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Comment by vvpan | Hacker News Reader

The idea that you should define a code of conduct first just sounds awful. The best small gatherings are organic and informal. This just (I'll use a word from somebody else in the thread) politicizes the whole thing. In other words, if I am looking to join a group of 3-4 people and they have a code of conduct already defined - I am just not going to come, simple as that.

In general the author seems to be into formalizing things. Organizing events is a wonderful skill, but if you look like you are overthinking you'd be a excluding a broad swath of people to whom formality is the opposite of friendly warm relationships they are looking for.

For example: Every Wednesday I attend a board game night at somebody's house. I know everybody there, but we are not necessarily all friends. Both sexes and a range of ages are represented. If one day the hosts came up with a formal set of rules I think Wednesday game night would be over.

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Code of conducts are simply not for people who feel like you do. And that's fine.

For certain classes of people, attending a small, relatively intimate group with strangers represents a material risk that someone in the group will be creepy or abusive. This shit happens all the time.

A CoC is a low cost, low effort way to mitigate the probability of that occurring up front, and also serves as a social signal to potential attendees that the organizers of an event are are at least aware of these issues and will be sympathetic in the event of a problem.

EDIT: I should add, nobody is trying to tell you how to run your game night. If you're all friends and comfortable with eachother then obviously introducing a CoC would be stupid. Stephanie's post is about how to productively and safely get together a group of (former) strangers.

> if I am looking to join a group of 3-4 people and they have a code of conduct already defined - I am just not going to come, simple as that.

I don't see why this is bad - groups shouldn't necessarily reach out to as broad an audience as possible. Like a sales funnel, the advertising in the group works better when it serves to filter out people who are incompatible with the group.

Your mindset reminds me of the ask/guess culture post on metafilter, which is a framework where people typically adopt either an attitude of explicitly asking for social expectations vs intuiting them through social context. You seem to prefer the latter, where people are expected to understand the implicit boundaries of the group through personal observation. There's nothing wrong with that; it doesn't mean the other way is inherently wrong, though.

I think their expectation is that any small group of adults should be able to respectfully communicate with each other, especially a voluntary collaboration around shared interests.

Formalizing rules in that situation usually means the group has at least one major asshole or bureaucrat causing problems (often the same person).

You mean adults should act like adults?

That’s madness!

But yea, small groups shouldn’t be formalized. If people can’t get along, that’s a sign of poor social skills or someone is a total asshole in the group. Which, again, be adults and learn how to deal with people in a proper manner. A manner that doesn’t need the Twatter or the internet in general.

Or, perhaps the group aspires to grow larger.

> an attitude of explicitly asking for social expectations vs intuiting them through social context

Formalizing rules isn't an attitude of explicitly asking them, but an attitude of explicitly telling them.

When you ask for them, there's fluidity into them, it's a communication, they can change when you add someone. Once it's formal, they tends to be less fluid and more forced toward any new person.

Thats because the one unstated rule is clear: Don't lead the owners of the house to believe you should no longer be invited.

There, it doesn’t matter if its not a “violation”, you can get excluded if you’re just bad at making socially-appropriate eye-contact or if you’re a boring conversationalist or whatever. But some people (myself included) feel really uncomfortable with that model because they aren’t confident in their social skills.

She said under Code of Conduct, "This was something I didn't always have when first organizing groups years ago, and I learned over time why it's necessary." I was curious about that and hoped that she would elaborate.

Not the author, but...

Here is a link to one she uses for large groups:

https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-con...

If you look at the list of unacceptable behaviors, each one of those is pretty much guaranteed to happen given a sufficiently large group and enough time. The amount of time it takes for the code to be clearly violated is typically far less that you expect or want it to be.

The interesting thing is that many/most offenders don’t think they are breaking the code even if they had read it. That’s why the wording is important — it helps during the intervention stage.

The use of sexualized language or imagery and unwelcome sexual attention or advances

Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks

Public or private harassment

Publishing others’ private information, such as a physical or electronic address, without explicit permission

Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

----

Yes, at least one of those will eventually happen. And when it does, the person should be pointed to the rules and told that they should have known it was unacceptable. What happens from that point is the question.

