I’m by no means a big fan of the concept of a code of conduct (it’s basically patronising for functioning adults by spelling out things that should be obvious; and I’ve yet to see evidence that they are actually effective at combating bullying, tribalism and harassment). But by now they’ve simply become a signal in their own right, saying: this place cares about its community. And, in the end, I think that at worst they’re not actively harmful.
So: how are they harmful, and in what regard do they need “unfucking”?
It doesn't work at best and it definitely strongly polarises some people into pro/con camps.
That being said, it is funny that nobody would bat an eye at signing a code of conduct when they sign up for a gym membership or to volunteer for the YMCA, but signing a code of conduct to enter a restaurant or pub would feel really obnoxious. In all cases an obnoxious patron would be ejected. Maybe when a code of conduct is presented alongside some other typical agreement it seems more appropriate?
> Maybe when a code of conduct is presented alongside some other typical agreement it seems more appropriate?
Funny, this is exactly what I’ve done on personal projects. The CoC is simply a part of the contributors’ guidelines, next to things like submission guidelines and code style.
I feel like in the early days of the internet people acted like the interactions with other people weren't "real" interactions and that people shouldn't be upset at conversations that wouldn't occur at the grimiest of dive bars. It seems this aspect of online culture pervaded some aspects of developer culture as well (it seems some really unprofessional behavior is tolerated in some places). Having a code of conduct that essentially says, "We expect you to behave in our online community like you would at a company barbecue," can get there. I don't think calling attention to particular types of bad behavior is a good idea. Nobody has succeeded in drawing a bright line through gray areas yet.
As far as combating bully, tribalism, and harassment. A code of conduct isn't effective unless it's enforced consistently. My local hackerspace has had to remove people. It's been effective. Those people are no longer a part of the community and as a result, the hackerspace is safe place late at night.
Earlier this year, I had a conversation with a guy in charge of a program. He told an anecdote about some bad thing happening and I talked about the need to guard against basing policy on such outliers, that when you write up policy trying to prevent a worst case scenario, you often frame it in a manner that announces to all new people "I expect you to be like That One Guy."
I told my own counter anecdote about dealing with some seriously screwed up guy I met online who wanted to talk me into meeting him in person and he actively hid from me the fact that he was a smoker knowing I have life threatening respiratory problems. When I called him on his messed up bullshit, he told me that if it mattered that much, I should have asked. He took it as some bizarre point of pride that he deceived me without actually directly lying to me.
I briefly spent some time wondering if I needed to post something somewhere essentially saying "No smokers, no tokers." then decided that's about like starting a dating profile and saying in it "No rapists!"
Yeah, that doesn't work. Hopefully, people here chuckle at that like he did.
Social problems tend to be hard problems to solve precisely because direct push back against certain kinds of things can actually deepen the problem and because it neither works to promote a punishment model as your only means to foster good behavior, nor to abandon punishment altogether.
I'm not sure why we didn't just try that in the first place!
The problem I see with these codes of conduct is it can turn the haziness and ambiguity of human communication (especially across cultural boundaries and with people with social difficulties) into black-and-white "if you do X you are a bad person and should be banned". Especially if "X" is defined in a very politicised way or the people who choose to call out offenders are doing so as political enforcers rather than trying to foster good communication.
It's difficult to know this for certain due to the variety of neurodiversity we see in our community. While I agree that codes of conduct have cons, not having a code of conduct also has cons that should be discussed.
I also believe that there is definitely a case for black-and-white "if you do X you should be banned". For example, I believe people who call other people ethnic or sexuality-related slurs should be banned, 100%, and anyone who calls anyone else a slur should be considered hostile to the community. There's very little positive communication to be had if someone refuses to stop using slurs, and they should be banned. Of course, there is a gradient of reasonability to this, but I can see in the most basic points where "if you do X you are a bad person and you should be banned" where X is also political (like homosexual people) where calling anyone a gay slur should be bannable.
I rarely find the first. The second is less clear cut, as far as I can tell the new Linux contributor code of conduct would not have directly applied to him.
None the less, the harm is in that it empowers exactly the same group of people who got Eich fired in the first place.
Much like progressives try to "de-platform" conservatives, these codes of conduct "en-platform" progressives. And while some of their points are valid, it's hard to endorse their camp when they go around hit and run blackmailing others under the threat of shouting Racist! Misogynist! Shitlord! to force them to do things like changing master/slave database terminology or even more insane, changing blacklist/whitelist terminology.
That is to say, I don't understand the rhetorical implication here that progressives, or people who want to change master/slave terminology in general, are not part of the community they want to see change in. When that happens, it's just a community discussing about terminological use in their own sphere, which is also exactly what the blog post here is doing. I feel this should be welcomed within any community.
My guess is that you’ll rarely find this as it’s not a protected characteristic under the law (and, as far as I can see, CoCs essentially follow discrimination law).
> None the less, the harm is in that it empowers exactly the same group of people who got Eich fired in the first place.
But Eich wasn’t fired, he stepped down and resigned of his own volition. Both he and others at Mozilla maintain this version of events, and it’s — as far as I can see — uncontested. You seem to be saying that you want a code of conduct that explicitly prohibits protest against political opinions. Good luck with that.
> Much like progressives try to "de-platform" conservatives
This is a myth: “Deplatforming” is neither exclusive nor even particularly prevalent on the left.
> to doing shit like changing master/slave database terminology or even more insane, changing blacklist/whitelist terminology
Fighting against such nonsense seems eminently more sensible (and more winnable!) than fighting for the prohibition of political protest in codes of conduct.
