Comment by turbonoobie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by turbonoobie | Hacker News Reader

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CoC is such a strange document. All I’ve seen it do is sit in a repo as a flag post. When I see a license document it gets me thinking about what intentions the project is released with, but when I see a CoC document all I do is mentally filter it out and go about my day..

One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything.

It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code.

Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything.

We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that.

A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything.

/idealistic early morning rant over

I know this is controversial, but I still love SQLite's old code of conduct (now 'code of ethics'[1]). Its based on some old religious text. If you skip the religious bits, the rest is extremely wholesome. I much prefer it over most projects' CoCs - I've never seen much benefit in spending a lot of words to say "please be civil".

> Be a help in times of trouble.

> Do not return evil for evil.

I will try, for you SQLite! :D

[1] https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

> 30. Do no wrong to anyone, and bear patiently wrongs done to yourself.

This one is similar to "be conservative in what you say and liberal in what you accept from others"[1], but worded better.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

I like this approach

Reading CoCs they are usually full of language that you would expect people would have already learned in Kindergarden. Unfortunately there are too many grown-ups around that seem to not have internalized these things, so while I don't like the patronizing myself, I see some value in writing down a set of "if you wanna collaborate here, please respect these rules".

And while you are right, the code itself doesn't care, there are lot's of interactions around producing that code that are between humans, where behaviour is important.

It's not much different from the guidelines that exist for this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I mean, that is a kind of code of condcut, too.

>Unfortunately there are too many grown-ups around that seem to not have internalized these things

This is true, but they wont read the CoC. And even if they do, they won't follow it. If someone can't practice basic decency, a txt file won't change them. Its an entirely futile effort at best and more likely a virtue signal than actually trying to improve things.

The only thing that works is strict moderation. You don't need a CoC for that.

I agree that a CoC by itself doesn't do anything. But if you want to do strict moderation, you need to put in place some rules that you can use to guide moderation and to make it transparent what the rules ares whch govern this moderation.

Otherwise you end up with arbitrarily enforced rules, created ad-hoc by whoever is doing the enforcing, without a way to know what they are or a way to appeal if you feel wrongly moderated.

> a way to appeal if you feel wrongly moderated.

Good. Otherwise people will pretend to be a laywer and talk about how _technically_ the rules don't say specifically what they did. Its a waste of time.

But really, in all my time on github and gitlab I have never seen an actual contributor violate common sense and common decency. The only shitty things I have seen have been anon users piling in on issue threads which have gone viral and in that case you just limit the repo to contributors only.

> We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people.

Is this mutually exclusive to stopping people doing bad things and being bad people though?

You don't really need a CoC to do that.

I'm curious how you plan to run a community without formalizing the rules that are expected to be followed somewhere. Restaurants generally have a sign outlining dress and language expectations, why is it so controversial to document community behavior expectations?

There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it".

This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.

Is "don't be a dick" not enough? For a long while there was a group of militant people hell bent on having everyone keep a CoC in their repos and ironically being the more intrusive and rude force themselves. I don't think any such document I've read has had any more substance or achieved much beyond the initial kerfuffle

People don't agree what's being a dick and what's not.

> Is "don't be a dick" not enough?

If everyone is going to act in good faith the whole time, sure, it's fine. But as soon as you get one person acting in bad faith, it all falls apart - see the current Republican Party, for example.

Definitely not. My impression though, is that the people who care about their conduct might read the document, and others will just gloss over it anyway. The energy is better spent elsewhere .

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