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All I can say is I've only seen and heard code of conducts be used for bullying and to exclude people from communities without any wrongdoing. Examples include

by dannyw 6y ago

All I can say is I've only seen and heard code of conducts be used for bullying and to exclude people from communities without any wrongdoing. Examples include the various Stack Overflow Monica incidents, the post we've just read, and a meatspace event I've been to. I think CoCs, while a great ideal, unfortunately tend to attract power-tripping, virtue-signalling bullies who seek to enforce it for the greater bad.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
Technically, the Monica incident didn't involve a CoC; that was a pretext (well, post-text). The people who made the decision were just out of touch, and pattern-matched the information they had available to the “powerful, respected individual is hurting people who can't fight back” story – not realising that they'd caused that story, with Monica as the one who got hurt. I'm still not sure why they doubled down on it, breaking long-standing traditions of how-moderation-is-done in the biggest possible way (defaming in the press) but (at least) some of the people involved (e.g. Sara Chipps, the face of the Big Bad… the person who introduced Jon Skeet to Stack Overflow) weren't sadistic abusers, so I'd prefer to assume ignorance than malice. (There might've been more than a little over-correcting for “we mustn't let ourselves defend the ones in the wrong, even if we like them”, but that's just speculation on my part.) And that situation was complicated. A lot of people were telling themselves they were doing the right thing, but ended up hurting innocent bystanders all the more, e.g. whoever released that poorly-redacted list of which moderators were LGBTQ+ (presumably to try to get back at Stack Exchange in some way or other). We still don't know who that was, which is as it should be; you don't talk about moderation decisions on Stack Exchange unless their target is part of the conversation (and even then, only usually if they bring it up). The whole thing goes to show (at least, to me) how important it is not to act how the story says you should; you might have the story wrong.

by dannyw 6y ago

wizzwizz4 6y ago

Technically, the Monica incident didn't involve a CoC; that was a pretext (well, post-text). The people who made the decision were just out of touch, and pattern-matched the information they had available to the “powerful, respected individual is hurting people who can't fight back” story – not realising that they'd caused that story, with Monica as the one who got hurt. I'm still not sure why they doubled down on it, breaking long-standing traditions of how-moderation-is-done in the biggest possible way (defaming in the press) but (at least) some of the people involved (e.g. Sara Chipps, the face of the Big Bad… the person who introduced Jon Skeet to Stack Overflow) weren't sadistic abusers, so I'd prefer to assume ignorance than malice. (There might've been more than a little over-correcting for “we mustn't let ourselves defend the ones in the wrong, even if we like them”, but that's just speculation on my part.) And that situation was complicated. A lot of people were telling themselves they were doing the right thing, but ended up hurting innocent bystanders all the more, e.g. whoever released that poorly-redacted list of which moderators were LGBTQ+ (presumably to try to get back at Stack Exchange in some way or other). We still don't know who that was, which is as it should be; you don't talk about moderation decisions on Stack Exchange unless their target is part of the conversation (and even then, only usually if they bring it up). The whole thing goes to show (at least, to me) how important it is not to act how the story says you should; you might have the story wrong.