I disagree. I think we should generalize more, beyond codes of conduct: If you are building an adjudication process for resolving non-criminal personal conflicts (whether that be a Code of Conduct, an HR department, a Title IX proceeding, a professional organization, or something else), you should take a look at Anglo-derived common law and the safeguards against abuse that have been evolved over the centuries.

That doesn't mean everything needs to go through the courts; it means that if your process allows something that Anglo common law does not allow, you should have a good answer for why that is. Does it allow anonymous accusations? Is the accused allowed to know the charges against them, before a finding of guilt is rendered? Is there a presumption of innocence? Is the accused allowed to have a trusted third party - one who knows the rules of the game - to advocate on their behalf? Who, exactly, is responsible for deciding matters of fact vs matters of "law"? Is there an appeals process to fix possibly incorrect decisions?

Going by the linked document by Valerie Aurora, a good Code of Conduct allows anonymous accusations, the accused does not get to know the charges against them before a finding is rendered, there is no presumption of innocence, the accused does not get a third party advocate, matters of fact are necessarily decided by the same committee that makes the rules, and there is no appeal process.

This doesn't mean that such a committee will always do wrong. But I think it's worth thinking about how people operating in bad faith (either on the committee, or reporters to it) can abuse those features to achieve goals that are not actually aligned with what the Code of Conduct is trying to do. Yes, it's true that people can't be put in jail for these sorts of things, but a poorly-run adjudication process can have significant negative personal and financial effects on people.

Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate. Sorry, I disagree: people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable. I can throw a party and not invite you simply for writing this comment; I can start a project and not allow you to contribute. You can relate to the rest of the world that I did that, and let them decide what that means to them.

We've gone out of our way to encode into law the exceptions to that rule. We can talk all we want about "anglo-derived common law" in those cases.

You inadvertently gave away the game.

We can all agree that everyone has the right to be arbitrary and capricious. Codes of conduct are a formalization of expectations and rules for behavior. The are often tied (explicitly or implicitly) to an adjudication and enforcement process much more complicated than the person in charge just saying "get the fuck out".

However when someone brings up the idea of improving that bureaucratic process by comparing and contrasting Codes of Conduct language and enforcement to our society's hard-fought experience in creating fair justice systems, you retreated right back to the right to be arbitrary and capricious.

This is why people can't help but wonder: what the fuck are we trying to accomplish here? All I know is I need to publish a specific flavor of bureaucratic boilerplate so I don't get my reputation attacked for not publicly promising to kick out people I would have kicked out anyway. And that I can use that document to dole out punishments with a larger air of legitimacy and seriousness than just telling someone not to come around my place anymore.

I think in your cynicism you've totally lost all meaning and purpose of the code of conduct

It's not a piece of legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)

When an organization has a code of conduct, it makes clear how I can complain about actions or events that occur under their jurisdiction. This is important because if you have high friction to reporting issues, issues don't get reported. [1]

What happens then? People who have legitimate grievances are the ones who stop coming around and you're left surrounded by the assholes who chased them off

The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone:

1. I know that my actions are above board, because I can read what is allowed

2. I know that any actions that aren't will be reported and processed not in public (eg on Twitter) but in some sort of well-defined process

3. I know what the range of penalties can be

4. If I experience a violation caused by someone else I know how to report it

Four is arguably the most important point. Otherwise you end up with would-be coc violations adjudicated on Twitter.

[1] I'll add that it should also describe how people who receive reports respond and how the issue will be mediated. All of these steps are important. It's important for conference volunteers to know what to do when they receive a report. It's important that you know how to make a report.

Oh, I think you underestimate my cynicism. I think some people adopted a piece of legalese without caring about the exact bounds and effects of implementing the terms of that legalese. It was vaguely in the direction of "stopping the bad stuff from happening" and was written with serious-sounding words so they just sort of assumed everything would work out fine. This blog post and HN thread are proof it has not.

>The code of conduct should be cheerfully received by everyone

I never cheerfully receive process. Process is valuable, process is important to have, but god-oh-god is it ever a massive pain in the ass.

Designing, drafting, implementing and refining process is HARD. I professionally maintain what I'll brazenly call "actually important" process so I don't get why everyone is so squeamish around the idea of maintaining the CoC process. (Well, I suspect that they're worried it will be corrupted by those nogoodnicks that they inartfully adopted this process to get rid of instead of growing some spine and just tossing them out on their ass in the first place.)

>legalese with which you can bludgeon people to get your way (I mean it can be, but that is not and should not be the point)

Understanding that this _will_ happen is just another part of designing process.

This is a great response, thanks!

I think I agree with 99% of it.

I'll take the rest of this comment to note that elsewhere I'm lauding codes of conduct because they are lighter-weight than certain legal processes.