IMO, if they can't accept those rules, I don't want them around. They're pretty basic, IMO.

If they accept them, but continually violate them, I also don't want them around.

Agreed. A number of defensive comments here seem to be emotional reactions to perceived attempts at being 'told what to do', when in fact, most codes of conduct are not much more than social contracts. Or at least, that is how they have worked in most groups I have been a member of.

Part of the problem is how one puts a CoC forth.

The CoC's come from a "don't do these things we disapprove of". Trolling, doxxinng, harassment, sexualization (that doesn't directly pertain to the discussion). This is pretty much a "don't be an ass to people".

The problem arises when a CoC is started or introduced. it's usually because of a single person being an ass, and 1 or more people taking the brunt. But when the organizers put this forth, they too can either do it without shame and blame, or with (and thus violating their 'dont be an ass' set of codes).

Example of a better way to introduce these: "Last year we had someone act terribly to member(s). We apologize for having to do this as almost all the people act with dignity and respect. But we are unfortunately put in the position of spelling out what acting decent entails, and what it does not."

The hard one there is the 'unwelcome sexual advances' - the mating signal is tough as hell, and is different per person. It's this awkward dance, to show interest but not act 'creepy'. I've even met some that expect others to know they aren't showing any signals - and thus every sexual advance is unwelcome even if they say nothing about it being unwelcome.

In this particular context (large, professional groups), I think the idea is that there should be no sexual advances or presumption of sexual advances at these professional events.

> I've even met some that expect others to know they aren't showing any signals - and thus every sexual advance is unwelcome even if they say nothing about it being unwelcome.

The baseline assumption is that no one is sending signals in a professional context (even if some do, even if some do with malicious intent). There are graceful ways to initiate engagement in a non-professional context that opens the doors for appropriate signal sending. Even this must be handled carefully, since one person may be thinking “romance”, while the other is thinking “professional socialization”. This is especially true if one person is in a position of power (e.g., a VC in a start up community).

This makes me want to have a recorder rolling all the time when I interact with people from that group, just in case.

As an anecdote:

We attended a renaissance/medieval dance event. This event would bring 150-200 people together. In years past, it was understood that you treated people with respect.

Turns out last year, a teacher was grabbing a transgender female dancer and forced them to the man's position for the dance, along with chastising them for dancing on the woman's side. The teacher was warned that this was completely unacceptable. (Be aware, that this is a private event, and she could be ejected for, you know, battery of forcefully moving student.)Ok. Fast forward to this year....

All the past teachers are invited to propose a class to teach. My wife usually teaches the beginner dances. During that, the event steward, then says to sign this paper that was a code of conduct in the form of a loyalty oath. She refused to sign it immediately and opened dialog as to why this is being put to teachers - it felt like it was a "you have been horrible in the past and this tries to fix it". It had the shame and insulting tone that we familiarly see with CoC's.

In the end, my wife chose not to sign, and chose not to teach the beginner's class. And when we showed up at the event, we saw some striking things. We had ~95 people attend the event, as opposed to 150-200. We had at 12 classes (normal is 4 tracks from 10-4, minus lunch, for 20 classes normally). Now, obviously correlation != causation... But the only factor that was significantly changed was demanding a CoC signed as a loyalty oath.

This is a tone argument, isn't it? Not the content of the code itself, but the manner in which it was put to you?

No.

The event required all teachers to not only agree to the CoC, but to sign and return it.

There is a distinct difference between "Our policies are now this", and "You will sign and affirm that you will follow our policies."

One is a loyalty oath. I don't like loyalty oaths, and I certainly don't take them without significant consideration.

The code of conduct is not for you guys. It's for that one future bad apple who will bring down everything you've worked hard to build.

We're all adults here. Why do we need to put gloves on and treat everyone like they're high school students? If someone acts up, kick them out. That's simple, and it doesn't treat people like pre-offenders.

Why are there rules for meeting in public? This isn't dangerous machinery; we're not warning people against behavior that causes loss of life or limb. It feels incredibly unwelcoming.

> If someone acts up, kick them out

How does a group decide what “acting up” is? Who is actually making the decision to kick them out?

