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Comment by serial_dev | Hacker News Reader

The thing is that codes of conduct do not help honest actors “regulate” and deal with troublemakers.

I used to organize meetups and I visited meetups organized by others who had code of conduct, and I just never understood what they were hoping to achieve with that.

If someone behaves poorly, you can point at a document all you want, but it doesn’t help you deal that the problematic individual. A document that you put in a markdown file is not enforceable.

And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.

It is all just a charade to help you pretend that you are impartial.

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My experience with a CoC at a meetup was that one day a bunch of people piled on the mailing list for the meetup demanding that the meetup adopt a CoC. The majority of these people were people that either only infrequently showed up, or hadn't ever shown up to the meetup. The CoC they demanded had a bunch of social justice language. When questioned on the mailing list as to the events that had precipitated the demand, one person said they had attended a meeting and had "felt uncomfortable." However, the organizer of the meetup actually took attendance, and it turned out that the complainer had not attended that day. The whole thing seemed like a ploy to turn the meetup from people who all used the same programming language into some sort of social activism group. This was at the height of #MeToo, and it appeared that this was being weaponized to take over successful technical groups through sympathy for women.

There's definitely a subset of people out there that are using CoCs as a way to install levers in organisations they can pull. I'm not completely burnt on the concept of CoCs but I definitely am very wary about them and the people who insist on them.

> And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.

Has it occurred to you that's actually exactly why they exist? :)

I mean. Whenever a code of conduct was installed in a project i was passionate about, i could look up the contributor on twitter/fediverse and see that they are a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.

Not surprised at the downvotes but this also matches my experience exactly.

These people (who push for CoCs so heavily) in my experience tend to hypocritically attack and censor opinions they don’t like, while not understanding why people won’t "accept them for who they are".

They are desperate to be the center of attention and love to play the victim.

It’s like the bullied becomes the bully sort of thing. They spend more time arguing over weaponized CoCs and ideological SJW politics instead of writing code. It doesn’t help that many of them self-admittedly suffer from mental health problems.

It just wasn't a very wholesome crowd. I don't have to like everyone, but I expect everyone to not try to ban people just because they have the unfavorable opinion du jours. Maybe write that in a COC, but it should be a premise to begin with.

On a completely unrelated note, you very, very rarely find real fascists in open source software projects.

And for even less favorable characters it seemed that it was just powerplay by some actors that wouldn't convince their own mother that they are the most untoxic of them all.

I have seen multiple CoC being installed with completely good intentions so no.

Have you ever heard the saying about good intentions? And just because you perceive something that way doesn't mean that's the reality

If someone files a lawsuit, does it implicitly mean it was filed with good intentions? Sadly, no.

There are people who will attempt to exploit any system.

I'm the ‘enforcer’ of a fairly large board games meetup, and the CoC is very simple: there's 3 rules. Newcomers are especially likely to ignore some of these rules, so I notify them the first 2 times. 3rd strike and they're out.

What I like about the simplicity of our CoC is that anyone can read it in a few seconds, and we can point it out to people without seeming bureaucratic or annoying.

Happy to share with others. Complicated CoC documents I've seen at other groups don't seem to do anything besides giving the organisers a feeling of power/that they're doing something. Simplicity might be key here.

Yes, please share. Can you post a link to your CoC?

No need for a link, it's about board games and the rules are (paraphrasing):

1. If you can't make it, let the host know the day before or morning of the event.

2. If you're playing at a venue, try to buy food or drinks from the venue. Don't bring lots of stuff from the outside.

3. Be kind and respect other people. Don't damage their games or act mean towards other players.

We're not super strict, but people have been perma-banned for sexually suggestive remarks or being assholes. I think we've had 3 or 4 really bad cases total. Most people get temporarily kicked out for violating rule #1 a lot.

Having something you can point to and say "This is why you're being removed" often removes some headaches. Some people will claim it's unjustified, moderator abuse, etc, if you don't. At least with some rules, there's less wiggle room. Of course, some people are going to respond poorly even with some rules, but it's also not just about the offenders - other community members being able to see there's some logic and reason to removals is good.

It's never about the rules, it's always about the perceived authority of the moderator or the decision maker.

This is very much so for small communities who don't have the infrastructure to litigate issues in a legalistic manner... but, even in areas like public law, the rules don't really matter, it's the perceived authority and impartiality of the courts that keep a legal system up and running. (think of any controversial Supreme Court decision -- do people really care what the law actually says and whether the legal reasoning is sound... or do they just speculate about the political leanings of the judges?)

Since most people writing up CoCs aren't good lawyers or experts in drafting (and finding loopholes in) rules... having a smaller "attack surface" actually makes a lot of sense.

That said, if the community is large or important enough that it already retains some legal advisors, then maybe yeah, make the rules more specific or something.

Assuming a majority of nice people, explicit rules can be exploited by a few assholes against their "enemies", while trusted human moderators only need to be kept in check with elections.

> often removes some headaches (...) with some rules, there's less wiggle room

... I understand that's the theory, but in practice, I've never seen it working that way.