These documents don't stop at describing the appropriate mechanism for reporting an incident, but rather they address topics of remediation and punishment: topics of justice.

defen points out that when these constitutions tread into topics of justice, they would do well to consider how to set up a fair system and what common mistakes to avoid.

This is a reasonable point and should not be at all controversial. Do you want fair treatment?

This begs the question of who decides the rules of an organization.

I want to attend events with rules I like - I might like them because they're fair, I might like them because they ban symbols I find offensive.

Ultimately, it's up to the organization to define the rules, and it's up to me to decide if I want to attend an event with those rules.

I think many of the people who write CoCs are oblivious to the fact that people lie, or may just be unreliable witnesses. Nor are the creators of a CoC trained or able to run an adjucation process.

If you punish anyone who has a report filed against them without evaluating those reports or requesting any proof, then you will quickly be left with a small pool of very manipulative people looking to game the system.

> I think many of the people who write CoCs are oblivious to the fact that people lie,

I posit that those who write CoCs are _precisely_ the type of people who lie. The average person DOES NOT lie as a matter of course. Small lies, bigger lies occasionally when embarassed. People who write CoCs want to control others. People who want to control others are narcissists/social dominants. Narcissists lie ALL THE TIME.

I think the problem arises when people want to have it both ways. If you want to say "we don't like you, please leave", you're probably [1] within your rights to do so, but then you don't also get to claim to have a fair and impartial process.

[1] This gets nastier when "you" is something like a corporation, a university, or the well-funded host committee of a generally public event. Legally and ethically, your latitude to exclude people from a private party is much greater than is your latitude to exclude people from a public-ish gathering that any person could show up to.

Yes the problem is giving the impression of a formal process and all that entails (i.e. fairness). If you want an informal process then the code of conduct should be informal: "Be nice, don't be a jerk".

It's not "every group of people" -- it's organizations that invite the participation of the public, or at least of others they don't know well, as long as they adhere to the mores of the community.

More importantly, I take the parent's point to be, not that such an organization "owes" anything to anyone, but simply that anyone formalizing a Code of Conduct and a committee to enforce it would do well to understand why the protections of due process exist. If their intention is truly to create a safe space for interaction, setting up a process that can be easily abused is not going to help with that.

> it's organizations that invite the participation of the public,

I feel like this is a very important classification: Inviting someone to an event with Byzantine rules and punishments should be frowned upon.

There's a disconnect here in that your argument presumes that we are talking about groups of people which organically and unanimously decided to install a CoC as a guideline or explanation on how exactly they are going to exercise their right to free association. However, the scenery that opponents of the CoC-associated culture typically see, and consider the modal scenario to be opposed, is that CoC proponents demand that groups of people that do not initially include them (or at least that they are a fairly marginal minority in) institute CoCs. Quite often, this also includes an implicit or explicit demand to install an outsider belonging to the "CoC proponent" group in a position that has wide-ranging powers to interpret the CoC. (After all, someone not properly trained might commit a rookie mistake such as thinking that in the story this thread is about, the enforcers were actually the ones who violated the CoC!) Consider the now-famous example of the person who first wanted to impose a CoC on Ruby canvassing/thinking out loud about removing Matz from his BDFL position.

You could argue that, if someone tells me to install a CoC or else (they will complain to my employer, and spread the message that I am a bad person), they are just exercising their right to free association and/or helping my employer and anyone who may see that messaging exercise theirs, but I think that this is very close to being a free association counterpart of the "free speech" defense of blatant slanderous misinformation, or people using a public list of businesses operated by members of a minority to inform their non-patronage.

> people can decide they don't want to associate with you or me for reasons we don't find justifiable

Unless your decision involves a protected group, in which case this is a little more nuanced.

> I can throw a party

Professional organizations putting together conferences do not get the same liberties as individuals organizing family events.

Individuals might have the right to disassociate, but organizations have more power then individuals, and concentrate power in the hands of a small number of people, and thus should have some democratic checks on that power. Elections are one form of democratic check on power, but a randomized selection of peers works as a statistically sampled approximation, which is why the concept of a jury exists.

Any organization without democratic checks to redistribute power to its constituents is generally seeking to hold hierarchical power over those constituents and others, and should be distrusted.

People also have the right to associate, like a person could crash your party if it’s a public place and not against the law. You can also be a dick and find ways to actively ruin other people’s events. What I’m saying is that your comment doesn’t make sense since no one is owed anything, not even the right to disassociate. He’s within his “right” to complain about them dissociating themselves with him and pointing out things he thinks might help someone’s decision when it comes to associating with them

Your party wouldn't have a formal written document that claims to set out specific rules, wouldn't be inviting arbitrary members of the public on the basis of a shared interest, would make no claim to be anything other than an arbitrary group of people picked by you on the basis of whatever, and generally differs from this situation in a lot of ways.