Whether that's the law wasn't my point. And actually some progressive states do have laws prohibiting employment discrimination based on political opinion. They probably came from the Hollywood Blacklists, and are now amusingly ignored and irrelevant as a moral principle now that the shoe is on the other foot.
But Eich wasn’t fired, he stepped down and resigned of his own volition. Both he and others at Mozilla maintain this version of events, and it’s — as far as I can see — uncontested. You seem to be saying that you want a code of conduct that explicitly prohibits protest against political opinions. Good luck with that.
The progressive demanded he lose his job and conducted a campaign until he did. Potato potato.
his is a myth: “Deplatforming” is neither exclusive nor even more prevalent on the left.
"They both do it" does not imply "the left doesn't do it". My point was just to introduce the tactic, which is relevant.
Fighting against such nonsense seems eminently more sensible (and more winnable!) than fighting for the prohibition of political protest in codes of conduct.
It is not winnable. Look at recent events, eg redis. And allowing codes of conduct that don't protect unrelated, out of scope, and otherwise politely expressed political opinions makes it even less winnable.
So what you’re saying is that you want a code of conduct to protect Eich’s free speech but not that of the people who campaigned against him. That … simply doesn’t work.
Pretty much "I am allowed to say what I like because freedom of speech. Fuck you you fragile snowflake. Also, you're not allowed to use that same freedom of speech to criticise my ideas oh my god I'm being oppressed it's a terrible terrible thing that is happening to me".
"Remember the good old days, when we didn't care about feelings? Yeah, maybe a bunch of women and other minorities got turned away from tech because they would be bombarded for nudes, doxxed, and had to endure a lot of racist taunting, but at least _we_ were having a good time, and right now, that's what I care about."
Yes, it was easy for the author to ignore them. Not for other people. That's the point. The author is giving me PTSD flashbacks to coming home from grade school with a black eye and being lectured about how if only I had ignored the bullies, this wouldn't happen, so really in a way wasn't it all my fault?
I too was bullied at school. There was no code of conduct at my school. I too was told that I had to ignore bullies.
But I cannot for the life of me believe that making those children who bullied me attest to a code of conduct would have stopped the bullying. Nor can I believe that enforcement by teachers would have increased; the behavior would already have been considered criminal if we were adults so the reason it was ignored was something else. Zero tolerance policies in schools exist because the enforcement problem is so hard to solve. One person's word against another.
I don't see a code of conduct and think to myself, "Oh, good. There won't be any jerks here." I just think, "Hmm, I wonder if they have been having problems... do I want to be here?"
I don't even understand this - is this kind of joke now prohibited by the Linux code of conduct?
This is a strawman, and I assume you are better than that.
There is a reason IT has such a toxic reputation. It's because it tolerates some pretty appalling behaviour at times.
I don't think it is. Those of us who've been in tech for a long time know women and people in minorities who have come and gone from the industry for these exact reasons. You don't have to blindly accept the stories people tell about how they're abused and mistreated; just read the comments on the videos of people's talks, or look at the replies to their tweets, and it's really obvious.
Tech culture is nice and cosy for us straight white men, not so much for others. I personally know several women who have left the whole industry/scene because they'd had enough sexism for one lifetime, thank you very much.
If you don't like the anecdata, then there's plenty of studies saying the same thing, and of course the numbers don't lie: there are less women in tech than men (and no, the reason for this is not that they're not very good at it, ffs).
Going back to the good old days is not an option if we want more women involved. And I want more women involved, so I'm not going to co-operate with any attempt to go back to the old days.
If you disagree with the reframing, please explain why instead of shouting “fallacy”
If you got PTSD from a black eye what did I get from being beaten into the emergency room with a swollen liver when I was 9?
What did my grandmother get for surviving an extermination camp?
People are anti-fragile. The less adversity you have experienced the less you can deal with adversity. If everything is PTSD inducing nothing is.
Trying to protect people from reality only makes them unfit to live in it.
Did they just not see the vicious bullying disguised as debate, the misogyny, homophobia, ageism and racism that I’ve been seeing in my industry for 30 years? Deliberately not see it? Not care?
Because this is often not fun for members of the community that are Female, PoC, LGBQT, or just targetable.
So the debate itself seems to be like an alien war fought above my head with the occasional fallout dropping on projects I care about. I would very much prefer both sides to do more coding and less clawing at each other.
Blatant discrimination against one of my reports who was openly gay and dealing with schizophrenia
A female colleague sexually propositioned by her boss
A VP who was openly homophobic and misogynistic.
If you are dealing with this and trying to get it to stop and the other side is asking you to do “less clawing” ...
Some of the replies are worth a read too. I like the one on cultural differences because it resonates with me that the whole CoC thing seems to be a very american thing.
Anyway I am not aware of a particular "purge" going on. Care to be more specific ?
The fact is that open source projects rely on people. And we need those people to feel like they aren't going to have to tolerate bad behaviour just to be involved in the project.
Because if so, I think I can see what's gone wrong...
Also, people are more than welcome to fork Linux and take it in a different direction.
I declined to change my example, and pulled out of the conference.
That's just vague hand-wavy logic. One time, a group of people vaguely aligned with X did something stupid, therefore X is a fundamentally bad idea. Obviously that's not true. If a conference organiser puts together a bad conference do you say that conferences as a concept are terrible? Of course not. You say "that was a bad conference". When an organiser overzealously applies inclusive rules you don't say "inclusivity rules are bad", you say "that rule is bad".