I don't see how having the CoC affects any of this. If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them. If someone behaves so poorly that you decide you need to remove them, the community (the small portion of people who give a f) should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.

It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say (without pointing to a document you put in your repo when you were bored), that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision".

Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.

People have different level of tolerance to negative behavior. That includes both your team and your community. Having a clear rules allows you to

1) point both involved and uninvolved people to the code of conduct when you end up taking action.

2) avoid disparity of enforcement within your team

3) funnel disagreements (from both teammates or community members) by focusing them on the rule, rather than on a general debate on how should the community should be managed.

If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.

> If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.

Of course it does. If the community/project leaders are not aligned with your ideology, it's better to find one with alignment than to attempt to corner them with a written set of rules.

> If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them

I think you mean, "if someone is behaving poorly, the coc did not deter them".

The people who it did deter aren't behaving poorly.

I'm just having a hard time imagining someone who wants to be racist sexist xenophobe jerk to other people, but they saw you drafted a CoC last year in the root of your repository, so they won't... Or they were racist sexist xenophobe jerks, then you point out that "our community has a CoC", and they will stop.

None of these things happen in real life.

Written rules aren't for the offenders, they're for the conflict-adverse community members who get uncomfortable when someone needs to be thrown out for community health reasons. They don't really have strong opinions supporting the person's behavior, but they're uncomfortable with the idea of people getting exiled from the community, so come slithering out to protest when an asshole is exiled for being an asshole. Since their primary reason for speaking up in the first place is discomfort with conflict, a quick "they broke the rules" tends defuse further argument.

Why wouldn't "I have taken a dislike to them. Pray I do not take a dislike to you as well" also solve these people's problems? There's surely something more than "dislike of conflict" here, or else they wouldn't invite conflict by disagreeing with the now decided and closed conflict's resolution.

Yeah, if a community has someone with that kind of generally trusted authority, that works great. If a community doesn't, agreed upon rules are the next best thing.

The CoC isn't for them. As you mentioned, they're gonna be assholes no matter what. Kicking someone out of a group is possibly traumnatic but usually a bunch of drama. Having the god king of the group capriciously kick random people out of the group for no clear reason, and without communication as to why leaves the remaining members worried they could be next. I mean, sure, if you want to be the groups dictator and rule by fear, I guess that's fine, but imo that's no way to run things. By having something documented, with a procedure, gives a framework to follow for when you do have to kick someone out that's a bit less made up than "we just didn't like that person".

Not every person who does something problematic is actively seeking to do so in order to hurt someone. Also, there are plenty of people who are looking for spaces that are "okay" with their views, and a CoC that makes it clear the space is not can absolutely make them avoid it.

You are so focused on the strawman of problematic people being mustache-twirling villains trying to disrupt spaces they dislike, that you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for.

> you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for

Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave. My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.

Technology Z meetup / user group is a space for people who are interested in Technology Z. Repository Y is a space for people who are interested in Repository Y.

If someone needs a CoC to figure that out, bad luck.

You want to start discussion about War X, vilify everyone just by being born in that country, please do it outside my repo / user group. Plenty of spaces you can do it and there, you'll be welcome to do so. Want to talk about evil black / white / DEI / right wing people, please also leave my group out of it.

> Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave.

Behavior is who people are. It's the 'content of their character' that MLK spoke of.

> My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.

And yet different communities have vastly different concepts of acceptable behavior. CoCs let people know whether their behavior is acceptable in a community.

In my experience, it absolutely does help. But everyone has their own experiences.

> should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.

It's not a matter of the action being transparent, it's the motivations. Sometimes, it's not clear to community members why the action was taken, if there's no CoC or rules. "They're being an asshole" is a lot more subjective than "They were breaking the rules"

> It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say, without pointing to a document you just put in your repo, that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision". Just my 2c.

Sure, this might work for a small community or group, but the fiasco with Nix seems to suggest this isn't the case at a certain size. Some people apparently want accountability and transparency from their moderators.

> Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.

Great! That's fine! Not every community needs such things. Some do.

> If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true.

You're treating humanity as if it's divided into two distinct sections: Those Who Behave Well, and Those Who Behave Poorly.

In reality, different humans have different ranges of ways they prefer to act, and most are quite amenable to reasonable, clearly-stated codes of conduct for interaction in a particular space.

There is a small subset of people who are either deliberately antisocial for the sake of it (trolls/griefers/etc), and another subset that are genuinely just assholes who will, if given the leeway to do so, cause endless problems in a community.

But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct not because they actively want to, but because their unstated assumptions about how people should interact clash with the unstated assumptions of other people there. Having the code of conduct lets everyone coming in in good faith align their expectations and avoid these unnecessary conflicts. They're like a Session 0 in a TTRPG in that sense.

> But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct

Hard disagree... I've never seen one have this effect. IMO you don't need a CoC to suddenly understand what should already be common sense i.e. don't be a dick. Either they were already going to act that way, or they weren't.

