4 ms·
Codes of Conducts shouldn't be necessary to tell people not to break the laws which seems to be what happened here. Codes of Conduct also has a number of downs
by skinkestek 7y ago
Codes of Conducts shouldn't be necessary to tell people not to break the laws which seems to be what happened here.
Codes of Conduct also has a number of downsides, first and foremost the creation of more meta games.
Also, for the record:
This very site, one of the nicest forums there is, together with lobste.rs and others: none of the have stupid CoCs and they are still among the nicest sites there is.
- kthejoker2 7y agoYou should read The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah, it talks exactly about why Codes of Conducts are necessary, even for things which are not "breaking the law." Moral stances have a place.
- skinkestek 7y agoSo, if they are truly necessary: how comes HN and a number of other places works extremely well without one?
- akdas 7y agoI don't think this discussion will be productive if different people have a different set of first principles they start with. In this case, I disagree that HN works extremely well. It works well, but there's still a fair amount of misogyny in my experience.
- kthejoker2 7y agoHN has an honor code - it may not be as strong as the "SJW!" trope you have in your mind, but it certainly exists. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ALl of their guidelines have the same shape as all honor codes: they ask you not to do something that you are, in a strict legalist / absolutist sense, allowed to do. And then they shame those who violate the rules, and the group codifies that shame in the name of "common" "decency", and those activities no longer happen here in great numbers, despite being "allowed" in the larger sense (they even preface most of the guidelines with "Please" to emphasize the voluntary nature of your choice to submit to the guidelines.)
- akdas 7y agoHN has a form of a Code of Conduct (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and strong moderation to remove truly bad-faith comments. These two aspects are really important to the level of discourse here. And while I would say HN is often times civil, I've definitely seen misogynistic or otherwise demeaning comments here.
- skinkestek 7y agoHNs guidelines are totally OK and the moderators have proven ywar by year how reasonable they are even to us who don't always agree. If CoC were like HN guidelines and enforced the same way I guess almost nobody worth listening to would care at all if every project had one.