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The thing is that codes of conduct do not help honest actors “regulate” and deal with troublemakers. I used to organize meetups and I visited meetups organized

• curtisblaine 1y ago
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  • chrislo 1y ago
    What evidence do you have for that? I was involved in adopting a code of conduct for a local tech meetup and we did that because a couple of incidents that weren't handled very well left other people feeling unsafe and unwelcome. Having some guidelines in place reassured folks that we took those concerns seriously and gave us a framework to deal with unwanted behaviour.
    • arpinum 1y ago
      Anti-meritocracy was in in some CoCs, arguing in its favour was a reason for exclusion from an event / project. Even if the argument happened somewhere else on the internet and not in the project.
      • vkou 1y ago
        Whenever I see someone dying on the hill of fighting for 'meritocracy', in the words of another poster in this subthread, I have found them to be: > ...a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy. ... And typically with a giant chip on their shoulder. The real world's a little bit more complicated than the spherical cows that the near-religious faith in it requires.
        • arpinum 1y ago
          I'm not sure how your comment is relevant. No one is fighting for meritocracy here. Only providing the requested information about a case where CoC pushed a specific political view and excluded others.
        • deleted 1y ago
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        • raxxorraxor 1y ago
          It highly depends on what you understand that word to mean. At first it was just meant to to pronounce fairness. Nothing more to it. It was used in a context to explicitly disregard who people are and focus on what they do. And of course it wasn't meant as an instruction manual for how to run a society. It was quite explicitly a message that you are not judged by who you are. That is it, there is no ideology, there is no grand idea. That is media garbage that filled your head with a phantom. And honestly, that did a much better job than most COC I read.
          • roryirvine 1y ago
            Er, at first it was a purely pejorative term - most famously used to describe a dystopia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
    • belorn 1y ago
      From my experience, writing rules directly after incidents and as a reaction to incidents do not produce good results. New members of the community 5-10 years later will have no understanding of what the rules are trying to do or why they exist, and when a new incident occur the rules get rewritten again and again. The only effect is the optics as in sending a message that "we take those concern serious", but without substance, and again from experience, those people who was leaning to leave will still leave regardless. What has worked in communities I have been active in is to have continuously conversations, in combination with a no-blame culture that provide social safety for people to bring up issues and also room for people to improve without feeling personally attacked (which is the opposite of social safety).
• weird-eye-issue 1y ago
  > And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share. Has it occurred to you that's actually exactly why they exist? :)
  • blueflow 1y ago
    I mean. Whenever a code of conduct was installed in a project i was passionate about, i could look up the contributor on twitter/fediverse and see that they are a zealot about their cause. Deflecting and uncompromising, very unagreeable. They would be the last persons to know how to make a community comfy.
    • ranger_danger 1y ago
      Not surprised at the downvotes but this also matches my experience exactly. These people (who push for CoCs so heavily) in my experience tend to hypocritically attack and censor opinions they don’t like, while not understanding why people won’t "accept them for who they are". They are desperate to be the center of attention and love to play the victim. It’s like the bullied becomes the bully sort of thing. They spend more time arguing over weaponized CoCs and ideological SJW politics instead of writing code. It doesn’t help that many of them self-admittedly suffer from mental health problems.
    • raxxorraxor 1y ago
      It just wasn't a very wholesome crowd. I don't have to like everyone, but I expect everyone to not try to ban people just because they have the unfavorable opinion du jours. Maybe write that in a COC, but it should be a premise to begin with. On a completely unrelated note, you very, very rarely find real fascists in open source software projects. And for even less favorable characters it seemed that it was just powerplay by some actors that wouldn't convince their own mother that they are the most untoxic of them all.
  • mzhaase 1y ago
• squigz 1y ago
  Having something you can point to and say "This is why you're being removed" often removes some headaches. Some people will claim it's unjustified, moderator abuse, etc, if you don't. At least with some rules, there's less wiggle room. Of course, some people are going to respond poorly even with some rules, but it's also not just about the offenders - other community members being able to see there's some logic and reason to removals is good.
  • serial_dev 1y ago
    > often removes some headaches (...) with some rules, there's less wiggle room ... I understand that's the theory, but in practice, I've never seen it working that way. I don't see how having the CoC affects any of this. If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them. If someone behaves so poorly that you decide you need to remove them, the community (the small portion of people who give a f) should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed. It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say (without pointing to a document you put in your repo when you were bored), that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision". Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.
    • ang_cire 1y ago
      > If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them I think you mean, "if someone is behaving poorly, the coc did not deter them". The people who it did deter aren't behaving poorly.
      • serial_dev 1y ago
        I'm just having a hard time imagining someone who wants to be racist sexist xenophobe jerk to other people, but they saw you drafted a CoC last year in the root of your repository, so they won't... Or they were racist sexist xenophobe jerks, then you point out that "our community has a CoC", and they will stop. None of these things happen in real life.
