Hacker News Reader

Comment by Caveman_Coder | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why tech communities need their CoC...

I'm a member of a local HAM radio group and we don't have any CoC and we don't have any issues at all. The male/female makeup is about 70/30 and there are people of various political/religious viewpoints, but I haven't once seen any issues over these differences. I've seen leftists amicably talk and work with conservatives because when we meet as a group it is all about HAM radio, nothing else. I'm not sure why tech communities have all these problems to be honest...it seems like there are groups that purposefully want to stir up discord because they make money (get funding) if there are issues...

View on HN

Your local HAM radio group isn't being infiltrated by social justice activists. Tech orgs don't need a CoC and have functioned mostly fine since the beginning without them. CoCs are pure entryism (the most famous example being Opalgate).

Consider this line from the CoC:

>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.

Why even include the line 'reinforce systemic oppression' ? I guarantee that the CoC won't be enforced against someone saying stuff like "Kill all men" or "white men are garbage". They're a tool for expelling anyone who doesn't kowtow to social justice ideology.

One of the most widely used CoCs - Open Code of Conduct -specifically has a section about not accepting complaints regarding ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’

What do you think of the FIOL Code of Professionalism [1]? To me it seems very fair. Note: This COC has come a long way in the past year or so since Matthew Garrett criticized it for being an abuser's fantasy.

[1]: https://github.com/fantasylandinst/fcop/blob/master/CODE_OF_...

I assume you have some standards of behavior, though, right? If a member of your group, say, punched another member, you’d probably kick him out, right?

If so: you have a code of conduct, you just don’t have a _written_ code of conduct. You’re relying on the relative homogeneity and shared context of the group to know and follow the unwritten rules.

This tends to work ok for smaller more homogenous groups with shared social values. But unwritten rules fail for people on the margins, and falls apart at scale.

I think that is a fair point. Our group is relatively homogeneous in our interest in HAM radio (and there aren't that many of us), so when we find others that share the same interest, perhaps we're more likely to overlook any political/religious/racial differences...

Just FYI, "ham" isn't an acronym and shouldn't be capitalized. It comes from the pejorative "ham-fisted", which professional telegraph operators used to describe radio amateurs back when the only option was morse code. (Source: I have a general license, like trivia, and am a pedant for better or worse.)

> But unwritten rules fail for people on the margins, and falls apart at scale.

How ever did society survive before written CoC's?

Badly. I for one am glad Bronze Age people had the brilliant idea to write down their laws, as I'm glad Romans and Byzantines decided to spread their legal system around.

I suspect we're the first to attempt to codify rude behavior.

> I suspect we're the first to attempt to codify rude behavior.

Many private groups have rules on good and bad behavior. There's simply nothing new about it.

I never heard of any before about 20 years ago when speech codes started appearing on campuses. I've been going to conferences for 40 years, and the first time I had to sign a CoC for one was last year.

It was simply if you behaved badly, you were asked to leave. Nobody needed a definition of rude behavior.

That's an interesting observation: a shift towards using a law-code paradigm for regulating personal social behavior, from an informal consensus-based one.

I suspect that has something to do with the fact that law codes are legislated by a select body, which is more susceptible to influence than an informal consensus.

Perhaps Codes of Conduct are imagined as a solution by people who fundamentally have sucktastic social skills. They think if you make a rule, it will fix it, without them needing to genuinely develop social skills.

local HAM radio group.

Perhaps being local creates more social cohesion.

I've seen plenty of these issues in online ham groups, including political and religious sniping.

CoCs are useful for coordination among large, non-local, diverse communities.

Have you considered that instead of "purposefully want[ing] to stir up discord" for funding the rules are meant to reduce the incidence of actual harassment/abuse? Or to promote inclusivity?

How does an articulation of values "stir up discord?" I can point you to numerous examples of harassment and inequity in the tech community. Can you point me to an example of "discord" brought about by better rules of conduct? Or to this funding that you mention?

> "Can you point me to an example of "discord" brought about by better rules of conduct? Or to this funding that you mention?"

Only my wife's anecdotal experience...she was a full-time software developer and the companies she worked for routinely tried to use her as an example in their "we support women in tech" PR. She hated it and said it felt degrading. Also, there were various "women in tech" groups that reached out to her, based on some of her open source work, for conference speaking engagements/panels/writing/etc, and they were pushy about it. When she was showing the groups to me, they were all operating off of donations from various Fortune 500 companies. The "discord" is that a lot of these "women in tech" groups, advocated in some cases by women who aren't even doing anything tech related, castigated my wife, on two various instances, for not wanting to participate. My wife didn't want to be a pawn for some corporate PR or for some "women in tech" group...she just wanted to engineer things in peace.

That's a great example. Someone (like your wife) may be bothered by being contacted by pushy activist groups and then even castigated for not participating. We weigh that against systematic income inequality and sexual harassment along gender lines.

It seems like that minor inconvenience is worth the net benefit to the community, from which your wife benefits (for example, by being legally protected against sexual discrimination in the workplace).

Still, those pushy activists should see the GP's wife as a person with her own interests, priorities, and desire to be left alone, not just a token [insert group identity here]. A generalized version of what I just said might even make a good item in a CoC.

I don't think this would need to be codified...There seems to be too much of that going already

No, that minor inconvenience is absolutely not worth whatever benefits you imagine.

> "It seems like that minor inconvenience is worth the net benefit to the community, from which your wife benefits"

You'd be hard pressed winning her over with those arguments in all honesty

> "...for example, by being legally protected against sexual discrimination in the workplace"

Sexual discrimination in the workplace protections aren't the result of the work done by groups previously mentioned...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com