Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

The claim that there is always someone creating strawmen is itself the creation of a strawman. If you assume good faith of participants then it might be useful to assume good faith of those who criticise even if they misunderstand or misread or assume unwarranted implications.

The geek community was largely formed by people who had been unfairly targeted by those who enforce social norms: picking inappropriate targets, taking things to inappropriate extremes, and the like. Our response was to create a community that didn't enforce social norms at all -Geek Social Fallacy #1, essentially- and a lot of beautiful things came from that. We changed the world for the better in a lot of ways, precisely because we refused to reject people just because they acted in ways that went against the social norm.

But there was a problem: some behaviors really shouldn't be accepted, and some people really won't change without the application of force. Unlike the people who first formed the geek communities -people we should all aspire to be like- this second group was fairly ostracized: appropriate targets, appropriate measures. They came to our community, not precisely for support, but for enablers; having been rejected from everywhere else, they fled to a group that refused to reject anybody. And that's exactly what we did, if not always enthusiastically. It's hard to find a geek circle without at least one of Those Geeks: the kind who drag things down and ruin things for everyone, but people feel a duty to put up with their crap because that's what it means to be a geek. They continue to abuse us and play us, for exactly this reason. And they aren't going to change unless they are forced to. Some of them won't change even then, but you do what you have to do.

And that's the problem with the kernel's old code of conduct, and with these "Kind Communication Guidelines". They're a step in the right direction, because they spell out unacceptable behaviors. But because they don't spell out clear and consistent consequences for those behaviors, creepers gonna creep. You might catch a few mild cases, and that's not insignificant, but the mild cases aren't at the core of the problem, so the needle isn't going to move much.

I know only too well how hard it is to lay down the law against someone who is abusing your goodwill, especially when they're valued for other reasons, and most of all when it feels so much like they're "just a little more extreme" than most. It's a horribly painful thing to have to do -if you haven't had to do it before, it hurts just as much as you might imagine, if not even worse- and I can't blame people for being reluctant to do that. But this is how you induce change in the hardcore. Guidelines like this can serve as decent warning that real change is coming, but they don't bring about that change themselves.

Still, this is a step in the right direction. It's at least an acknowledgment that there are norms, and they are to be observed. But it's not going to be the magic pill. There simply is none.