Nonetheless, if you invited a bunch of people to your party, then you and three others inexplicably ganged up on one of them, told them they were a bad person for claiming someone else was wrong, bullied them, made them cry and then banned them from future parties, then that sort of behaviour probably would get around and you'd soon develop a reputation for being an asshole.

Before today's post I had no views on JupyterCon, after today's post my view is that it seems to be run by assholes; that will certainly impact my future decisions around Jupyter and its community if I end up in a position to need to make them. That outcome could have been avoided by the advice to follow best practices from the legal system. This unfortunate blog post could have been avoided, and JupyterCon would have its reputation intact.

> Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else, presumptive of their right to associate

If you "start a project and not allow [me] to contribute" then you're by definition starting a much more traditional, hierarchical, authoritarian community, with the forms of dispute resolution you would expect there. Now that's okay, but it means that you should probably be upfront about it from the onset. And it also means you should expect pushback and accusations (probably accurate ones) of bait and switch if you change directions midway. They will say "that doesn't sound very egalitarian to me" and they will probably be correct. It shouldn't be a problem if you don't want to court that segment, or power your community through their contributions. But if you do want to court that segment, then I think they will want you to play by their rules.

I also think this is why the idea of Anglo common law was brought up. It is a form of dispute resolution which is pretty amenable to egalitarian, decentralized dispute resolution. What I like about Anglo common law is that it minimizes the need for a fair authority figure in favor of a fair autonomous process operable by a majority of equal peers:

> Does it allow anonymous accusations?

> Is the accused allowed to know the charges against them, before a finding of guilt is rendered?

> Is there a presumption of innocence?

> Is the accused allowed to have a trusted third party - one who knows the rules of the game - to advocate on their behalf?

> Who, exactly, is responsible for deciding matters of fact vs matters of "law"?

> Is there an appeals process to fix possibly incorrect decisions?

All of these concerns must be addressed to create such a system. And I think that a lot of prospective contributors (such as myself) do not want to be part of a community unless it is run by such a system. I also think that such contributors will be particularly incensed about contributing to such communities that say they are run by such systems but which are actually oligarchies. In that case, I would feel like I had originally contributed to the community as an equal, but I am instead now just a cog helping build someone else's dream. This will not just discourage me from contributing to the community, but it will make me regret ever doing so in the first place, and resent the community's leaders for lying to me.

So going back to your original example, I think you are well within your rights to start a project and not allow me to contribute. But if you do that, I think you have to be honest about what kind of community you are really building. It is one thing to say you wish to build a community through benevolent dictatorship. It is another to say you wish to build a community through distributed consensus. It's not really a two-way door. Switching directions midway can cause collateral damage with an extremely high blast radius.

> Your premise is that, rather than free association, every group of people owes a kind of due process to everyone else

They very well might. When you exercise your judgment in any way, you are liable for damages. Due process might protect you from that.

I agree with the top-voted reply: you want Code-of-Conducts for the cover it gives to organizations, and not for the protection it offers to the victims of organizations.

> but the piece itself seems pretty balanced and thoughtful

The piece is not balanced of thoughtful. The piece is crafted to present the case in a way that's immune or resilient to typical and expectable attacks. It underlined the core failings of the concept behind a CoC, and it provides a concrete example of how people use CoCs as an oppression tool that's leveraged to manipulate and condition groups to follow the leader's bidding.

> Here, I think the story is pretty much just: people screw up

It really isn't. This isn't a mere "whoopsie". This is a CoC working exactly as it's supposed to work. By design. This is exactly what they were created to achieve. A community member said something, some people didn't approved based on their personal tastes, and thus they proceeded to leverage their CoC to persecute and punish that individual to keep the community in line.

There is absolutely no other use for a CoC. This is precisely what they were created for. This is no accident or mistake.

> A community member said something, some people didn't approved based on their personal tastes, and thus they proceeded to leverage their CoC to persecute and punish that individual to keep the community in line.

Not sure if it's too soon to joke about this, but I find it funny that "I like Jupyter notebooks" was such a controversial opinion at JupyterCon.

(Yeah I know it was actually the mask advocacy and not the talk itself.)

> (Yeah I know it was actually the mask advocacy and not the talk itself.)

Is that what actually caused the complaints?

> Is that what actually caused the complaints?

Given that the complainers were anonymous (thanks to the CoC process), we'll never know. But it seems like a reasonable guess.

Why would we never know? Quoting from the blog post: "The specific reasons given were that [...]" followed by a bullet list. Your guess is unwarranted speculation.

> Why would we never know? Quoting from the blog post: "The specific reasons given were that [...]" followed by a bullet list. Your guess is unwarranted speculation.

The question was: can we find out if hidden political vendettas against OP were the cause of complaints? You're implying that, yes, we can find out, because the complainers provided a bullet point list. If the complainers had hidden political vendettas against OP, do you actually think they would have listed them in the bullet points?

Can someone give me the tl;dr of what the author's "mask advocacy" was and why it's so controversial? He only alludes to it in passing in the piece.