> I've never seen one have this effect.

How do you think you would see it?

Under normal circumstances, what it would look like from the outside is just...someone not causing friction, because there is a code of conduct. Or someone causing friction, because there isn't one.

The former looks identical to someone who would never have caused trouble in the first place, and the latter looks, if not identical, at least very similar to someone who would have caused trouble, no matter what.

Presumably the code of conduct was introduced to solve a problem. So I'd be interested in hearing about an example of a community that had problems with their social fabric, and then introduced a code of conduct, and then could demonstrate that those issues in their social fabric were addressed.

In the history of the world? Yeah. Anytime you have a communal living space, you're going have to set norms on what constitutes shared community stuff. Is the milk in the fridge George's and no one is allowed to touch it, or do we, as a household, want milk communism and it just goes as shared groceries and we go often enough that there's always milk? There's not a right answer, but it's up to the community to decide what's normal in its culture. People come from different backgrounds, were born in different countries and have totally different expectations as to what constitutes "don't be an asshole". Do you put your elbows on the table? Is slurping your soup a sign of respect or disrespect? What you don't see is people who see a lack of a code of conduct and then just don't join.

Don't these tend to be discussions between the people involved?

Whether or not anything needs to be written down afterwards seems like it would be a separate thing.

The way I see it, the people who would cause friction anyway won't be stopped by a CoC.

And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.

Another commenter (cannot find their name now but I saved the text) said exactly what my experience has been:

> A written code of conduct can legitimize petty disputes based on interpretations of the text, even if the issue itself is something easily addressable like using the word “master” in a programming context. It can become a tool for manipulation (pushing someone out for “CoC violation” vs simply correcting the wording).

> The way I see it, the people who would cause friction anyway won't be stopped by a CoC.

> And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.

Both correct. By definition, in fact.

CoCs are for the people in the middle of those. Who do, in fact, exist.

I think if someone needs to be told to be nice... it's time to grow up. Open source projects are not your mother and we shouldn't have to treat people like children, nor get chastised for having that (IMO very reasonable) stance.

It's not about being "told to be nice".

It's about setting a shared understanding of norms.

It's about whether the kinds of jokes allowed among members are "as raunchy as you please", "polite jokes only," or "none".

It's about whether you're expected to work out differences in private chats, address them in public, or bring them to a moderator.

It's about whether your comments on a code review started by another member have to be addressed by the committer before the review can go forward.

Any time you think the way you do things in the open source project (or any other kind of community) you contribute to or run is The Natural, Obvious Way Everyone Does Things, you're probably wrong, and some other people or projects do things exactly the opposite way and think that's just as natural and obvious.

Right. I've seen a CoC used as a power-grab by people who had barely made any contributions to a project, when the people in charge were too easy-going or naive to shut down dishonest use of it, so they tended to side with the squeaky wheel. Once the bad actors got people they didn't like removed or driven away from the project, they just got worse, saying things like "go kill yourself" without consequence, because they were now in control and could interpret the code however they liked or just ignore it.

You can't write a CoC that will prevent bad behavior from bad actors in charge, so it's worthless at best and a weapon for the unscrupulous at worst. What matters is who enforces standards of behavior, and if those people are decent and honest, no written code is necessary.

I play in a band. Since we're just 4 people a code of conduct would be ridiculous. What isn't ridiculous however is that a group of people who do some shit together need to be somewhat on the same page what is acceptable and what isn't. You don't need that with just friends, but any project beyond friends needs people to agree on what kind of social space this is meant to be. If you don't talk it out the shittiest person is going to define it for you.

And beyond a certain size formalizing that makes sense. Not as a tool for punishment or to point to, but so everybody can be on the same page and you know if someone acts out of line they do so despite better knowledge.

If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?

>If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?

Maybe he don't want to exclude people who are outside of the CoC norms, but can still be valuable contributors.

> If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?

If it would contain stuff you're within bounds of anyways, then it's entirely unneeded. :)

Yes sure, but what I mean here is stuff, that can start interpersonal conflicts. To stay with the band example, different people will have different sensibilties around their equipment and how to respectfully treat it. If everybody does it their way you basically guarantee some sort of clash. The solution is to make a general rule that may seem overly sensitive to that one punk member that throws their gear on a pile, but everybody else is happy and the conflicts are avoided.

What I want to say here, is that a good code of conduct deals with the stuff that is open to interpretation and defines it. So if our punk-bandmate throws the singers gear on a pile we don't have to argue about different definitions of how we expect others gear to be treated.

So it is needed precisely because everybody thinks they are just acting normal and within bounds, even when the majority thinks they are not.

Literally pointing at a real thing is useful. Yes, rules are not logical binary that absolves you of activity but having no basis for decision making other than hind brains is how you enter the current American morass.

Its the agreement to argue about a topic that is struck when you make rules.

Not seeing this is how..niholists proliferats with variohs plicit ordering liks might is right

Yeah I'd like to see some examples of "these code of conducts did good thing" before I buy into these things.

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