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Comment by chrislo | Hacker News Reader

What evidence do you have for that? I was involved in adopting a code of conduct for a local tech meetup and we did that because a couple of incidents that weren't handled very well left other people feeling unsafe and unwelcome. Having some guidelines in place reassured folks that we took those concerns seriously and gave us a framework to deal with unwanted behaviour.

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From my experience, writing rules directly after incidents and as a reaction to incidents do not produce good results. New members of the community 5-10 years later will have no understanding of what the rules are trying to do or why they exist, and when a new incident occur the rules get rewritten again and again. The only effect is the optics as in sending a message that "we take those concern serious", but without substance, and again from experience, those people who was leaning to leave will still leave regardless.

What has worked in communities I have been active in is to have continuously conversations, in combination with a no-blame culture that provide social safety for people to bring up issues and also room for people to improve without feeling personally attacked (which is the opposite of social safety).

Anti-meritocracy was in in some CoCs, arguing in its favour was a reason for exclusion from an event / project. Even if the argument happened somewhere else on the internet and not in the project.

Whenever I see someone dying on the hill of fighting for 'meritocracy', in the words of another poster in this subthread, I have found them to be:

> ...a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.

... And typically with a giant chip on their shoulder. The real world's a little bit more complicated than the spherical cows that the near-religious faith in it requires.

I'm not sure how your comment is relevant. No one is fighting for meritocracy here. Only providing the requested information about a case where CoC pushed a specific political view and excluded others.

It highly depends on what you understand that word to mean. At first it was just meant to to pronounce fairness. Nothing more to it. It was used in a context to explicitly disregard who people are and focus on what they do.

And of course it wasn't meant as an instruction manual for how to run a society. It was quite explicitly a message that you are not judged by who you are. That is it, there is no ideology, there is no grand idea. That is media garbage that filled your head with a phantom.

And honestly, that did a much better job than most COC I read.

Er, at first it was a purely pejorative term - most famously used to describe a dystopia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

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