The author was one of the primary drivers of widespread mask adoption for Covid transmission suppression, by popularizing epidemiological and public health evidence.

See: https://masks4all.co/about-us/

I don't understand. Why would mask advocacy mean the CoC people have a vendetta against him? Is the conference run by Trump acolytes?

Wearing masks for covid prevention it seems like

> why it's so controversial?

I recommend watching Stephen Colbert's or Trevor Noah's talk show skits to gain an idea of why a pro-mask position is controversial in the states.

Exactly what punishment was given here? I've read the piece several times, and couldn't figure it out. The most negative thing that was done to him was that they found him to have violated the Code. If there was a punishment, he seems to have found it less doleful than the finding itself and the process by which it came about.

That's understandable, but to me it also seems to illustrate the reason we're having this. He felt persecuted by their words. They were unkind to him, and it left him "shattered".

CoCs calling for "kindness" are put into place precisely because words have such power to harm. That vagueness makes them prone to abuse as well, but the sentiment on this thread seems to be, "Because this has the potential to harm me it must be stopped, but the kinds of harms that I could inflict on other people the same way are unimportant and do not need to be addressed."

I'm sorry he was treated this way; this doesn't seem to have been handled well. It's hard to deal with situations where multiple people are experiencing the "low emotional resilience" he cites (both himself and the apparent fragility of the person who reported him). But I think it's important to recognize that there are many "oppression tools", so it's worth reconsidering who has them even without a CoC, and how they can be countered.

From what i can tell there was no punishment, he opted out of the process before the "next steps" phase. Or in other words, the process itself was the punishment-- being called in front of a tribunal and scolded by strangers.

You realise conference organisers can do the very same thing without a code of conduct, right? That a code of conduct can be used as an "oppression tool" doesn't mean that its absence doesn't lead to even more "oppression". If you want to compare the relative merit of two things, like having a code or not, you need to consider both sides rather than just point out the perceived downsides of one.

I'm curious how you think they would achieve the same without a Code of Conduct, the acquired public support and the pseudo-court-system that comes with it.

Would you accept (or would one even send) an ad-hoc post-conference invite to 'talk about something you did wrong and how you should be punished' from a committee member?

Exertion of power does not require a pseudo-court-system and it can be exerted in the furtherance of fairness just as much as in its hindrance (people are also punished because there's no enforcement of some behaviour). Again, to discuss whether something is worth doing or not, you have to consider all the upsides and all the downsides of doing it as well as those of not doing it.

If they do it without, they have to own the decision. The CoC provides plausible deniability that it was personal.

It also makes it less likely to actually be personal. I don't think anyone claims that due process is always free of bias and error, but that doesn't make it more likely to be more biased.

Well, that is a take. It feels like it must be exhausting to have that take, and I certainly don't share it, but I acknowledge that it is one.

It is not a take. It's an objective description of what a CoC is and how it is designed to be used. There is no way around it. At all. I'm surprised you feel the need to turn a blind eye to this fact.

Let's put it differently: without it's oppressive and persecutory function, what's the point of a CoC? To make it even simpler to you, what do you expect if someone in a community is deemed in direct violation of a CoC?

Like any other system of laws, a code of conduct necessarily restricts the boundaries of what one individual is allowed to do in order to ensure there is a safe space for others. When used correctly, instead of inhibiting the free exchange of ideas, a CoC helps keep participants in an open and receptive mindset instead of a closed and defensive one.

Acknowledging that people come from different backgrounds or belief systems where norms and customs are different, a good code of conduct offers a concise and easy-to-understand set of core expectations that the participants in a community agree to follow, along with a mechanism for reporting and curing violations when they occur. Curing violations should typically involve helping members learn and adopt better ways to communicate their ideas and interact with others, rather than shaming or punishing them for lacking these skills or for having a bad day.

As a gross example, a functioning code of conduct should make the difference between someone saying “I don’t understand why anyone would believe X”, which is an open statement that invites thoughtful discussion, versus “X is stupid and anyone who believes it is an idiot”, which is a closed statement that triggers fighting instead. Or, it should make the difference between someone making sexual advances at a professional conference because they think it’s what the other person wants, versus someone not engaging in that behaviour—even if they still think that—because it’s outside of the norms listed in the code of conduct.

It is certainly the case that codes of conduct are sometimes abused to create cultural echo chambers[0]. This isn’t because the concept of a code of conduct is flawed; rather, it is often (in my experience) because people adopt CoCs without having the knowledge and skill necessary to administer them. When this happens, the CoC can become a mechanism for suppressing disagreement instead of a mechanism for creating a healthy environment where ideas and relationships can thrive despite disagreement.

[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/10/idea-labs-echo-chambers.html

In general I agree with your point that communities often need some sort of guard rails to ensure that they can stay productive, especially as a community grows.

