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Comment by d3w4s9 | Hacker News Reader

I rarely find a CoC to be "woke", and it would be helpful if you can provide cover concrete examples. What I see in big products is mostly "Don't attack others, don't tell dirty jokes, no harassment of any kind" which I find neutral and fair.

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I had a look expecting to find a few quickly, but couldn't. The ones I saw do mention you can't be mean about, say, gender, but among a vast swathe of other features. So I can't see how that's particularly woke.

I suppose there was the brouhaha at Stack Exchange about their code or conduct and how you must use user-provided pronouns if they are specified (not even using terms like OP or "they") but looking at CoC now I can't see any mention of this. Not is SE an open-source project, it is a for-profit closed-source project with volunteer contributions.

https://www.contributor-covenant.org/ is (was?) the most widely adopted code of conduct in FOSS, initially drafted by a Ruby contributor, who also happens to be transgender if that's pertinent information to you. It's the genesis seed from which all this code of conduct madness stems from. Personally I'd stick with "be excellent to each other" or "say what you want, just don't use slurs or deliberately insult other contributors" or something vague, ambiguous and universally understood as that. I'm not really a fan of rigorous social rules, so my view on this starts from that position.

Unfortunately it seems that "be excellent to each other" is not specific enough to be understood by everyone.

E.g., "address people using the name and gender that they use to refer to themselves". You would expect this to be obvious, and yet... Or maybe making this explicit is promoting a "woke ideology"?

> don't tell dirty jokes

That alone is annoying and limiting. Constantly having to filter and mince your words to comply with this slows down thinking and reduces creativity.

Remember dongle-gate? People should be allowed to joke about dongles all they want.

These aren’t social clubs, they’re organizations of humans dedicated to building software. Telling jokes in e.g. an issue task or a project mailing list wastes everyone’s time. And why would you be having to filter in the first place?

The motivation for this whole thread is the social club, the community aspect of a software project.

FOSS software projects are social clubs. They're endeavors undertaken willfully, voluntarily, usually without any expectation of financial compensation, out of personal interest. They have a goal, yes, but at the end of the day people get involved because it's fun, and they're trying to have fun and do something they think is cool. Telling someone they can't share a winkyface in chat is offputting to I'd say most talented people that do this sort of thing out of personal interest. I don't think it's a coincidence that we see alongside this rise on CoCs a rise of frustratingly hostile user experience in software.

I don't know how such a simple thing can be "annoying". Do you tell dirty jokes with colleagues when you have lunch in the cafeteria? If not, how is it difficult (not) to do the same thing online? That seems a very low bar.

I am a male and I am not some sort of saint that never watches porn or never has dirty thoughts in my private life, but this (dirty jokes) isn't something I would complain about.

btw I noticed that many women really don't like dirty jokes, like, disgusted by them. This can be a real turnoff for inclusivity -- imagine a woman interested in contributing to the project but decides not to participate because of issues like this.

Why did you bring up dongles? I thought we were discussing CoCs

This is an example

https://meta.chaos.social/rules

For example "No right or alt-right bullshit, Nazi content, conspiracy narratives.". What about leftish bullshit? That also exists, so why be so specific? The answer to me is pretty clear. These are rules for a specific political worldview.

You're mentioning a service ran by a very particular community that draws Antifa logos on badges given to participants of its events. Of course it's not going to tolerate right-wing bullshit and it has every right to state that, but I fail to see how that's on-topic here. It's hardly a surprise that a CoC used by a community that's likely "woke" by your standards appears as "woke" to you.

I was asked to provide an example and gave one. How could that not be on topic?

You asserted that CoCs "usually broadcast a woke world view", and when asked for an example provided one that's used by a clearly left-aligned community. You could very well make a completely opposite statement and also find a supporting example and it would be just as informative.

Many communities aren't explicitly politically aligned and their CoCs aren't either.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/usually

you're mad a private organization doesn't want to be associated with nazism, conspiracy theories or alt-right nonsense?

There you go, agitating. That's not what they're saying. They're saying that the rules are one sided, you're allowed to be an ideological extremist as long as you're the right kind of ideological extremist.

I'd personally like to contribute in communities again, like it used to be, where insane political ideology of any stripe was not an important aspect of contribution. It seems these days people like me, who don't want to either see the N word every five minutes or hear about late stage capitalism and gender identity, don't have a place in the FOSS world.

But it's a private org, they can limit speech how they see fit. Communities need to have rules; if not communities can become pretty toxic, and drive people away who might want to contribute, or even just seek help.

By making it clear they ban nazi's and the alt-right, people know what they're getting into when they join. I don't see the issue, and I don't buy into "horseshoe theory" or the idea that far left and far right are just two sides of the same coin, because they're not.

You're hearing lots about late stage capitalism because of the times we're in.

You're hearing lots about gender identity because until recently in modern capitalist society it was dangerous for people who didn't fit traditional gender norms to express that openly.

Well so is the Hyprland community, yet we seem to be discussing the merits of deciding for them how they limit speech. We don't want them to do it how they see fit as you put it, because their criteria are not to our liking.

I personally find the politicization of everything off putting and won't contribute to projects that do it. I'd call the constant push to shoehorn gender identity into every crevice of our lives toxic and I'd say it drives me and other people away. But that's OK right, because they don't want people like me contributing, that's the point, and maybe I have a right to not want people like them contributing in my projects also, maybe I don't want to be inclusive towards people that aren't inclusive towards me.

>I personally find the politicization of everything off putting and won't contribute to projects that do it. I'd call the constant push to shoehorn gender identity into every crevice of our lives toxic and I'd say it drives me and other people away.

Is gender identity being "shoehorned" into every crevice of our lives, or are people just more comfortable expressing who they really are? And now that they are, people who didn't need to feel bad about expressing their identity don't always know how to handle it.

>We don't want them to do it how they see fit as you put it, because their criteria are not to our liking.

No; they're perfectly allowed to limit speech how they want to. But we're allowed to criticize it as well.

Wow, I think I'm too lawful left aligned to handle that level of "chaos". D:

There are plenty of CoCs which explicitly advocate for ideas from Critical Race Theory such as “anti-meritocracy” (meritocracy discriminates against the historically disadvantaged) and “anti-racism” (you have to be discriminatory to fight discrimination). I’m on mobile so my Google-fu is a little weak. All I can leave you with is the (unsatisfactory) anecdote that people have expoused these ideas to me in real life, saying things like “If you don’t have enough PoC contributing to your FLOSS project, you need to go and invite some regardless of if they are good contributors or not”

> There are plenty of CoCs

Examples, please.

https://floss.social/about

See:

https://github.com/sagesharp/code-of-conduct-template/blob/m...

And from that:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%E2%80%9Cprioritizes%20margi...

Two notable examples:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/CodeOfConduct

https://www.elastic.co/community/codeofconduct

Probably more but I’m on vacation. Also I’m expecting you to respond saying something like “Those don’t count” anyways

> Also I’m expecting you to respond saying something like “Those don’t count” anyways

The HN guidelines explicitly say take ppl in good faith. We have guidelines on this site.

https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_con...

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