Leaning on a code of conduct to fix a cultural problem seems like a losing battle. In the sense that it establishes a framework for moderation, a CoC has some v

Leaning on a code of conduct to fix a cultural problem seems like a losing battle. In the sense that it establishes a framework for moderation, a CoC has some value, although if I'm being honest I think the CoC concept is more about signalling than anything else. But this article already hits on the core problem: We're living in a culture where a large amount of people think that it's OK to be rude to service workers because it's their job. People who don't return the shopping cart because there's no incentive. I think that engaging a beurocratic process every time you get a toxic comment will in fact not make your job as a maintainer less stressful. I also suspect that it won't reduce the volume of abuse anymore than just blocking/muting abusive folks. If anything, for most first time offenders, they're probably just tilted and telling them to stop is the most productive thing to do. But abusive asshats don't care about your rulebook very much other than to use it against you, so I really think it's not as valuable as it's being made out to be. I don't know if we can improve the cultural problem. It really did feel, at least from what I can recall, that "netiquette" was stronger at some point. Exactly what was "toxic" was tuned very differently, but that's not the point. The point is that there were SOME baseline tenets that most people expected out of eachother in a lot of situations. These days, it feels like everyone has completely different standards and really long, complex justifications for their standards on what conduct is OK and when. I dunno if that's good or not. All I know is, "don't be an asshole" is deprecated, but its replacement doesn't appear to be ready yet, whatever it is. So what do we do? Frankly, my recommendation is to detach harder. I know the "just grow a thick skin" bit has gotten stale, but that's not really the point. The point is to try to not be vulnerable. Detach. Block and mute as you need if politely asking people to stop acting like an ass doesn't work. Try not to take it personally; recognize that most people don't actually mean what they're saying. Etc, etc. Changing the world is hard and slow. Changing your own behavior is also hard, but at least you have more personal control over it. I feel bad for open source maintainers getting burnt out over this. It's a shame. But, it'd be impossible to have all of the amazing upsides of the internet and open source without some coinciding downsides. You have to be realistic to some degree.