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Can you give any examples of witch hunting based on CoC? Ignoring the famous example of pycon a few years ago is there another? I feel there's a common feeling

Can you give any examples of witch hunting based on CoC? Ignoring the famous example of pycon a few years ago is there another? I feel there's a common feeling about the potential "badness" of a code of conduct, but very few actual examples.

tokenizerrr 10y ago
Sure. The person who started promoting the concept of code of conducts, "Coraline Ada", has been hunting down people who violate their view of what's "right". For example pressuring third party projects to remove maintainers because they are "publicly calling trans people out" on twitter. https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 There is this other very interesting example where Coraline got called out doing the very things she despises: https://github.com/ContributorCovenant/contributor_covenant/issues/278 https://github.com/ContributorCovenant/contributor_covenant/... This is of course perfectly acceptable.
- SorryImNone 10y ago
  She's "GitHub staff" now. The mentality of "that person said something I disagree with [on other media] and they should be banned here [on a random project that I don't have anything to do with] or else..." is incredible toxic. If you don't agree with "assholes" writing code or using code that was written by an "asshole", you'll have a hard time using anything open source at all.
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    Yup! And your project can be removed/banned from GitHub if you do something she disagrees with now. I forget which project it was that was lashed out at recently, but it's all rather insane.
    - adekok 10y ago
      That is, it looks like GitHub will ignore it's own code of conduct in order to punish "bad" people. This is a common theme among proponents of codes of conduct. See also Twitter's ban on many people, including Milo Yiannopoulos. He was banned for "violating the rules". But I've looked, and no one anywhere can point out which exact tweet violated which particular rule. Even more extreme, no one can point out where he said any of things he's accused of saying. So... Twitter blocked him for "abuse", when there is zero evidence of such abuse. I'll say this: The more extreme the code of conduct, the more likely it will be broken by the people enforcing it.
      - scrollaway 10y ago
        Neither Github nor Twitter have a code of conduct; they have a Terms of Service document. TOS, unlike CoCs, are written by lawyers because the goal is a full-featured CYA. And they generally contain the legalesed disclaimer "we're free to get rid of you whenever we feel like, for whatever reason we feel like". I'm sure twitter also has some extra community rules somewhere. CoCs are worrisome because they tend to emulate that behaviour, and I certainly do not condone overreaching TOS, but you can't equate those two situations. It's the behaviour of people vs. the behaviour of companies.
        adekok 10y ago
        Except in the case of Twitter, the claim was that they banned Milo for engaging in certain kinds of behavior. Such claims are false. When you have such a legalese disclaimer as above, you don't need to lie about why you're banning someone. You just say "Under the Twitter ToS, we've banned Milo." The fact that they chose to lie about the justification for the ban shows not only that the ban was politically motivated (and not based on reality), but that they are so incompetent that they can't even spin it in their favor. Their bias is leaking. They don't really care about their own ToS. They don't care about following the rules they put in. They do care about banning anyone who they don't like. I find such behavior unethical, and morally repugnant.
        scrollaway 10y ago
  - alex_hitchins 10y ago
    More reasons to look at GitLab, cloud or self hosted. You should be the only one who decides who works with you on your project. I have cancelled all my private repos with GitHub as I just don't like their ethics.
  - jcadam 10y ago
    Yep, that person being hired on at Github was the last straw for me. I cancelled my (paid) subscription and moved all my private repos to Gitlab. Any future open source libraries I may publish will be on Gitlab as well.
- biafra 10y ago
  As far as I can tell, the Opal project does not have a CoC so this is a bad example for "witch hunting based on CoC".
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    Because the Opal project is ran by sensible maintainers. The point of this link is to showcase the kind of people that want CoCs to be a thing. If you read the comments on that issue you will see that the PC warriors are trying to pressure the project into adopting a CoC which would make the behavior that upset them unacceptable. To be clear, the behavior that upset them was a contributor tweeting things on twitter under his private name. They wanted this person to be removed from the open source projects they were working on because of that. The people who are pushing CoCs want to be able to punish people for perceived injustices. These injustices can be tweeting on twitter, and if the PC warriors get their way the punishment is to be ostracized from all open source projects.
  - AlexB138 10y ago
    If you read the link, you'll see that one of the people conducting the witch-hunt created an issue calling for a CoC. It's a good example of the mentality and its link to CoCs.: "strand referenced this issue on Jun 18, 2015 Closed Create a Code of Conduct #942"
- dvdhnt 10y ago
  That's insane. I can't believe that conversation exists on that place. It is not the place for it. Personally, I believe to each their own, but I also believe in not harassing people when they don't agree with me.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > That's insane. I can't believe that conversation exists on that place. Even worse: "Coraline Ada" works for GitHub (also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13667829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13667829).
- jdiez17 10y ago