• HankStallone 1y ago
  Right. I've seen a CoC used as a power-grab by people who had barely made any contributions to a project, when the people in charge were too easy-going or naive to shut down dishonest use of it, so they tended to side with the squeaky wheel. Once the bad actors got people they didn't like removed or driven away from the project, they just got worse, saying things like "go kill yourself" without consequence, because they were now in control and could interpret the code however they liked or just ignore it. You can't write a CoC that will prevent bad behavior from bad actors in charge, so it's worthless at best and a weapon for the unscrupulous at worst. What matters is who enforces standards of behavior, and if those people are decent and honest, no written code is necessary.
• throwaway9917 1y ago
  My experience with a CoC at a meetup was that one day a bunch of people piled on the mailing list for the meetup demanding that the meetup adopt a CoC. The majority of these people were people that either only infrequently showed up, or hadn't ever shown up to the meetup. The CoC they demanded had a bunch of social justice language. When questioned on the mailing list as to the events that had precipitated the demand, one person said they had attended a meeting and had "felt uncomfortable." However, the organizer of the meetup actually took attendance, and it turned out that the complainer had not attended that day. The whole thing seemed like a ploy to turn the meetup from people who all used the same programming language into some sort of social activism group. This was at the height of #MeToo, and it appeared that this was being weaponized to take over successful technical groups through sympathy for women.
  • Avshalom 1y ago
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    • deleted 1y ago
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  • Doxin 1y ago
    There's definitely a subset of people out there that are using CoCs as a way to install levers in organisations they can pull. I'm not completely burnt on the concept of CoCs but I definitely am very wary about them and the people who insist on them.
• duxup 1y ago
  Yeah I'd like to see some examples of "these code of conducts did good thing" before I buy into these things.
• atoav 1y ago
  I play in a band. Since we're just 4 people a code of conduct would be ridiculous. What isn't ridiculous however is that a group of people who do some shit together need to be somewhat on the same page what is acceptable and what isn't. You don't need that with just friends, but any project beyond friends needs people to agree on what kind of social space this is meant to be. If you don't talk it out the shittiest person is going to define it for you. And beyond a certain size formalizing that makes sense. Not as a tool for punishment or to point to, but so everybody can be on the same page and you know if someone acts out of line they do so despite better knowledge. If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there?
  • justinclift 1y ago
    > If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there? If it would contain stuff you're within bounds of anyways, then it's entirely unneeded. :)
    • atoav 1y ago
      Yes sure, but what I mean here is stuff, that can start interpersonal conflicts. To stay with the band example, different people will have different sensibilties around their equipment and how to respectfully treat it. If everybody does it their way you basically guarantee some sort of clash. The solution is to make a general rule that may seem overly sensitive to that one punk member that throws their gear on a pile, but everybody else is happy and the conflicts are avoided. What I want to say here, is that a good code of conduct deals with the stuff that is open to interpretation and defines it. So if our punk-bandmate throws the singers gear on a pile we don't have to argue about different definitions of how we expect others gear to be treated. So it is needed precisely because everybody thinks they are just acting normal and within bounds, even when the majority thinks they are not.
  • integralid 1y ago
    >If a code of conducts contains stuff you are within the bounds of anyways, why would you care it is there? Maybe he don't want to exclude people who are outside of the CoC norms, but can still be valuable contributors.
• cyanydeez 1y ago
  Literally pointing at a real thing is useful. Yes, rules are not logical binary that absolves you of activity but having no basis for decision making other than hind brains is how you enter the current American morass. Its the agreement to argue about a topic that is struck when you make rules. Not seeing this is how..niholists proliferats with variohs plicit ordering liks might is right
• port11 1y ago
  I'm the ‘enforcer’ of a fairly large board games meetup, and the CoC is very simple: there's 3 rules. Newcomers are especially likely to ignore some of these rules, so I notify them the first 2 times. 3rd strike and they're out. What I like about the simplicity of our CoC is that anyone can read it in a few seconds, and we can point it out to people without seeming bureaucratic or annoying. Happy to share with others. Complicated CoC documents I've seen at other groups don't seem to do anything besides giving the organisers a feeling of power/that they're doing something. Simplicity might be key here.
  • mitchbob 1y ago
    Yes, please share. Can you post a link to your CoC?
    • port11 1y ago
      No need for a link, it's about board games and the rules are (paraphrasing): 1. If you can't make it, let the host know the day before or morning of the event. 2. If you're playing at a venue, try to buy food or drinks from the venue. Don't bring lots of stuff from the outside. 3. Be kind and respect other people. Don't damage their games or act mean towards other players. We're not super strict, but people have been perma-banned for sexually suggestive remarks or being assholes. I think we've had 3 or 4 really bad cases total. Most people get temporarily kicked out for violating rule #1 a lot.