Assuming a majority of nice people, explicit rules can be exploited by a few assholes against their "enemies", while trusted human moderators only need to be kept in check with elections.

> 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.

People have different level of tolerance to negative behavior. That includes both your team and your community. Having a clear rules allows you to

1) point both involved and uninvolved people to the code of conduct when you end up taking action.

2) avoid disparity of enforcement within your team

3) funnel disagreements (from both teammates or community members) by focusing them on the rule, rather than on a general debate on how should the community should be managed.

If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.

> If people commit a lot of energy to a community/project then for many "I didn't like this behavior, end of discussion" won't cut it.

Of course it does. If the community/project leaders are not aligned with your ideology, it's better to find one with alignment than to attempt to corner them with a written set of rules.

> 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.

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.

Written rules aren't for the offenders, they're for the conflict-adverse community members who get uncomfortable when someone needs to be thrown out for community health reasons. They don't really have strong opinions supporting the person's behavior, but they're uncomfortable with the idea of people getting exiled from the community, so come slithering out to protest when an asshole is exiled for being an asshole. Since their primary reason for speaking up in the first place is discomfort with conflict, a quick "they broke the rules" tends defuse further argument.

Why wouldn't "I have taken a dislike to them. Pray I do not take a dislike to you as well" also solve these people's problems? There's surely something more than "dislike of conflict" here, or else they wouldn't invite conflict by disagreeing with the now decided and closed conflict's resolution.

Yeah, if a community has someone with that kind of generally trusted authority, that works great. If a community doesn't, agreed upon rules are the next best thing.

Not every person who does something problematic is actively seeking to do so in order to hurt someone. Also, there are plenty of people who are looking for spaces that are "okay" with their views, and a CoC that makes it clear the space is not can absolutely make them avoid it.

You are so focused on the strawman of problematic people being mustache-twirling villains trying to disrupt spaces they dislike, that you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for.

> you're discounting the actual purpose of CoCs, which is to make it clear who your space is for

Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave. My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.

Technology Z meetup / user group is a space for people who are interested in Technology Z. Repository Y is a space for people who are interested in Repository Y.

If someone needs a CoC to figure that out, bad luck.

You want to start discussion about War X, vilify everyone just by being born in that country, please do it outside my repo / user group. Plenty of spaces you can do it and there, you'll be welcome to do so. Want to talk about evil black / white / DEI / right wing people, please also leave my group out of it.

> Code of conduct is not about that. It's about how to behave.

Behavior is who people are. It's the 'content of their character' that MLK spoke of.

> My community is not that special that you need a user manual on how to behave, you should have learned it by age 10, latest.

And yet different communities have vastly different concepts of acceptable behavior. CoCs let people know whether their behavior is acceptable in a community.

The CoC isn't for them. As you mentioned, they're gonna be assholes no matter what. Kicking someone out of a group is possibly traumnatic but usually a bunch of drama. Having the god king of the group capriciously kick random people out of the group for no clear reason, and without communication as to why leaves the remaining members worried they could be next. I mean, sure, if you want to be the groups dictator and rule by fear, I guess that's fine, but imo that's no way to run things. By having something documented, with a procedure, gives a framework to follow for when you do have to kick someone out that's a bit less made up than "we just didn't like that person".

> If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them.

I'm sorry, but that's just not true.

You're treating humanity as if it's divided into two distinct sections: Those Who Behave Well, and Those Who Behave Poorly.

In reality, different humans have different ranges of ways they prefer to act, and most are quite amenable to reasonable, clearly-stated codes of conduct for interaction in a particular space.

There is a small subset of people who are either deliberately antisocial for the sake of it (trolls/griefers/etc), and another subset that are genuinely just assholes who will, if given the leeway to do so, cause endless problems in a community.

But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct not because they actively want to, but because their unstated assumptions about how people should interact clash with the unstated assumptions of other people there. Having the code of conduct lets everyone coming in in good faith align their expectations and avoid these unnecessary conflicts. They're like a Session 0 in a TTRPG in that sense.