When you have a group this is either large or long-standing, these questions eventually come up. I’ve been in a 5-hour-long meeting that was the 2nd of 3 attempts to eject a mid-30s non-student from a University student computing club. I fail to see how this sort of stuff is easy.

If you don’t have a charter, then the leadership is a default dictatorship that can do what it wants.

If you do, then have a meeting amongst the leaders to see how to reconcile actions with the charter.

Most problems occur when the dictator just wants to step aside and let the general population decide an issue, but there’s no real mechanism for doing so.

> I’ve been in a 5-hour-long meeting that was the 2nd of 3 attempts to eject a mid-30s non-student from a University student computing club. I fail to see how this sort of stuff is easy.

Generally speaking, this is caused by too much policy, not too little policy -- and adding an official code of conduct (which a university likely already had!) isn't going to solve that.

This type of long argument happens in 10 person discords who have literally no policy. I don't think they're necessarily related.

> University student computing club

How many people? The first comment of that thread was talking about a 3-4 peoples groups. I personally agree that for large group you NEED formalities. It's not even a question of if it's better with or without, the group will just not survive without formalities.

What acting up? Did you felt right about how someone acted? That's acting up. Is it enough to kick someone out? That would be mostly about if he keep doing it or not... and how everyone else feel about it. Maybe it just means that this group isn't meant for you either.

> If someone acts up, kick them out.

That means implicit unstated arbitrary code of conduct where participants are expected to guess it.

If you are in position to enforce arbitrary rules on whim, that is fine. If however there is expectation on fairness and kicked person has option to complain about you, the it is better written.

It depends on the size and formality of the event, but part of being an adult is understanding that there's an implicit code of conduct (our social rules), and observing those by being on this planet for more than 20 years or so.

Having to explain to be respectful to an adult is just pandering unless they've already shown themselves to be a disrespectful person.

> participants are expected to guess it

Guess? We should know the difference between right and wrong, welcome and unwelcome. We don't have to be told not to murder or steal. If there is a line that gets crossed, it can be dealt with, or even turned into a teaching moment so long as it wasn't too egregious.

> kicked person has option to complain about you

I'm not going to get upset if someone complains about me kicking them out. No big deal.

Maybe that's it? The actual point where I disagree. I expect people to be adults _and_ to have thick skin. This is why code of conducts feel like coddling to me.

Maybe I'm in a place of privilege and there are people that get repeatedly harassed. I get that, and I sympathize. But damn does it feel like being called a "bad boy" when there's a set of additional rules that feel like platitudes. It's kind of like the feeling you get when being followed by a cop even though you've made no traffic violations.

To quote you: "If there is a line that gets crossed, it can be dealt with, or even turned into a teaching moment so long as it wasn't too egregious." A code of conduct in many ways is a commitment by the organizer that that's what will happen, even if it'd be more convenient to ignore a problem and avoid confrontation, or if they'd be tempted to treat some people differently. A commitment they can be held to by attendees.

In the same way, for the organizer, it provides something to follow when making a decision, and to point to to justify their decisions when challenged. Something that amounts to "I'll kick people out if they break those rules" is easier to accept than "I'll kick people out when I want to" (even if the latter is often the organizers right from a legal POV too).

If everyone "know[s] the difference between right and wrong, welcome and unwelcome", a Code of Conduct is redundant (which also means one existing shouldn't cause no problems, and when it does the ideas about whats right or wrong typically weren't as common as expected). But experience shows that this doesn't reliably survives contact with reality, and it's easy for issues to never get brought up or silenced because "surely we all are adults and nobody would really do something bad", where again the commitment part of a code of conduct comes into play.

It's always just a tool: It doesn't magically make problems go away, and I'm certainly not saying all code of conducts are perfect, fit the same for all groups or are always applied well.

Re "set of additional rules that are platitudes": So you don't have a problem with an organizer saying "If you misbehave I'll kick you out", but making it more explicit what counts as "misbehave" is a problem?

> I'm not going to get upset if someone complains about me kicking them out. No big deal.

I'm glad you're a reasonable person, but I've been part of a group where people did get upset about being kicked out. They tried to argue about it. They tried to rules-lawyer their way out, they tried all sorts of emotional appeals.