  Reading this thread is making my blood boil. But I have never understood what these people are trying to prevent. Are they concerned about someone's technical contribution to a project being rejected because of their personal views? I have never seen that happen (and I don't believe it has ever happened). Yet, the person who created this issue has been hunting down people whose opinions they don't agree with and trying to exclude them from participating in a technical community. The scariest part: this person works for GitHub.
adekok 10y ago
See the Atheism+ debacle a few years ago. The entire thing was CoC abuse writ large. "Its Atheism PLUS morality, sensitivity, acceptance, diversity, etc." Things which are all well and good, but that turned out to not be the point. The point seemed to be that creation and enforcement of CoC rules was more important than anything else. People argued endlessly about which rules should be created, what the rules meant, and how to enforce the rules. Which in practice, meant witch hunting, and a totalitatian enforcement of vaguely-defined values. i.e. nasty, toxic, behavior. This negative behavior was pointed out to one of the main proponents. To prove the nay-sayers wrong, he created a sock puppet account which asked a simple question "Hey guys, what's this thing about?" Cue hysterics and shaming of the newbie. He publicly came out and said the account was his, and that this behavior was bad. Cue hysterics and shaming of him. He was banned (both accounts) from the forum. A thread was set up specifically for people to discuss how they were betrayed / hurt / abused by his behavior. Another major proponent who talked endlessly about the need to be inclusive towards women and not sexually harass them... has now been accused of repeated sexual harassment. And his public statements pretty much say "yeah... that actually happened, but it was all a misunderstanding" And what are the results of this new movement? Well, a few years later, it's dead. The forums are dead. The proponents are fighting each other. One was drummed out, and then publicly admitted that the people she was against were nicer to her than her ex-allies. When the "bad" people are more moral than the "good" people, I think you have your labels reversed. I've advocated for this before. Codes of conduct should be simple. Technical forums should have a code of conduct that says "Technical topics are on topic. Others are not. Off-topic conversations will be stopped. Continued off-topic conversations will result in a warning, and a ban." Anything else devolves into a morality play. Where the proponents argue about which moral standards are correct, and which ones are evil and wrong. In short, people who obsess about enforcing codes of conduct are toxic. They don't get anything done. They largely have never gotten anything done.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > Technical forums should have a code of conduct that says "Technical topics are on topic. Others are not. Off-topic conversations will be stopped. Continued off-topic conversations will result in a warning, and a ban." Let me tell a story about off-topic postings in a forum that I was active at. There was a member who often posted (let's say) controversial, but very reasoned answers in this forum. They were often against the official consensus of the forum, which lead to strong reactions and controversies (I can even imagine that he loved this controversies); but as I said: his arguments were very well reasoned. So there were some moderator(s?) who rather would have liked to ban him from the forum (but they couldn't easily, since there were people who rightfully said that though his postings are controversial, they come from a completely different side of view, so they have value for the community). So the moderators gave him a warning (I think there were two warnings were before ban) because of some off-topic posts (there were some terms hidden in the forum rules, which really nobody read). This lead to an outcry in the forum since there were other (less controversial) forum members who also accidentally wrote off-topic posts, so people sensed an agenda. One of the moderators (a very recognised one) did the (IMHO) only correct thing that one can do in this emotionally charged situation as a moderator: She gave an official warning to herself in the "warnings thread", for the reason that she accidentally wrote some off-topic posts, too.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
In the Scalaz community there was Dibblegate: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scalaz/9X_putSGoCY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scalaz/9X_putSGoCY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/scalaz/code$20of$20conduct|sort:relevance/scalaz/EBP_7sfB2ks/DL7NnrwSPD4J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/scalaz/code$20of$... https://twitter.com/shajra/status/544712807220908032 https://twitter.com/shajra/status/544712807220908032 Basically a CoC was quietly created and applied retroactively to so that Typelevel (a major Scala consultancy) could try and kick Tony Morris (founder of Scalaz) off his own project. From what I understand, having a colorful community of weirdos made the open source project they based their company on seem unattractive to big corporate customers.
- smitherfield 10y ago
  Here's the original IRC convo that precipitated it: https://gist.github.com/betehess/77de5b4b35ae11801936 https://gist.github.com/betehess/77de5b4b35ae11801936 I'd have to agree with you that the reaction seems absurd. He was unprofessional, sure, meriting a temporary kicking from IRC or something, but IMHO he who has never been a know-it-all (unheard-of on HN, ofc) or lost his temper over something silly on the internet should cast the first stone.

tokenizerrr 10y ago

Sure. The person who started promoting the concept of code of conducts, "Coraline Ada", has been hunting down people who violate their view of what's "right". For example pressuring third party projects to remove maintainers because they are "publicly calling trans people out" on twitter. https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941 There is this other very interesting example where Coraline got called out doing the very things she despises: https://github.com/ContributorCovenant/contributor_covenant/issues/278 https://github.com/ContributorCovenant/contributor_covenant/... This is of course perfectly acceptable.