I think the challenge is in enforcement. A code of conduct should be a measure of last resort. In your example:

> a functioning code of conduct should make the difference between someone saying “I don’t understand why anyone would believe X”, which is an open statement that invites thoughtful discussion, versus “X is stupid and anyone who believes it is an idiot”, which is a closed statement that triggers fighting instead.

I don't think that the code of conduct should be invoked the first time someone steps a bit onto the side of expressing something in a hostile way. When collages are in the process of solving real problems, and getting real work done, it can be the case that disagreements occasionally get heated. If someone steps a bit over the line in terms of how they express themselves in such a disagreement, the first response should be for a colleague to put the metaphorical hand on the shoulder and invite the offender to reign it in a bit, equal-to-equal, rather than invoking the authority of the CoC right away. If someone repeatedly demonstrates abusive behavior, then it makes sense to escalate this to a matter of community governance.

It's certainly not ideal if people express themselves in a hurtful or inflammatory way, but if everyone is self-censoring for fear of punishment, it can negatively affect the quality of work that gets done.

You inadvertently proved a point here on misuse of code of conducts.

Declaring that “X is stupid and anyone who believes it is an idiot” without any discriminatory intent is definitely in bad taste, but should _absolutely not_ be grounds for a CoC violation or any kind of punishment, other than "your talks are obnoxious and we're not going to be inviting you or accepting your papers anymore".

Hm, and me I thought most of them were just a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list.

My take is that the problem with this code of conduct was that it was dumb. I want to recommend to you the degree to which it is easy and relaxing to just acknowledge that and move on, maybe with a note or two about what not to do in any code of conduct you write. It seems --- I could be wrong, I started today confidently wrong about bay leaves --- like the alternative is an exhausting vigilance about conspiracies to control and persecute. Even if you're right, nobody is going to believe you, so what's the point in letting your pulse quicken?

> racist trolling on the mailing list

Is this a widespread problem in software-related communities? I'm genuinely asking, because if it is maybe I am just not aware of it, but for example in the open-source projects I have been involved with the conversations tend to be extremely focused on the subject matter, and I'm not even aware of the race or gender of the people I'm conversing with.

I have never encountered this in 23 years of participating in open source projects of all kinds.

20 years back (in Debian) there was some banter on the mailing lists, but never of that nature. It was mainly jokes about women. The community was primarily of young males, and that did stop as more women got involved. However, I should state for completeness that none of it was anything that anyone should have been banned over; sometimes a joke was just a joke, before humour was effectively outlawed lest anyone get even slightly offended.

I don't think so. I have never seen it happen in my 10 years in open source.

If you've never seen racist trolling on GitHub, maybe it's because you're not looking rather than that it doesn't happen

The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery

(This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)

I don't think anyone was suggesting that it literally has never happened, so much as that it's very, very rare. Moreover, that kind of behavior would get you banned irrespective of any CoC, so the question remains: what does a CoC add here?

> I have never seen it happen in my 10 years in open source

Seems like a very generous reading of what the person I'm specifically responding to said

I don’t see how you can possibly think that. Saying that you’ve never experienced something is not a claim that no one has ever experienced that thing. Mine is not a generous interpretation, but rather I’m not going out of my way to infer some nefarious subtext.

I think the problem is essentially this: if you're a white male, you may essentially never experience or see racism / sexism in tech.

If you are a woman or black or ... you will very likely experience sexism or racism. You will probably also see more, because you are used to identifying it.

If you say "a third [1] of the people in this group experience a bad thing" I would say that's pretty wide-spread.

The OP was specifically saying "it's not widespread, I've never seen it" [2]

I'm not trying to claim there's a nefarious subtext. I'm not saying the op is sexist or racist. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people experience this, and one of the stated goals of CoCs in open source or at conferences is to help combat it. I think that's a good thing, and while you or perhaps others have pointed out that a community could combat such negative behavior without a CoC, the CoC does give some indication of how such behavior will be dealt with (before I join the community/attend the conference), which can increase my confidence recommending a conference or increase someone else's confidence attending (or participating in an open source community etc)

[1] https://psmag.com/news/sexism-in-the-tech-industry

[2] not a real quote so please correct me if it's way off, I'm being lazy

Also, I know they were referring to open source - maybe they've seen workplace sexism etc and were specifically excluding that. In that case I'm definitely misquoting and apologize

I'm just speaking for myself, but in terms of the open-source projects I have been a part of, communication either happens over a mailing list, or a discourse forum. A lot of the time you only know the people you're interacting with as a screen name, so you don't even know their race or gender. And 100% of the content of the discussion is either purely technical in nature (e.g. how do I use this API feature, what JSON structure is expected etc) or is something operational like the timelines and priorities of the project.

It's just hard to imagine how racism or sexism would enter into to a community like this because the race and sex of the participants is not known, and you're not even discussing races or genders at all, heck you're generally not discussing people at all.