> Maybe I'm in a place of privilege

It kind of sounds like it.

>They tried to rules-lawyer their way out

Well if there's no rules, there's nothing to rules lawyer about is there? You just kick rude buddy out and they can sit and complain outside.

I mean if I kicked someone out of my place and they started arguing with me, I would physically remove them my house. There would be no arguing. Someone disrespects my house, my friends and me by not leaving when asked, they are no longer welcome there. There's no appealing to emotion, no anything. They leave.

> Well if there's no rules, there's nothing to rules lawyer about is there? You just kick rude buddy out and they can sit and complain outside.

I don't think I was clear; their chief complaint that technically they didn't break any rules, and that there was no warning, and that they didn't know, etc.

If you have a concrete rule to point to - especially one that's loose enough to cover most issues - then you can kick them out much more easily, especially because your co-organizers won't be stuck waffling.

Sure; but what if it's not your house? Then you've got duelling claims over who should be in, resolved by appeals to emotion.

> kicked person has option to complain about you

This is important to you? That will happens code of conduct or not... better be prepared to live with that.

> the it is better written.

What if it's not written? Your solution is to only allow what's written? That's going to be quite a conundrum and awful to live with. There's reasons why the laws are that large and the court system is required.

A small gathering isn't meant to become a simulation of a government you know?

If anything bad happens, discuss it together, decide the course of action based on that and act on it. It could be to kick out someone, or it could means for you to go because that's not the kind of interaction that you want to live in a small gathering.

> We're all adults here.

With all due respect, that sounds like something someone would say if they haven't spent a lot of time running events where all sorts of strangers show up.

Think of the Birthday Paradox. How many people does it take before there's a 50% chance of someone sharing a birthday? It's surprisingly low. How many people does it take before there's a 50% chance of someone being an unreasonable asshole? Significantly less.

The birthday paradox would only apply here if assholishness is a property of pairs of people (like sharing a birthday) instead of individual people (like having a particular birthday). While that may be true, it doesn’t match my experience and certainly isn’t obvious.

One of the core observations of modern understanding of abusive behaviour is that it is a pairwise property; the world is full of domestic abusers who are charming to everyone except their spouse when nobody's looking.

Similarly with "missing stairs" and "whisper networks"; there have been plenty of workspaces where Alice knows that no female staff should be left alone with Bob, and manages to communicate this obliquely to Carol shortly after she joins. This usually co-exists with none of the male staff of the office admitting to being aware of what's going on.

No, when anyone says “we are all adults here”, that’s a person who often socializes with people on a regular basis and doesn’t binge watch videos and shows all day, everyday.

That’s why a lot of people are getting fired up about in here. People who don’t actually put themselves out there and communicate with others face to face, are saying rules are required to interact with others.

Thus, the real asshole is the rules lawyer who barges around saying everyone must do certain things to cater to their sensitivities.

Hi! I'm a person who puts myself out there and interacts face-to-face with people. While I do spend probably 2-4 hours a week watching videos about history and general nerdery, I'm active in my local folk dance and I help organize in-person events for a social circle of about 35ish people. This past week, my social calendar included:

- Someone's birthday party, followed by Karaoke.

- Puzzle hunt at a pub.

- Dinner, then watching a video-game themed dance performance

- Dinner, then folk dance, then small house party

I'm one of the people who thinks that its worth putting some amount of thought into how to handle people being jerks. I also think a Code of Conduct is one tool that is reasonable to use in community building/management.

Bizarre sets of accusations. The author of the original post is the co-founder and sales lead of her tech startup. This is a job that consists of putting themselves and the company "out there" and persuading people to spend a lot of their company's money on their technology.

There's more than enough actual event organizers putting Codes of Conduct in place and arguing for their value (even if they put extra commitments on them), people you can not reasonably claim are "People who don’t actually put themselves out there and communicate with others face to face" - to the contrary, they are the ones that get to do the painful bit communication if things go wrong, and get told by random commenters to just appeal to people to be "adults" and that will fix things magically. Similarly with speakers at events.