SorryImNone 10y ago
She's "GitHub staff" now. The mentality of "that person said something I disagree with [on other media] and they should be banned here [on a random project that I don't have anything to do with] or else..." is incredible toxic. If you don't agree with "assholes" writing code or using code that was written by an "asshole", you'll have a hard time using anything open source at all.
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  Yup! And your project can be removed/banned from GitHub if you do something she disagrees with now. I forget which project it was that was lashed out at recently, but it's all rather insane.
  - adekok 10y ago
    That is, it looks like GitHub will ignore it's own code of conduct in order to punish "bad" people. This is a common theme among proponents of codes of conduct. See also Twitter's ban on many people, including Milo Yiannopoulos. He was banned for "violating the rules". But I've looked, and no one anywhere can point out which exact tweet violated which particular rule. Even more extreme, no one can point out where he said any of things he's accused of saying. So... Twitter blocked him for "abuse", when there is zero evidence of such abuse. I'll say this: The more extreme the code of conduct, the more likely it will be broken by the people enforcing it.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      Neither Github nor Twitter have a code of conduct; they have a Terms of Service document. TOS, unlike CoCs, are written by lawyers because the goal is a full-featured CYA. And they generally contain the legalesed disclaimer "we're free to get rid of you whenever we feel like, for whatever reason we feel like". I'm sure twitter also has some extra community rules somewhere. CoCs are worrisome because they tend to emulate that behaviour, and I certainly do not condone overreaching TOS, but you can't equate those two situations. It's the behaviour of people vs. the behaviour of companies.
      - adekok 10y ago
        Except in the case of Twitter, the claim was that they banned Milo for engaging in certain kinds of behavior. Such claims are false. When you have such a legalese disclaimer as above, you don't need to lie about why you're banning someone. You just say "Under the Twitter ToS, we've banned Milo." The fact that they chose to lie about the justification for the ban shows not only that the ban was politically motivated (and not based on reality), but that they are so incompetent that they can't even spin it in their favor. Their bias is leaking. They don't really care about their own ToS. They don't care about following the rules they put in. They do care about banning anyone who they don't like. I find such behavior unethical, and morally repugnant.
        scrollaway 10y ago
- alex_hitchins 10y ago
  More reasons to look at GitLab, cloud or self hosted. You should be the only one who decides who works with you on your project. I have cancelled all my private repos with GitHub as I just don't like their ethics.
- jcadam 10y ago
  Yep, that person being hired on at Github was the last straw for me. I cancelled my (paid) subscription and moved all my private repos to Gitlab. Any future open source libraries I may publish will be on Gitlab as well.
biafra 10y ago
As far as I can tell, the Opal project does not have a CoC so this is a bad example for "witch hunting based on CoC".
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  Because the Opal project is ran by sensible maintainers. The point of this link is to showcase the kind of people that want CoCs to be a thing. If you read the comments on that issue you will see that the PC warriors are trying to pressure the project into adopting a CoC which would make the behavior that upset them unacceptable. To be clear, the behavior that upset them was a contributor tweeting things on twitter under his private name. They wanted this person to be removed from the open source projects they were working on because of that. The people who are pushing CoCs want to be able to punish people for perceived injustices. These injustices can be tweeting on twitter, and if the PC warriors get their way the punishment is to be ostracized from all open source projects.
- AlexB138 10y ago
  If you read the link, you'll see that one of the people conducting the witch-hunt created an issue calling for a CoC. It's a good example of the mentality and its link to CoCs.: "strand referenced this issue on Jun 18, 2015 Closed Create a Code of Conduct #942"
dvdhnt 10y ago
That's insane. I can't believe that conversation exists on that place. It is not the place for it. Personally, I believe to each their own, but I also believe in not harassing people when they don't agree with me.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > That's insane. I can't believe that conversation exists on that place. Even worse: "Coraline Ada" works for GitHub (also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13667829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13667829).
jdiez17 10y ago
Reading this thread is making my blood boil. But I have never understood what these people are trying to prevent. Are they concerned about someone's technical contribution to a project being rejected because of their personal views? I have never seen that happen (and I don't believe it has ever happened). Yet, the person who created this issue has been hunting down people whose opinions they don't agree with and trying to exclude them from participating in a technical community. The scariest part: this person works for GitHub.