That fact that it's hard for you to imagine just means your imagination isn't very good

It happens. People leave tech communities because of it. I don't know what else to tell you. I've provided citations to this effect in a bunch of other comments.

It's important to note, though, that people can do or say racist or sexist things without targeting it at someone. That would still impact someone's decision to stay in the community, even if the person who said it didn't mean to offend them.

To be fair, the article in question is not about a software project, it's about an individual who is using github as a food blog being trolled using the github collaboration features. It's an example of horrible online behavior, but I don't think it's relevant to OSS communities.

I can understand how you might think that code repos are different from other social media sites.

However, they aren't. They require moderation because people are rude even when not anonymous.

Here's a quote from the vscode repo moderators:

> We deleted a handful of comments which we deemed too offensive to leave as-is (foul language, racist remarks, etc.). We also deleted a few issues that were overwhelmingly offensive. Unfortunately, that resulted in some non-offensive comments within those issues being deleted as well.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440

Surely you can't continue to claim that open source communities do not suffer from such issues, now, right?

I'm not saying that open source communities are not in need of moderation. Of course they are, like any online community. Basically every open online forum is vulnerable to vulgar, hateful and abusive content being posted. The point this sub-thread is referring to, is that CoC's are there as:

> a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list

This is what seems a bit funny to me, because I would take it for granted that racist remarks would not be tolerated as a matter of course. It doesn't seem to me that you need a CoC to enforce this.

And I would repeat that in my personal experience, having been involved with OSS discussions for over 10 years, I have never personally encountered this.

Of course you don't need a CoC to enforce anything! You can moderate aggressively without one.

What it does is sets expectations. It sets expectations for everyone involved in any interactions. In general, this should give you confidence that there will be some moderation or recourse if you experience rude behavior. That may allow some people who have been burned by ruder communities to be willing to give yours a try.

In the c++ community[1] someone did just publicly announce that they were tired of the hostility so... yes

https://thephd.github.io/the-community#

[1] if you think this is "just a c++ problem" you're going to be very disappointed

What are the author's actual complaints about the C++ community? Maybe I am lacking context, but it's extremely difficult for me to understand it by reading this blog post.

It's super inside baseball, sorry

Background:

The boost community has managed to lose a large number of very technically proficient people who were tired of dealing with racism/sexism

JeanHeyd came to prominence a few years ago with some stellar open source libraries and gave some pretty good conference talks & joined the c++ committee.

Throughout his continued work in the c++ community, he ran into a lot of... unnecessary, non-technical feedback.

At some point, he got fed up with it all and created this.

Within the c++ community there are people who are known to be particularly toxic, fwiw, and some of this is calling them out specifically.

I think everyone who has attended a committee meeting knows who/what he is talking about.

There's also an additional bit, where he managed a discord server for one of his open source projects. When discussing Black Is Tech, he got racist pushback.

Hopefully this helps add a little bit of context. I don't think it's too important to understand the details. The tl;dr is that an extraordinary developer, speaker, committee member left the community because he found it to be hostile

That's a fact, and it's one engineers should be reckoning with. Your actions matter.

> [CoC are] a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list.

The implication being that every project without an established code of conduct is awash with racism?

Exhausting vigilance about conspiracies indeed.

Did you skip over the word 'assure'? The implication is that other projects aren't performing that particular assurance.

Problems such as a plague of racist jokes aren't omnipresent, but they show up often enough in the world that a little signpost at the front door about expectations can help with first impressions and understanding the community.

If this were a signpost along the lines of "employees must wash hands", then there would be no problem. Of course employees should wash their hands.

The problem is the weaponization against random people for obscure reasons. The blog poster here didn't make a presentation full of racist jokes, it's not even clear what they did.

Lawful evil anti-social people exist in the world, we shouldn't let them bully people just because they're waving a rainbow flag while doing so.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but is the idea that--apart from a CoC--people might venture into a community thinking racist jokes are okay?

A lot of people will venture in thinking that maybe they're okay here, and they'll find out later.

The implication being that the coc gives clear guidance on what to do if it does happen

Fun straw man though

Apropos of nothing related, I want to know: What, exactly, were you confident yet wrong about in regards to bay leaves?

Someone asked on Twitter what, if any, flavor bay leaves had. I repeated advice I'd heard: supermarket bay leaves are bad, so just add a lot of them. Then I acted on another piece of advice: if you want to know what bay leaves taste like, steep them in water and taste the water. I did. Bay leaves are disgusting. Nobody should add more of them to anything.

It's a funny take. Have you tried oregano|paprika|basil|salt|pepper flavored tea? You'll end up not seasoning your food at all :)

Bay leaves work their magic in stews, especially beans. Not much else. (I absolute hate licorice btw).

