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> Last summer an(other) unarmed black man was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [...] So, what was tech’s big song and dance? Let’s remove offensive t

> Last summer an(other) unarmed black man was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [...] So, what was tech’s big song and dance? Let’s remove offensive terminology from our collective lexicon. There were several casualties, white/blacklist are examples of words deemed to be too offensive to use. In my memory this started way before the recent BLM protests - around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.

that_guy_iain 6y ago
> around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced. The things about the CoCs that really annoyed me: 1. People would literally go around projects and send pull requests just to change the code of conduct to improve the wording even tho no one had made any complaints or anything. Anytime a CoC get added you would see more people mess around with the CoC than the code. It was like people just wanted to look like they were improving things while not actually doing anything. 2. The only blog posts I've seen about CoCs at conferences and stuff have sounded nuts. One was for SunshinePHP[0] where one of the infractions was someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better. They wrote that they told the offender to go to his room to prevent him from being assaulted. But mentions nothing happening about a guy threatening violence for flirting. I would understand if they were threatening violence in response to violence but flirting, nah. Then there was the whole fast.ai[1] thing where the infraction was basically someone was offended on the behalf of someone else who wasn't offended. [0] https://geekyboy.com/archives/1179 https://geekyboy.com/archives/1179 [1] https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/ https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/
- eertami 6y ago
  >someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Your man was being a creep and while I'd agree violence isn't the answer, I'm not at all surprised if he was threatened. (I also wouldn't be surprised if he was just told to back off initially but then pushed the issue because that is what creeps do.) And if for some reason this still isn't obvious to the reader, here's a top tip for how to avoid getting into a fight: maybe don't insult people.
  - that_guy_iain 6y ago
    > I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Let's be serious it depends on the context of the conversation. She could have been flirting with him and then when he flirted she said "but I have a boyfriend" and he could had said that and she could have agreed. That is flirting. It could have been what we suspect some guy hitting on a woman and she said "I have a boyfriend" and he said that. I used the word flirting because that is what the source used. The guy was probably a creep and I am not surprised either but if you're going to have a code of conduct for everyones safety then say someone had to go to their room for their safety tells me your code of conduct isn't for safety but for apperance.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  That fast.ai post is insane. I feel really bad for him. I watched Lex Fridman's interview with him and he seemed very nice and thoughtful.
turbonoobie 6y ago
CoC is such a strange document. All I’ve seen it do is sit in a repo as a flag post. When I see a license document it gets me thinking about what intentions the project is released with, but when I see a CoC document all I do is mentally filter it out and go about my day.. One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything. It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code. Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything. We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that. A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything. /idealistic early morning rant over
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Is this mutually exclusive to stopping people doing bad things and being bad people though?
  - baud147258 6y ago
    You don't really need a CoC to do that.
    - XorNot 6y ago
      I'm curious how you plan to run a community without formalizing the rules that are expected to be followed somewhere. Restaurants generally have a sign outlining dress and language expectations, why is it so controversial to document community behavior expectations? There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it". This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.

that_guy_iain 6y ago

> around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced. The things about the CoCs that really annoyed me: 1. People would literally go around projects and send pull requests just to change the code of conduct to improve the wording even tho no one had made any complaints or anything. Anytime a CoC get added you would see more people mess around with the CoC than the code. It was like people just wanted to look like they were improving things while not actually doing anything. 2. The only blog posts I've seen about CoCs at conferences and stuff have sounded nuts. One was for SunshinePHP[0] where one of the infractions was someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better. They wrote that they told the offender to go to his room to prevent him from being assaulted. But mentions nothing happening about a guy threatening violence for flirting. I would understand if they were threatening violence in response to violence but flirting, nah. Then there was the whole fast.ai[1] thing where the infraction was basically someone was offended on the behalf of someone else who wasn't offended. [0] https://geekyboy.com/archives/1179 https://geekyboy.com/archives/1179 [1] https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/ https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/

eertami 6y ago
>someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Your man was being a creep and while I'd agree violence isn't the answer, I'm not at all surprised if he was threatened. (I also wouldn't be surprised if he was just told to back off initially but then pushed the issue because that is what creeps do.) And if for some reason this still isn't obvious to the reader, here's a top tip for how to avoid getting into a fight: maybe don't insult people.
- that_guy_iain 6y ago
  > I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Let's be serious it depends on the context of the conversation. She could have been flirting with him and then when he flirted she said "but I have a boyfriend" and he could had said that and she could have agreed. That is flirting. It could have been what we suspect some guy hitting on a woman and she said "I have a boyfriend" and he said that. I used the word flirting because that is what the source used. The guy was probably a creep and I am not surprised either but if you're going to have a code of conduct for everyones safety then say someone had to go to their room for their safety tells me your code of conduct isn't for safety but for apperance.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
That fast.ai post is insane. I feel really bad for him. I watched Lex Fridman's interview with him and he seemed very nice and thoughtful.

turbonoobie 6y ago

CoC is such a strange document. All I’ve seen it do is sit in a repo as a flag post. When I see a license document it gets me thinking about what intentions the project is released with, but when I see a CoC document all I do is mentally filter it out and go about my day.. One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything. It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code. Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything. We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that. A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything. /idealistic early morning rant over

zimpenfish 6y ago
> We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Is this mutually exclusive to stopping people doing bad things and being bad people though?
- baud147258 6y ago
  You don't really need a CoC to do that.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    I'm curious how you plan to run a community without formalizing the rules that are expected to be followed somewhere. Restaurants generally have a sign outlining dress and language expectations, why is it so controversial to document community behavior expectations? There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it". This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.