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Nearly every point in this list assumes the issues people are addressing with code of conducts boil down to over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas. It is ess

by rfrey 11y ago

Nearly every point in this list assumes the issues people are addressing with code of conducts boil down to over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas. It is essential an extended denial that there is ever a real problem. That might be, but the article doesn't even try to make that argument. Instead it makes a caricature of people who think there is sometimes a problem, and furthermore think that making expectations explicit rather than implicit is a good and helpful step. The article is lazy, cynical, and reflects shallow thinking.

sombremesa 11y ago
"in fact, we won’t bring it up, or ask" Sounds like a CoC.
- sarciszewski 11y ago
  I can't speak for everyone, but the communities I'm involved in are far too technical and busy doing technical things to give a shit about anyone's gender, sexuality, skin tone, or culture. (Religion isn't even on our radar.) Can you provide insight into something of a technical nature? YES: Welcome, friend. NO: GTFO and/or LMGTFY That's not really CoC-ish.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Then how will you notice if some of the people doing technical things are specifically giving more insight or more benefit of the doubt based on gender, sexuality, skin tone, culture, or religion? If you are not paying attention, you're open to abuse. Hopefully there is no abuse; most people are good at heart. But you have no way of knowing. This strikes me as an un-technical way to approach problems, especially if you know that there are problems in other projects.
    - sarciszewski 11y ago
      > Then how will you notice if some of the people doing technical things are specifically giving more insight or more benefit of the doubt based on gender, sexuality, skin tone, culture, or religion? We don't care. Or, to be completely intellectually honest, at least I don't. I'm interest in the output and the ideas that are shared. The input is none of my business. I judge people for their relevant behavior, not their state.
      - geofft 11y ago
        Sorry, I guess I was a bit unclear. You don't care, sure. But someone working in the project with you might decide to exercise bias, for lots of reasons. (Maybe they grew up indoctrinated into bias, and it's hard to shake. I grew up in the Southern US, I get that.) Do you know that you will notice? If you're only paying attention to output and ideas, does it matter to you if the output and ideas are only coming from certain people? You might decide, of course, that if you're getting enough output or ideas, you don't need all the new contributors you might get, and if you only get those that get past people's biases, that's enough. I would be unhappy about that, personally, but it's clearly possible to make a thriving open-source project with such a philosophy.
        sarciszewski 11y ago
        In my experience, the top contributors tend to have open minds. In practice, I have not run into much bigotry with the people I associate with, except for the occasional newcomer who is quickly asked to leave.
coldtea 11y ago
>Nearly every point in this list assumes the issues people are addressing with code of conducts boil down to over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas. Yes. That's why I think they've nailed it. This is, much more often that not, the case. People have been capable of coexisting in social situations without an explicit CoC for millenia. And they have been doing just that on the internet since its inception. Heck, they're doing it in most non-US Western countries without many issues...
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  > People have been capable of coexisting in social situations without an explicit CoC for millenia. People have been excluding minorities and disadvantaged groups for those same millennia. Your argument is almost verbatim that of antivaxxers who argue "people were fine before vaccines!" while ignoring all the evidence that people weren't.
  - spotman 11y ago
    Can you point to where this is happening more than the after mentioned over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas issues? ( I mean in the context of our industry ) Dongle Gate / Pronoun Gate / Opal Gate... whats next? Let me guess: I'm an asshole for asking for proof. Sigh.
    - geofft 11y ago
      Do you believe that our industry employs black people (a demographic, which, at least in the US, have been fairly clearly historically discriminated against, until the passage of legal codes of conduct) at a rate commensurate with their relative skill and interest compared to non-black people? http://insights.dice.com/2014/11/11/african-american-it-pros-on-diversity-in-tech/ http://insights.dice.com/2014/11/11/african-american-it-pros... http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-data/ http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-d... http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf
      - 11y ago
pdabbadabba 11y ago
> The article is lazy, cynical, and reflects shallow thinking. Agreed. It also attempts to blame the victims of various forms of discrimination, harassment, etc. on the Internet for the distraction that their complaints cause in the community. He should stop to consider that maybe the people doing the discriminating, harassing, etc. are the real problem. You might also streamline a community by adopting a zero tolerance policy towards discrimination, etc. That way, people are deterred from misbehaving, and you rapidly eliminate the people who cause the problems, all while supporting people who have historically been marginalized.
shredprez 11y ago
Fair. I read it as an individual extremely burnt out by politicization, which I relate to. Taking the various problems for granted, I definitely get a "here we go again" feeling when I see another identity-focused scandal show up on my feed. On the one hand, it's depressing how common these issues are on a wide scale and I want to see them put to rest. On the other hand, I've done a lot of work to cultivate an intelligent, balanced social/professional group specifically so I wouldn't have to worry about these issues in my daily life. I started out on board with using the internet as a medium for advocacy. Now, after a couple years of the scandal-shame-"apology" cycle, I'm cynical and frustrated. There's always some idiot treating people around them like garbage. There's always somebody with a story about their mistreatment. There's always some org making empty changes to appease public outrage. I've done what I can locally and virtually and (go figure) it did little to fix a society-wide issue. The constant barrage of victimization and victimhood wears us all out and it's no longer a purely social topic. Music, movies, industries, churches, countries, there's mildly-inappropriate-to-horrific stuff happening everywhere and the conversation never stops. At some point it does start feeling like you can't talk about anything online without having to pay lip-service to the crimes of strangers world wide. It's become harder and harder to connect and the threshold for "unforgivable mistake" has gotten lower and lower. So it just doesn't feel worth the energy to engage anymore. The world isn't a better place because of this particular conversation we're forcibly engaged in all the time. People are generally incredibly bitter or entirely apathetic, either doing the right thing or committed to their crumminess. Rarely does the virtual mob even take anyone down and at least half the time when they do it's some nobody making a typical human mistake that could be easily addressed with normal 1-1 interaction. Meanwhile the companies that peddle this stuff get rich on our collective disgust and 99% of the jagoffs in the world keep doing their thing until the outrage lotto picks their number. That's our tactic for social improvement. It's a joke. Anyway, I'm saying I get where this individual is coming from. I suspect the site is as much an angry rant as a serious idea (there's nothing groundbreaking about people behaving themselves: most of us do it most of the time, and I think that's the point). But a lot of these Codes of Conduct feel like a flimsy response to the toxic way we talk about these problems and not a response to the problems themselves. nCoC seems to be the flip-side of that coin, It says "we have problems, we don't know how to discuss them productively, so let's focus on the work we share and forge relationships that way." In most settings, that's the one good approach we can all reliably execute. My two cents.

