having a CoC [...] I did see aggressive list moderation be abused

Right, no CoC, just random moderators who abused their power. I don't see how that's a good thing. I think having a CoC can limit the explicit powers given to moderators so that moderators can only moderate very bad behavior like X, Y, and Z, but not A, B, and C. Of course, this depends on moderators being held to the CoC (i.e. if a moderator doesn't follow the CoC, you make it clear that's not OK so they aren't "abusive" again), and it depends on X, Y, and Z being very carefully deliberated.

> You talk about a "mass exodus". I find myself skeptical of this claim

Visit Twitter and look at Node's "thought leaders". I'll update this post with some links to tweets in a couple minutes.

> If the NodeJS contributors are so dependent on a CoC then it seems like they went badly wrong somewhere. Somehow other projects thrive without one.

Right, many projects of Node's size thrive without any CoC, they just have moderators following whatever rules the mods deem fit, or they just allow toxicity. If you want to remove toxicity while holding mods accountable, some sort of CoC is the way to go.

You don't need a CoC to deal with 'poisonous people' as the old talk by the Subversion guys named them. You just need a maintainer with common sense who treats list bans as a last resort, but is willing to use them if things get out of hand. If the maintainer can't be trusted to do such things properly, they probably can't be trusted to exercise common sense in other areas too, but in practice I've not seen that be an issue. Normally trolls go away if ignored.

Also as far as I can tell CoCs are invariably so vague that they just trigger more fighting. Now there's a formal excuse to do it, you see.

Again, you're arguing in favor of trusting mods (or just one sole maintainer). I'm arguing that mods will abuse power unless their power is restricted, which is why I think CoCs are good.

One could argue that all you need is a single maintainer, like North Korea has, and I get it, that does sound simpler. But I prefer it when there are more rules to prevent dictators - I think those rules can limit the powers of the overrulers and simultaneously put a wrench in harassment.

Well yes, lots of projects do run on the so-called "benign dictator" model. As do nearly all companies.

Moderators abusing their power is absolutely possible. However it seems to me, anecdotally, that putting in place a CoC is a good sign that such abuse is about to get far more common.

The problem is that a CoC cannot really be any more precise than my vague 'use common sense' strategy is. A CoC will basically say "be nice to people, don't be a dick" in more flowery language, but ultimately - as incidents like this one show - there will still be moderators who decide whether any given incident is in violation. So a CoC doesn't really help with moderator abuse: if they want to be abusive, they're going to do it.

Of course, you can get really in depth and create judgement panels, voting mechanisms, appeals processes etc for a CoC violation. But we already have that, it's law.

I mean, Node.js has made this particular choice that they're going to believe in CoCs; other projects can of course choose not to: but they chose to and that's what the Node.js technical community is publicly about. That is their choice, and it might not be your choice.

It does have an effect on the social culture that's touched by that CoC, and you might like or dislike that effect. You might also have been totally distanced from this so as someone who is an outsider who has met a bunch of these people, let me say that in my personal interactions with these folks, Node.js has been more friendly to LGBT folks, issues of accessibility for the hearing and sight impaired, people with mental health issues like depression, people of color, women, and nonbinary folks, than just about any other community I have ever met. Meanwhile they have never come across as any of those alt-right buzzwords -- as "social justice warriors" or "man-hating" or "white-shaming" or anything; I have never felt unwelcome personally as a white American man.

Someone on the TSC has been anti-(what-the-community-is-about), and is actively apologizing for CoC enforcement and saying mean things which is discouraging others from participating in Node.js, and the technical community had a vote to censor him. They voted not to, and now someone for whom those community values are important has quit the TSC because they didn't support this decision.

I feel like everybody's rushing to see everyone else's choices as invalid but these are all valid private decisions. That community is allowed to decide that it likes this culture that its CoCs create, Rod is allowed to decide that he does not like it, the TSC is allowed to vote that Rod's dislike is not enough to kick him off the committee, and Myles is allowed to decide that this TSC support of this guy who doesn't like this culture is enough for him to no longer want to be part of the TSC.

>> I don't recall any of the projects I worked on having a CoC

you can thank GitHub for this. GitHub is a big Advocate for aggressive anti-free speech codes of Conduct

More and more Projects are being pushed to Adopt them, and many are.

> Without CoCs, many people in the Node community wouldn't feel as safe.

I strongly disagree with this language. I support CoCs because I feel explicitly spelling out consequences for harassment allows for the unambiguous rejection of toxic behavior which creates a welcoming environment for new or otherwise anxious contributors... but nothing about CoC affects an individual's personal safety and using that type of hyperbolic language damages the cause more than it helps.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that CoCs magically shield and help people. I simply meant that having a CoC and then removing it or ignoring it will make people feel like there aren't any "consequences for harassment" as you put it. When a CoC is removed or ignored, it makes people feel like there isn't any "unambiguous rejection of toxic behavior", so people don't feel like they're in a "welcoming environment for new or otherwise anxious contributors"

Your wording is definitely better than mine, but I hope that doesn't detract from my point

I got pedantic over the "safety" language but we're definitely in agreement.

Have you read the article that was linked to? While I may not agree with the author's solution "use the ADA to eliminate campus speech codes that discriminate against neurominorities", I think he raises a very fair point about speech codes and how they can impact with poor social and people skills.

The solution in my mind is not to eliminate CoCs but to start a discussion about how to improve them to mitigate this impact. This appears to be what the original tweet was doing "If you've never considered the potential downsides of codes of conduct, here's a good place to start"

Apparently this is not a conversation it is ok to have if you are on a committee that is responsible for managing and enforcing the CoC? It seems to me like these are exactly the people who should be having this conversation.

>One thing many people loved about Node was its openness to everyone. But when a leader of a group [demonstrates a different opinion], one can see how [they deserve to be kicked out].

Ok.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com