Hacker News Reader

From your own quote

> participation in our community

community should mean a group of people. It seems you are interpreting it as a group of people or robots. Even if that were not obvious (it is), the following specialization and characteristics (regardless of age, body size ...) only apply to people anyway.

View on HN

That whole argument flew out of the window the moment so-called "communities" (i.e. in this case, fake communities, or at best so-called 'virtual communities' that might perhaps be understood charitably as communities of practice) became something that's hosted in a random Internet-connected server, as opposed to real human bodies hanging out and cooperating out there in the real world. There is a real argument that CoC's should essentially be about in-person interactions, but that's not the argument you're making.

I don't follow why it flew out the window. To me it seems perfectly possible to define the community (of an open-source software project) as consisting only of people, and to also to define an etiquette which applies to their 'virtual' interactions. Important is that behind the internet-connected server, there be a human.

FWIW the essay I linked to covers some of the philosophical issues involved here. This stuff may seem obvious or trivial but ethical issues often do. That doesn't stop people disagreeing with each other over them to extreme degrees. Admittedly, back in 2022 I thought it would primarily be people putting pressure on the underlying philosophical assumptions rather than models themselves, but here we are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com