What you're saying is true, but consider this also: America's Test Kitchen made identical versions of a bunch of recipes with identical ingredients on identical equipment simultaneously, and with no exceptions, the tasting panel preferred the ones containing bay leaves, but interestingly, they couldn't state exactly why.

This here is more interesting than everything else in the thread. IIRC ATK is a TV show so I presume the experiment wasnt particularly rigorous, but it's still neat to learn.

I wouldn't recommend making tea out of most herbs, including uncontroversial staples like basil and oregano. Doesn't mean they don't add useful flavors in the right dishes.

Wrong twice in one day, amazing. Many spices and sauces are not good if you do this, I submit Fish Sauce for your consideration.

Using more than one entire bay leaf is often too much. Is a strong spice. Is poisonous in big amounts but half a leaf here and there adds a nice flavor.

On the other hand, I had seen americans before to mistake bay leaves and cherry laurel. Specially when trying to harvest leaves in gardens. Don't do that. They look similar but cherry laurel contains cyanide.

i should object to this strenuously as someone with mediterranean heritage, but this is absolutely not the bay leaf take i was expecting and i have to admit that astrigency you hate is like the whole point and i would never eat one by itself so i am torn here.

Ha. I saw the saw the start of that conversation on Twitter. I didn’t know you went ahead and ran an experiment. Hilarious. Good work. They definitely add bitter/dark tones.

It’s not a objective description. It’s a subjective one. You’re describing the intent of other people, which is really your interpretation of their intent.

Yes in some cases there are bad things in this world that are promulgated and promoted under the guise of being good. Learning to recognize those bad things for what they are instead of naively accepting their self-serving sanguine explanations is part of being a developed adult.

You write this as if it's insight, as if maybe it's the first time it's occurred to the reader that "good" things can be bad. We all know that. It's the sentences that come after that thought that have meaning.

I don't think it's particularly insightful. I'm just stating it since it doesn't seem to occur to most adults these days.

Certainly it is interesting to consider the set of circumstances that give victimhood and fragility such power to those who claim it.

That's quite the inversion. It is interesting that the people who focus so much on the analysis of hierarchies to the point where they see them everywhere and assert the unjustness of hierarchy qua hierarchy end up just inverting these hierarchies and using their power to tyrannize other people.

What does that say about the people that allow them to do that?

> This is a CoC working exactly as it's supposed to work. By design.

> There is absolutely no other use for a CoC. This is precisely what they were created for.

> There is absolutely no other use for a CoC. This is precisely what they were created for. This is no accident or mistake.

I run groups that use a CoC and I assure you that they aren't supposed to work like this, weren't created for this and it is a mistake if they are.

> There is absolutely no other use for a CoC.

Sure there is. It's a good way to keep racist and sexist trolling and harrassment out of talks.

Frankly, and you should be careful of not becoming too cynical about it, I think there are people that want to build their ego with fighting sexism and racism through penalizing others. And if there isn't anything obvious to be found, smaller and smaller infractions are used as an excuse to exclude other people. They want to play cop on the internet.

> And if there isn't anything obvious to be found, smaller and smaller infractions are used as an excuse to exclude other people. They want to play cop on the internet.

This sounds terrible and I guess I'll have to modify our CoC to deal with it when it occurs.

OTOH, we've had frequent cases of sexual harassment (primarily men hitting on women at events) and a CoC has been extremely useful in dealing with those situations.

> OTOH, we've had frequent cases of sexual harassment (primarily men hitting on women at events) and a CoC has been extremely useful in dealing with those situations.

This seems like a pretty reasonable use for a CoC in my view--flirting isn't ubiquitously taboo (unlike racism, trolling, or overt sexual harassment) nor should it be, but it's understandable that a community would prefer to just prohibit it outright and set that expectation clearly up front.

CoCs should focus narrowly on this kind of thing (of course, without giving the impression that these are the only offenses that a person might be kicked out for), and proponents of CoCs should talk about this. Instead, much of this thread is talking about racist trolling, as though CoCs are necessary or sufficient for dissuading a racist troll (everyone understands racism is unacceptable; if you're motivated to cross that line anyway, a CoC isn't going to deter you).

This happens to be a case where the adsurdity of using CoC to silence criticism is quite clear, as no “minority” is involved (right?). If the exact same thing happened but the criticized party played the minority card, or someone played it for them — in this case the criticized party don’t even care, I dare say it would immediately become much more controversial.

Heck, I once shared such a story and got labeled, with zero evidence, as someone “who like to casually throw around homophobic slurs”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21173970 Thankfully the community flagged that attack.

This instance is BS

How does this instance suddenly being thrown into gender and pronoun political correctness ?

agreed. it deserves a response of "this is true, code of conducts need to be done thoughtfully and well" but can expect a response of "this proves babies should be discarded with bath water"

If the U.S. accidentally bombs a civilian caravan when trying to bomb terrorists isn't the critique "we should stop trying to bomb terrorists" equally as valid as "we should be more careful where we drop bombs".