adekok 10y ago

See the Atheism+ debacle a few years ago. The entire thing was CoC abuse writ large. "Its Atheism PLUS morality, sensitivity, acceptance, diversity, etc." Things which are all well and good, but that turned out to not be the point. The point seemed to be that creation and enforcement of CoC rules was more important than anything else. People argued endlessly about which rules should be created, what the rules meant, and how to enforce the rules. Which in practice, meant witch hunting, and a totalitatian enforcement of vaguely-defined values. i.e. nasty, toxic, behavior. This negative behavior was pointed out to one of the main proponents. To prove the nay-sayers wrong, he created a sock puppet account which asked a simple question "Hey guys, what's this thing about?" Cue hysterics and shaming of the newbie. He publicly came out and said the account was his, and that this behavior was bad. Cue hysterics and shaming of him. He was banned (both accounts) from the forum. A thread was set up specifically for people to discuss how they were betrayed / hurt / abused by his behavior. Another major proponent who talked endlessly about the need to be inclusive towards women and not sexually harass them... has now been accused of repeated sexual harassment. And his public statements pretty much say "yeah... that actually happened, but it was all a misunderstanding" And what are the results of this new movement? Well, a few years later, it's dead. The forums are dead. The proponents are fighting each other. One was drummed out, and then publicly admitted that the people she was against were nicer to her than her ex-allies. When the "bad" people are more moral than the "good" people, I think you have your labels reversed. I've advocated for this before. Codes of conduct should be simple. Technical forums should have a code of conduct that says "Technical topics are on topic. Others are not. Off-topic conversations will be stopped. Continued off-topic conversations will result in a warning, and a ban." Anything else devolves into a morality play. Where the proponents argue about which moral standards are correct, and which ones are evil and wrong. In short, people who obsess about enforcing codes of conduct are toxic. They don't get anything done. They largely have never gotten anything done.

wolfgke 10y ago
> Technical forums should have a code of conduct that says "Technical topics are on topic. Others are not. Off-topic conversations will be stopped. Continued off-topic conversations will result in a warning, and a ban." Let me tell a story about off-topic postings in a forum that I was active at. There was a member who often posted (let's say) controversial, but very reasoned answers in this forum. They were often against the official consensus of the forum, which lead to strong reactions and controversies (I can even imagine that he loved this controversies); but as I said: his arguments were very well reasoned. So there were some moderator(s?) who rather would have liked to ban him from the forum (but they couldn't easily, since there were people who rightfully said that though his postings are controversial, they come from a completely different side of view, so they have value for the community). So the moderators gave him a warning (I think there were two warnings were before ban) because of some off-topic posts (there were some terms hidden in the forum rules, which really nobody read). This lead to an outcry in the forum since there were other (less controversial) forum members who also accidentally wrote off-topic posts, so people sensed an agenda. One of the moderators (a very recognised one) did the (IMHO) only correct thing that one can do in this emotionally charged situation as a moderator: She gave an official warning to herself in the "warnings thread", for the reason that she accidentally wrote some off-topic posts, too.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

In the Scalaz community there was Dibblegate: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scalaz/9X_putSGoCY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scalaz/9X_putSGoCY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/scalaz/code$20of$20conduct|sort:relevance/scalaz/EBP_7sfB2ks/DL7NnrwSPD4J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/scalaz/code$20of$... https://twitter.com/shajra/status/544712807220908032 https://twitter.com/shajra/status/544712807220908032 Basically a CoC was quietly created and applied retroactively to so that Typelevel (a major Scala consultancy) could try and kick Tony Morris (founder of Scalaz) off his own project. From what I understand, having a colorful community of weirdos made the open source project they based their company on seem unattractive to big corporate customers.

smitherfield 10y ago
Here's the original IRC convo that precipitated it: https://gist.github.com/betehess/77de5b4b35ae11801936 https://gist.github.com/betehess/77de5b4b35ae11801936 I'd have to agree with you that the reaction seems absurd. He was unprofessional, sure, meriting a temporary kicking from IRC or something, but IMHO he who has never been a know-it-all (unheard-of on HN, ofc) or lost his temper over something silly on the internet should cast the first stone.