Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty far on the sidelines here but I don't really understand the CoC hate. Code of Conducts feel like unit tests for a community along with a plan of action if one of those tests fails.

Just like there are bad unit tests, I'm sure there are bad Codes of Conduct, but on the whole it seems like a positive thing to clearly state how things should go in a community.

View on HN

I've seen it multiple times: A project is humming along, lots of contributors and in pops this stranger that has no ties to the project whatsoever with a demand for a CoC. They also happen to invite their twitter swarm to the thread and demand a CoC or else they support some $horrible_group.

Example: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/942

I mean, that's not what has happened here; the CoC has been around for a while. What's happened here is just that there is someone who is "above the law" that the CoC provides for and a bunch of others are just like "we don't support that, if we are going to carefully abide by the CoC then we don't want to work with folks who flagrantly disregard it and get away with it because they have a position on some committee."

If members of your community are feeling discouraged to the point that they're asking for a CoC, it seems like something worth taking notice of.

I think the objection comes if the people asking for the CoC are from outside the community.

Of course, the argument can come that there's not going to be much people inside the community asking for a CoC because they're obviously comfortable with how things are running, or they wouldn't keep contributing.

Doesn't seem like an easy call either way.

I read that thread and ... I see that the people working towards a CoC are the calm, reasoned ones whilst the anti-CoC people are the rabid trolling libertarian nonsense "WHAT ABOUT THE MUSLIMS?" bullshitters (ie the very people you don't want in a community.)

You may have shot your own foot with that link.

The late Pieter Hintjens had some thoughtful criticisms of CoCs: http://hintjens.com/blog:108

From my understanding, he's concerned about harmful assumptions sometimes made in them and also how the policing of them can be abusive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com