> But there are many, many more who would cause friction with others in such a community without a code of conduct

Hard disagree... I've never seen one have this effect. IMO you don't need a CoC to suddenly understand what should already be common sense i.e. don't be a dick. Either they were already going to act that way, or they weren't.

> I've never seen one have this effect.

How do you think you would see it?

Under normal circumstances, what it would look like from the outside is just...someone not causing friction, because there is a code of conduct. Or someone causing friction, because there isn't one.

The former looks identical to someone who would never have caused trouble in the first place, and the latter looks, if not identical, at least very similar to someone who would have caused trouble, no matter what.

The way I see it, the people who would cause friction anyway won't be stopped by a CoC.

And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.

Another commenter (cannot find their name now but I saved the text) said exactly what my experience has been:

> A written code of conduct can legitimize petty disputes based on interpretations of the text, even if the issue itself is something easily addressable like using the word “master” in a programming context. It can become a tool for manipulation (pushing someone out for “CoC violation” vs simply correcting the wording).

> The way I see it, the people who would cause friction anyway won't be stopped by a CoC.

> And the people who wouldn't cause friction are already behaving so they don't need one.

Both correct. By definition, in fact.

CoCs are for the people in the middle of those. Who do, in fact, exist.

I think if someone needs to be told to be nice... it's time to grow up. Open source projects are not your mother and we shouldn't have to treat people like children, nor get chastised for having that (IMO very reasonable) stance.

It's not about being "told to be nice".

It's about setting a shared understanding of norms.

It's about whether the kinds of jokes allowed among members are "as raunchy as you please", "polite jokes only," or "none".

It's about whether you're expected to work out differences in private chats, address them in public, or bring them to a moderator.

It's about whether your comments on a code review started by another member have to be addressed by the committer before the review can go forward.

Any time you think the way you do things in the open source project (or any other kind of community) you contribute to or run is The Natural, Obvious Way Everyone Does Things, you're probably wrong, and some other people or projects do things exactly the opposite way and think that's just as natural and obvious.

Presumably the code of conduct was introduced to solve a problem. So I'd be interested in hearing about an example of a community that had problems with their social fabric, and then introduced a code of conduct, and then could demonstrate that those issues in their social fabric were addressed.

In the history of the world? Yeah. Anytime you have a communal living space, you're going have to set norms on what constitutes shared community stuff. Is the milk in the fridge George's and no one is allowed to touch it, or do we, as a household, want milk communism and it just goes as shared groceries and we go often enough that there's always milk? There's not a right answer, but it's up to the community to decide what's normal in its culture. People come from different backgrounds, were born in different countries and have totally different expectations as to what constitutes "don't be an asshole". Do you put your elbows on the table? Is slurping your soup a sign of respect or disrespect? What you don't see is people who see a lack of a code of conduct and then just don't join.

Don't these tend to be discussions between the people involved?

Whether or not anything needs to be written down afterwards seems like it would be a separate thing.

In my experience, it absolutely does help. But everyone has their own experiences.

> should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.

It's not a matter of the action being transparent, it's the motivations. Sometimes, it's not clear to community members why the action was taken, if there's no CoC or rules. "They're being an asshole" is a lot more subjective than "They were breaking the rules"

> It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say, without pointing to a document you just put in your repo, 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.

Sure, this might work for a small community or group, but the fiasco with Nix seems to suggest this isn't the case at a certain size. Some people apparently want accountability and transparency from their moderators.

> 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.

Great! That's fine! Not every community needs such things. Some do.

It's never about the rules, it's always about the perceived authority of the moderator or the decision maker.

This is very much so for small communities who don't have the infrastructure to litigate issues in a legalistic manner... but, even in areas like public law, the rules don't really matter, it's the perceived authority and impartiality of the courts that keep a legal system up and running. (think of any controversial Supreme Court decision -- do people really care what the law actually says and whether the legal reasoning is sound... or do they just speculate about the political leanings of the judges?)

Since most people writing up CoCs aren't good lawyers or experts in drafting (and finding loopholes in) rules... having a smaller "attack surface" actually makes a lot of sense.

That said, if the community is large or important enough that it already retains some legal advisors, then maybe yeah, make the rules more specific or something.