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Comment by ermir | Hacker News Reader

Open source projects (or any large collaboration) now have a new type of danger that many are unprepared to handle, in that there are people online who will shit on your work or make a giant spectacle that can ruin people just so that they can appear good in Twitter or make some kind of name for themselves in certain online circles. Similar to thieves who steal metal from railways, the damage they cause is far higher to the benefit they get, and so they should be resisted like the harmful element they are.

Sadly, having an open and explicit CoC and governance structure gives these people a weapon to use against you. Now instead of dealing with your problem on a case-by-case basis, you will have third parties, who otherwise have no stake, interpreting your own CoC against you just to win some internet cred.

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Until recently, having a CoC in the first place is something I viewed as signalling allegiance or submission to the bully crowd you mention. Over the recent years, however, CoC seems to have become a new term for the standard rules boilerplate every community has, so I view it as neutral these days.

(Unless someone makes a big deal about adopting Contributor Covenant. That's just genuflecting to the "rail thieves".)

Nope, it's still virtue signalling. By acknowledging the need to have a paragraph of text that boils down to "play nice, or we'll take your things away", you've already given trolls too much legitimacy and power. Why is it so hard to start from a position of: assume all participants want to make the project better from the start until otherwise seen?

That leads to "the person complaining about a problem is trying to make the project worse, so all we have to do is ban the person who said that <prominent contributor> groped them at a conference and we can get back to work".

(That example was not referencing any particular case, BTW)

More likely that the person complaining about a social problem is actually trying to make the project worse. Like e.g. outsiders coming out of the woodwork to push CoCs on projects that don't have them.

> so all we have to do is ban the person who said that <prominent contributor> groped them at a conference and we can get back to work

Yes. Such an issue should be brought to the police, not be posted on an issue tracker for rallying social media lynch mobs. Cases of exaggerating or straight up lying about sexual harassment in order to remove or destroy someone are common enough, and consequences of a mistaken judgement severe, so the presumption of innocence is very important.

> Such an issue should be brought to the police

... who will often ignore it.

> Cases of exaggerating or straight up lying about sexual harassment in order to remove or destroy someone are common enough

Are they?

> ... who will often ignore it.

Which is still not a justification for making public accusations of illegal, perhaps criminal behavior on a project issue tracker or mailing list.

> Are they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape

> ... who will often ignore it.

Acknowledged that it may happen in some cases, and that is extremely regrettable and frustrating. However, I believe that is no justification for jumping straight to what I consider pretty much "mob justice".

Investigations still matter. Facts still matter. You fundamentally have a right to confront your accuser and challenge the evidence in a court of law, before a judgement and potential punishment is rendered upon you. You don't get the same benefit when you are being tried in the court of public opinion (social media). I get suspicious when people skip the court of law route and only pursue the court of public opinion route.

On the flip side, I have written things that got significantly more attention that I had expected and probably came across to the project maintainers as hating on their work–and that is with multiple drafts to make it clear that this wasn't my intention. There might be random people who like to persecute individuals and their work for no good reason, but even harder to deal with are the people who have been invested in the project before and you've made unhappy; doubly so if you've reached the point where you're not interested in having certain conversations and your governance structure makes it difficult for them to feel heard. Really, this is not a simple problem and I think it's more nuanced than "people will take your Code of Conduct and use it to nitpick you and call your work stupid on the internet", when there's a whole spectrum of "this maintainer has been closing all conversations of a contentious topic by citing the governance structure" to "we made an unpopular but necessary decision that we did not explain well enough and that's causing everyone to come out of the woodwork to harass us".

Bad people cut both ways, and I think it's impossible to design any kind of document (CoC or otherwise) that can force assholes to behave nicely. All these discussions about formalizing relationships, expectations, and behaviors are in my opinion a foolish exercise of programmer logic in social situations, where you abstract away all the difficult human interactions behind something that resembles a function call and then use it everywhere. In reality, all social structures are unique, all relationships take time and effort to build, and a large amount of a programmer's effort will be spent in navigating human structures. The fantasy that you can put up a CoC so you can finally solve the human issues and get back to programming is the ultimate programmer dream, but it's not something that exists in the real world.

>Sadly, having an open and explicit CoC and governance structure gives these people a weapon to use against you.

Also, not having one also makes lots of people rally against you. You can't win on the CoC front

You're derailing a very reasonable discussion to make a political point. Instead of hiding your complaints with loaded language, be honest so we can actually discuss it on it's merits. Furthermore, it would benefit from some real-world examples. I'm frankly sick of these "The SJWs have gone too far and only care about internet cred" comments without any real analysis. It's on track to becoming much more annoying than the original problem, and stifles discussion just as much.

As it stands, all your comment is doing is contributing to the ideological echo-chamber on HN and derailing an otherwise non-political discussion.

My perception is that a few open source communities have blown up this way very visibly, and people are getting up in arms about it.

But I don’t think the problem is widespread; it’s just people getting excited about bad things that happened.

So I agree: more analysis, more facts please. It’s a good conversation to have; let’s keep it substantive.

It's infuriating to see those complaining about very real barriers to contribution or actual abuses smeared as "rail thieves". For example, the percieved gender of the submitter making a difference to pull request acceptance rates: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

...by a very small margin.

It's hard to determine how maintainer preceived the submitter's gender, so they tested for how they could have perceived instead (availability of identifying information - and even that is very hard to determine and limited the sample size).

Looking at the big picture, a lot of pull requests are accepted from both genders.

I'd be concerned if the difference was >20%, but 4% with all the listed limitations in the study doesn't get me excited.

Agreed. 4% is probably as equal as things can get realistically. You probably can get the same margin if you compare people who wear glasses or short vs long hair.

This study doesn't say what you think it does. Women gain significant advantage in being identified as women, except in the case of a first request, and only then by an amount on the edge of statistical significance. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exc...

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