by rfrey 11y ago

sombremesa 11y ago

"in fact, we won’t bring it up, or ask" Sounds like a CoC.

sarciszewski 11y ago
I can't speak for everyone, but the communities I'm involved in are far too technical and busy doing technical things to give a shit about anyone's gender, sexuality, skin tone, or culture. (Religion isn't even on our radar.) Can you provide insight into something of a technical nature? YES: Welcome, friend. NO: GTFO and/or LMGTFY That's not really CoC-ish.
- geofft 11y ago
  Then how will you notice if some of the people doing technical things are specifically giving more insight or more benefit of the doubt based on gender, sexuality, skin tone, culture, or religion? If you are not paying attention, you're open to abuse. Hopefully there is no abuse; most people are good at heart. But you have no way of knowing. This strikes me as an un-technical way to approach problems, especially if you know that there are problems in other projects.
  - sarciszewski 11y ago
    > Then how will you notice if some of the people doing technical things are specifically giving more insight or more benefit of the doubt based on gender, sexuality, skin tone, culture, or religion? We don't care. Or, to be completely intellectually honest, at least I don't. I'm interest in the output and the ideas that are shared. The input is none of my business. I judge people for their relevant behavior, not their state.
    - geofft 11y ago
      Sorry, I guess I was a bit unclear. You don't care, sure. But someone working in the project with you might decide to exercise bias, for lots of reasons. (Maybe they grew up indoctrinated into bias, and it's hard to shake. I grew up in the Southern US, I get that.) Do you know that you will notice? If you're only paying attention to output and ideas, does it matter to you if the output and ideas are only coming from certain people? You might decide, of course, that if you're getting enough output or ideas, you don't need all the new contributors you might get, and if you only get those that get past people's biases, that's enough. I would be unhappy about that, personally, but it's clearly possible to make a thriving open-source project with such a philosophy.
      - sarciszewski 11y ago
        In my experience, the top contributors tend to have open minds. In practice, I have not run into much bigotry with the people I associate with, except for the occasional newcomer who is quickly asked to leave.

