A CoC is still a useful communication tool. Guidelines are useful to have.
The CoC is not there to protect the community, but to protect all the bad actors and give ammunition to attack the good ones.
Happens every time, the maintainers who add CoCs to projects have no problem being an ahole to others.
Update: I know some people love their CoCs, but answer me this, how is this kind of childish name calling allowed and still online, if what I wrote above is not true?
Where you born 30 minutes ago to not have realized yet that people are not infallible, are subjects of emotions and contradict themselves all the time?
Luigi Mangione shot the UnitedHealthcare CEO December 4, 2024 and had an anti-capitalist manifesto, was he center right?
What about Elias Rodriguez (leftist activist, Israeli Embassy Staff Shooting)?
Michael Reinoehl (antifa) who shot Aaron Danielson?
"No Kings" Vance Boelter who shot two politicians?
"Anti-ICE" Joshua Jahn who killed two detainees and wounding an agent in the Dallas ICE Facility Sniper Attack?
US leftists are the same murderous closeted communists as they are everywhere else.
They assassinate people (see recent cases), perform terrorist attacks (peaking at ~500 (!) bombings in 1971), form mobs to socially ostracise people they don't agree with, distribute brazen propaganda in mass media and subvert every organisation they join.
My point is that Democrats and Republicans disagree on social policies, but on the economical side they are very close to each other. They are two shades of capitalist policies. Other countries have parties that are simply non-capitalist - that is the "left".
It’s just a document.
However, in this case, the presence of the code of conduct has made it trivially easy to point out the language as wrong in a way whoever wrote this for Zig cannot refute.
It’s working exactly as it should.
Holding the powerful to the law is unfortunately, a separate issue to whether it's worth it to have written rules/laws in the first place.
A CoC could still be better than no CoC, even if it fails to rein in abuse from the top.
The fact that this behavior, which would violate most CoCs ever written, came from the top tells you everything you need to know.
A good CoC for most projects is: “tl;dr: don’t act rude or illegal”, followed by a detailed explanation of what is rude or illegal, ending with “project maintainers have final discretion”.
I'm sharing these facts not to "credential-dump", but to underscore: This comment comes from compassion, not condescension.
Vague CoCs bug me because they're well-intentioned landmines. Take "don't be an asshole"; it could mean "act in good faith" (why not just say that?), or morph into "don't seem condescending" based on who's reading.
Pair that with commitments to safe spaces for neurodivergence, like autism (where social cues in text can be a foggy maze), and you've got a recipe for unintended clashes.
An earnest comment misfires, gets flagged as jerkish, and boom: escalation via subjective enforcement.
I've flagged this before: good faith-vague inclusivity can ironically exclude through feelings-based policing, which is how communities often roll anyway. So, why not tighten rules for clarity? Swap "don't be an asshole" for "assume good intent and clarify misunderstandings." It'd make safe spaces safer for all, autists included.
I don't doubt I'll get a tirade of "how can you call Autistic people assholes" just like always, totally missing the point on purpose.
Also, when people cause social issues, they should be reprimanded referencing specific parts of the CoC, and in most cases given warnings or opportunities to recover. For when the person causing the issue genuinely isn't aware what they're doing is wrong and can learn to be tolerable; and even when the person is completely bad faith, for unaware bystanders to learn what's right and wrong.
Diagnosed autistic people aren't the only ones who suffer from unwritten social cues. Also people from other cultures, e.g. where rudeness is considered more acceptable.
Ah the good old days!