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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

> Comments that reinforce systemic oppression related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.

So, there's a lot of "politicking" going on back and forth over this, but I'd like to suggest a specific problem: by attempting to formalize what used to be intuition, you're opening the door for people to follow up bad behavior with legal arguments that it was actually allowed. For example, someone could say something that was obviously meant against a group, and then defend it by pointing to specific wording in the CoC. ("But can you prove the oppression was systemic? Says the person who is obviously acting maliciously but is not obviously part of a system.")

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I think a lot of potential technicalities like that are handled pretty well by this paragraph at the start:

> This document is not an exhaustive list of things that you should not do. Rather, consider it a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us and the technical communities in which we participate.

That's vague and hand wavey. Their definitions are ripe for abuse and I'm sure someone will create e.g. an app for female rape victims and argue that excluding male rape victims is fine because "you can't be sexist against men."

By that reasoning, we should never have rules, because any rule will create the possibility of people trying to lawyer out of the rules.

The cost of rules is a court system and the lawyers to argue in it. In the end, introducing rules can lead to more time spent on strife than was spent before the rules, because of this overhead.

If you try to avoid this by interpreting the rules according to the present and changing intuitions of the project leaders, then you haven't really changed much from before.

Doesn't sound bad. Most communities survived 20+ years, and even thrived, without any such rules.

A group thriving does not mean it didn't do damage to (former) members or others while doing so, and neither should "but look at what we achieved!" be a good excuse for it. (of course, groups also can have written rules and still behave badly, rules do not automatically solve these problems)

On the other hand, a group having a list doesn't mean it wont do damage to members or others while having one. So there's that.

Yes, that's what the last part of my comment said.

Your example is not a 'legal argument', nor is the CoC a law. Lots of organizations have rules that don't have the formality or rigor of laws and they have little trouble interpreting them, applying them and enforcing them in letter and spirit. It's pretty much a non-problem.

Possibly. But the benefits outweigh the marginal scenario you are envisioning. I again return to the example of HN, which has higher standards of conversation than many other boards, due in part to strong moderating guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To draw a parallel, do you think HN would be more successful if it relied on "intuition" for norms of discussion?

The benefits of that kind of CoC remain to be proven. Meanwhile, I note that HN's moderating guidelines do not mention sex, gender, religion, food choices, or most of what FreeBSD's new CoC describes.

HN's moderating guidelines are about content whereas FreeBSD's new Code of Conduct codifies human behaviour, as the name would imply. They are different things.

I note that HN's moderating guidelines do not mention sex, gender, religion, food choices, or most of what FreeBSD's new CoC describes.

You might also note that HN regularly fills up with pages upon pages of sexist (more rarely, racist) tripe. Which might be ok for HN but the people who participate in the FreeBSD project have decided it's not ok for their thing.

yeah, ive been wondering if it was just me or if comments were starting to seem more reactionary?

I guess that would mean yes...

To your first point: The detriments of that kind of COC remain to be proven as well. But why even bring this up? Even a perceived benefit to a marginalized group is worth it. Do we imagine the status quo as somehow harmed by stronger anti-harassment policies? There are numerous examples of sexual harassment online and in person. The potential chilling effects of stronger guidelines have to be weighed against the actual chilling effects (trauma, non-participation) of those affected.

To your second point: The BSD guidelines address content ("comments") and physical meetings, which I assume apply to conferences and hackathons. I don't see the distinction you are making between "content" and "human behavior," as content is human behavior online. There is good research on moderated communities. Anecdotally, I am talking to you here and not on Reddit because of stronger guidelines (and the resulting, to my mind, higher quality of discussion).

>I am talking to you here and not on Reddit because of stronger guidelines (and the resulting, to my mind, higher quality of discussion).

That's a really interesting statement - I think that it has more to do with the actual people in the community (including the individual people moderating) than the guidelines they wrote. I think that if you took the HN guidelines and told a major subreddit's team to implement them, the discussion there wouldn't get any better. Why? Because it's all dependent on the judgment of the community and the moderators, and you either have that resource (and are already using it) or you don't.

Most of the "human behavior" described in the FreeBSD Code of Conduct is speech.

Not the original commenter, but I don't believe that was the point (to suggest abolishing rules in favor of intuition or to compare the pros & cons of the two). I read it as a simple observation that codifying things, writing them down, is hard, especially that which is (debatably) "known intuitively." And I think anyone can affirm this who has ever tried to write a law, a computer program based on business rules and tribal knowledge, or this selfsame FreeBSD code of conduct. It's surprisingly hard to describe and define things that previously fell under "we know it when we see it." That's why if a contractor gets hired to build a building the contract is 20 pages but the specs are 2,000 pages. For every word that says "build a building," there are 6 that are there strictly to remove wiggle-room.

> I again return to the example of HN, which has higher standards of conversation than many other boards

Do you truly think so?

I like it here well enough, don't get me wrong. But I don't know that replacing flame wars with passive aggressiveness - which is essentially what HNs moderation does - is a great tradeoff.

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