coldtea 11y ago

>Nearly every point in this list assumes the issues people are addressing with code of conducts boil down to over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas. Yes. That's why I think they've nailed it. This is, much more often that not, the case. People have been capable of coexisting in social situations without an explicit CoC for millenia. And they have been doing just that on the internet since its inception. Heck, they're doing it in most non-US Western countries without many issues...

ceejayoz 11y ago
> People have been capable of coexisting in social situations without an explicit CoC for millenia. People have been excluding minorities and disadvantaged groups for those same millennia. Your argument is almost verbatim that of antivaxxers who argue "people were fine before vaccines!" while ignoring all the evidence that people weren't.
- spotman 11y ago
  Can you point to where this is happening more than the after mentioned over-sensitive, reductivist prima-donnas issues? ( I mean in the context of our industry ) Dongle Gate / Pronoun Gate / Opal Gate... whats next? Let me guess: I'm an asshole for asking for proof. Sigh.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Do you believe that our industry employs black people (a demographic, which, at least in the US, have been fairly clearly historically discriminated against, until the passage of legal codes of conduct) at a rate commensurate with their relative skill and interest compared to non-black people? http://insights.dice.com/2014/11/11/african-american-it-pros-on-diversity-in-tech/ http://insights.dice.com/2014/11/11/african-american-it-pros... http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-data/ http://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/tech-diversity-d... http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-24.pdf
    - 11y ago

pdabbadabba 11y ago

> The article is lazy, cynical, and reflects shallow thinking. Agreed. It also attempts to blame the victims of various forms of discrimination, harassment, etc. on the Internet for the distraction that their complaints cause in the community. He should stop to consider that maybe the people doing the discriminating, harassing, etc. are the real problem. You might also streamline a community by adopting a zero tolerance policy towards discrimination, etc. That way, people are deterred from misbehaving, and you rapidly eliminate the people who cause the problems, all while supporting people who have historically been marginalized.

shredprez 11y ago

Fair. I read it as an individual extremely burnt out by politicization, which I relate to. Taking the various problems for granted, I definitely get a "here we go again" feeling when I see another identity-focused scandal show up on my feed. On the one hand, it's depressing how common these issues are on a wide scale and I want to see them put to rest. On the other hand, I've done a lot of work to cultivate an intelligent, balanced social/professional group specifically so I wouldn't have to worry about these issues in my daily life. I started out on board with using the internet as a medium for advocacy. Now, after a couple years of the scandal-shame-"apology" cycle, I'm cynical and frustrated. There's always some idiot treating people around them like garbage. There's always somebody with a story about their mistreatment. There's always some org making empty changes to appease public outrage. I've done what I can locally and virtually and (go figure) it did little to fix a society-wide issue. The constant barrage of victimization and victimhood wears us all out and it's no longer a purely social topic. Music, movies, industries, churches, countries, there's mildly-inappropriate-to-horrific stuff happening everywhere and the conversation never stops. At some point it does start feeling like you can't talk about anything online without having to pay lip-service to the crimes of strangers world wide. It's become harder and harder to connect and the threshold for "unforgivable mistake" has gotten lower and lower. So it just doesn't feel worth the energy to engage anymore. The world isn't a better place because of this particular conversation we're forcibly engaged in all the time. People are generally incredibly bitter or entirely apathetic, either doing the right thing or committed to their crumminess. Rarely does the virtual mob even take anyone down and at least half the time when they do it's some nobody making a typical human mistake that could be easily addressed with normal 1-1 interaction. Meanwhile the companies that peddle this stuff get rich on our collective disgust and 99% of the jagoffs in the world keep doing their thing until the outrage lotto picks their number. That's our tactic for social improvement. It's a joke. Anyway, I'm saying I get where this individual is coming from. I suspect the site is as much an angry rant as a serious idea (there's nothing groundbreaking about people behaving themselves: most of us do it most of the time, and I think that's the point). But a lot of these Codes of Conduct feel like a flimsy response to the toxic way we talk about these problems and not a response to the problems themselves. nCoC seems to be the flip-side of that coin, It says "we have problems, we don't know how to discuss them productively, so let's focus on the work we share and forge relationships that way." In most settings, that's the one good approach we can all reliably execute. My two cents.