Or for the future bad apples that come in and try to exploit the CoC to bully someone out who was there from the start. People interested in introducing CoC in small friction less groups are rather often extremely toxic.

The fear is that it will enable a different kind of bad apples, all while not necessary being effective at preventing the first kind.

How will code of conducts stop that from happening?

By making it much more clear:

1) To attendees that, “yes, that thing which you thought was inappropriate was in fact wrong. You should feel empowered to speak up about it.”

2) To organizers that “yes, we’ve already agreed this thing someone has done is wrong. Its worth doing something about it, even if that requires having an uncomfortable conversation which we’d rather just kick down the road.”

3) To other attendees that “yes, there was a thought process behind this and your place in this group of friends isn’t balanced on a knife’s-edge.”

4) To abusive people, “You probably want to move along” ...ideally. Alternatively, it tells them, “here is a mechanism you can exploit to separate your victim from their support network.”

Note that you cannot just slap up a code of conduct and assume that will solve/prevent all problems. That works as well as just adding “agile” to some PM’s job title. You have to have people who care about doing a good job at community management and are willing to endure the discomfort of difficult conversations.

> By making it much more clear

How? Unless you want to write out long, complicated laws, you'll rely on words like "kind", "friendly", "aggressive" etc that are anything but clear and rely on interpretation.

You'll still need the group to agree on what those terms mean and kick out people that don't agree with that interpretation (and the individual circumstances) - which you could've had without a formal set of rules in the first place.

The moderate reasonable interpretation of what you are saying is a solid criticism: misinterpretation is still possible and we don’t have the time to all go to law school and explain what “mens rea” means to each other.

But some level of explicit communication still scales better than silence and implicit expectations.

> But some level of explicit communication still scales better than silence and implicit expectations.

For (very) large groups, certainly, because the amount of effort you put in doesn't really increase with the group size. For small groups I just don't see it.

If there is no troublemaker, you don't need a codified system. And if there is a troublemaker, that codified system will be used against you and you will either be forced to disregard your set of rules (why have it in the first place if it's not binding?) to deal with the situation, or watch your group fall apart.

That's one possible aim but the main reason is it's for people who wouldn't feel comfortable joining without one. It's insurance for new joiners not protection for existing members

Do you immediately walk out of bars that say "no shirt no service", even if you're wearing a shirt?

I would probably if that was a big list of things not to do.

Defining a few not okays things that may happens, that's fine. The issue is when it become TOO formal. I don't expect the same from a small gathering at work, or from a night with friends. There's certainly things that shouldn't happen in both, but they aren't the same at all.

She said code of conduct, but her example is an actual guideline that is way more specific on what will be done.

https://pastebin.com/6kA93uPV

So I send you back your example, would you go on a bar that have that huge list that you need to agree with when you enter?

- You can come in, take a few drinks in exchange of money - You can make small talks, but only related to the drink you just took - Try to use the I when talking about drinks - Ask people first if they want suggestion toward another drinks - Don't share what you talked about with anyone else etc...

Someone else here gave another example which I would agree without any issue, about sexualized language, attention or advances (which funnily enough, I would agree with theses terms even in a bar setting, would you?), trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks, public or private harassment.

I feel the same. Rules definitely have their place, but starting something with rules is just weird. As the group grows, slowly rules can be added, only as needed - that would make more sense.

It's amazing how through all of human history (until ~2010 or so) we managed to do without written "codes of conduct" and things worked just fine without them.

More like "since 1750 BCE" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi

interesting. Organizing isn't free and even if it's just a casual group without an explicit code of conduct, people don't just show up for no reason. They look for other people and see who else is showing up. There is an organizer. Whether it's the venue owner, who will tell you they're not going to do a meeting because of a holiday, or a core group of regular attendees who rely on each other to show up and get a signal of whether or not there will be enough of a quorum to launch a game/discussion. Sometimes people on the outside will show up not knowing, and find out that the meeting has been canceled. It's only when the rules become too onerous and exclusionary that people decide not to join in. In a board game group, the rules are kind of reinforced through people who don't show up on time not being able to be in a game and wait. In a study group or book club it can get annoying as hell catching up the person up to speed so they don't recover something that they missed out on because of lateness.

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