The article explicitly argues CoC's should be done better, but it's also a story of collateral damage. The author might believe these issues are infrequent and a non-issue but not all the readers share this belief and I don't think there is anything wrong with that reaction.

I think extending the metaphor to bombs is a bit much. It's more like if the U.S. accidentally bombs a civilian caravan and the response is "we should stop trying to assassinate terrorists" in other countries.

I wouldn't call that an "invalid" opinion or critique, and again I would think it's an expected reaction. But it would be overly broad, based solely on that incident. Of course we don't exist in a vacuum, so I'd expect that other information would be brought in to support such an argument. Fair enough.

However, an argument that draws an isomorphic relationship between the ability to target a document and the ability to target a bomb is probably attempting to draw outside the lines.

(Particularly since in this case, it's equivalent to the victim of the bombing being the one who is reporting on the incident and quite clearly stating despite what they've been through "I support the thoughtful bombing of terrorists, but that is not what happened in this case.")

Hang about. The metaphor is more like this:

> It's more like if the U.S. accidentally bombs a civilian caravan and the response is "this shows why we should not have foreign policy.”

Without a CoC, this exact situation could have happened, but it just would be "your talk was removed for making people uncomfortable." The CoC just adds a layer of indirection, and in this case a rather non-sensical one, since "making people uncomfortable" isn't a CoC violation under the NumFOCUS CoC.

I don't know where I stand on CoCs in general, but saying "See this is why CoCs are bad" is like saying "See this is why we shouldn't punish someone for murder" when someone gets thrown in jail for murder and all parties agree that that the person did not kill anyone (though one side claims that what they did was still "murder").

I think the idea is that codes of conduct create the apparatus - meaning the committees and procedures, that caused this to happen. If this happened in a no-CoC universe, Jeremy gets the call that this talk made some people uncomfortable and they've taken down the talk and he reposts it on his website with a shrug.

Perhaps you should ask Violet Blue what she thinks of Valerie Aurora's "excellent" training:

http://www.securitybsides.com/w/page/35868077/BSidesSanFranc...

I based my judgement of that deck on reading the deck, and I really don't care what Violet Blue thinks about anything at all.

> The thing HN likes to do best with any story is to generalize it and find sweeping conclusions.

This is what intelligent people do. They recognize patterns and extrapolate. At this point the vast majority of people have experienced variations of what this guy has gone through.

In my own experience I have seen the exact same pattern of behavior in a slack community set up for my town.

> This is one of those posts where the title is going to trigger a lot of unproductive subthreads,

They seem quite productive to me. This sort of pathological behavior is increasingly common and finally people are willing and able to talk about it in public.

> This is what intelligent people do. They recognize patterns and extrapolate.

Any level of intelligence does this. How well one extrapolates varies, and extrapolation is always eventually wrong.

If we were to let that be a showstopper we would only have scientific hypothesis in place of scientific theories.

Consult the search bar below to disabuse yourself of the notion that "intelligent people" have had any trouble discussing their qualms about codes of conduct until now.

I can assure you that speaking out against CoCs under your real name in a professional context can be quite difficult. The people who tend to create, promote, and defend CoCs tend to engage in incredibly Kafkaesque and pathological behavior as a matter of course.

As far as HN goes, I use the term "intelligent" quite loosely but one of the hallmarks of intelligence is pattern recognition.

> I can assure you that speaking out against CoCs under your real name in a professional context can be quite difficult.

Christ I wish.

Maybe it's not what's being said but how it's being said. And, the irony of your bit about intelligence is that you're critiquing an instance of pattern recognition. ;)

> Maybe it's not what's being said but how it's being said.

This is the kind of rhetoric I'm referring to when I say Kafkaesque. These people derive power from being victims so if they are given this benefit of the doubt you are granting them where the onus is on some person to walk on eggshells lest that person upset the perpetually upset these perpetual victims will of course announce they are upset and victimized no matter what is said, thus fending off any attack.

Kafka would be proud.

You know it's possible for us to just disagree about things, right?

"Agreeing to disagree" is the easy way out of an argumentation. I think the parent is right in that having to worry so much about how others see things is unproductive and toxic. There's such a diversity of sensitivities, having to cater to all of them is a fool's errand.

Yes of course but in this case you're just wrong. This is a very well documented pattern of behavior at this point. Fortunately you're not my boss or colleague and so you can continue to promulgate these structures that cause a lot of misery and distress and lost productivity and I will continue to avoid being subject to them.

There's no "but". You feeling that I'm "just wrong" is what disagreement is. You don't have to drag Kafka into it. He's got better things to do.

I've been scrolling through the comments, and this whole place seems like a mad house. Everyone's got their own theory on what's "Destroying society/America/the world/the Internet" and are foaming in the mouth convinced that their pet idea is the right one...