Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

Think of that truthteller vs. weenie scenario: in cases where one person is potentially hurting someone else's feefees over professional criticism, there is for sure some subset of those cases where that's exactly what's happening. One person is 100% correct, and is being brutally honest with someone else who is both incompetent and hypersensitive, and deserves that brutally honest criticism because that's the only way to get through to them.

That's a subset of those situations. I don't know how much of a subset- 25%? 50%? My gut says more like 1-5%, but my gut is naturally biased (like everyone's). But in 100% of those situations, I guarantee that the brutally honest truthteller THINKS that's what the situation is. In my experience, the brutally honest truthteller is expressing their own confidence in themselves far more often than they're expressing an objective measure of cold hard truth. Some subset of them are expressing cold hard truth that can't be ignored, but all of them think they are. If they had really truly done their homework and knew what they were talking about, they would have eventually learned humility and skepticism, and would be much less likely to jump into the brutally honest truthteller role in the first place.

Simple example of productive etiquette: when criticizing someone's work, it's generally much more effective to phrase it in such a way that it doesn't come off like a personal attack. Meaning, some variant of "this code is bad" works better than some variant of "your code is bad". In the latter case, natural and common cognitive biases (i.e., human nature) are such that people will almost always feel at least a little bit defensive, and are more likely to reject the rational aspects of the criticism because they sense that the other person is criticizing their work for personal rather than rational reasons. I'm totally aware of these biases in myself and I'm still almost as susceptible to them as anyone. It makes it easy to brush off the criticism as coming from an irrational place, on a subconscious level that never even rises into the conscious mind. Making it personal diminishes the credibility of the criticizer in the eyes of the criticized.

So, as a rule, I have found that it's much more effective to make an effort to phrase things as objective criticisms rather than personal attacks. This isn't tiptoeing around someone's feefees, it's literally just making an effort to communicate in a way that is most likely to produce a positive outcome (in terms of production, not feefees- the preserved feefees are just a pleasant side effect). In my experience, that's all that most CoC's or calls for workplace civility or whatever are advocating. Some people are used to working in large organizations full of big egos and unbalanced people from all over the world. Other people have spent their professional lives in much smaller bubbles, and never had cause to think about any of this stuff. But successful open source projects resemble the former much more than the latter, and can require similar social awareness to keep things running smoothly. Things like CoC's, ideally, just make sure that everyone's on the same page in as harmless and nonintrusive way as possible. I'm sure they've been misused or poorly implemented in specific situations, but in principle it all seems eminently reasonable to me.

The Internet's a different beast- it's often an ignorance-not-malice situation when ugly things happen in places like open source project mailing lists. Electronic communication is notorious for not conveying nuance or irony or sarcasm. A CoC (in principle) seems like nothing more than an explicit statement intended to curtail ignorance that could be misinterpreted as malice, which in turn could derail a project.

This is a perfectly fair and valid thing to do, yet it's always portrayed by opponents as "tokenism", "gotta catch 'em all", etc., and then asserted to be "diversity for diversity's sake". As I originally said, such people either have not been paying attention, or have been misinformed (and are now actively spreading misinformation).

This is why I challenged someone's "collect diversity tokens" assertion by telling them to source the phrase in actual claims made by companies. I know they won't be able to, but I know they also deeply and likely unshakably believe -- because they're been bombarded with the message in HN threads, and on other social media -- that that's the real goal.

But for you, let's just flip the script: the unspoken principle behind your comment:

The fact that companies have programs targeting recruitment specifically to minorities says otherwise.

is that companies explicitly choose their recruiting pipelines and should be held responsible for the demographics which come out of those pipelines. I would agree with that principle, but I suspect you would find extreme distaste for it if it were actually to be neutrally applied. Current recruiting pipelines produce dismal demographics precisely because of who they target, and if companies were held responsible for that they'd have to make large-scale changes.

And yet I find no evidence of concerted effort against those things, or even minimal effort to express disagreement with those things, on fossdev's part. Only their presence here.

It would have been easy to add a condemnation of those things in the original comment, too, in order to make sure nobody could read the lack of it as support or at least acceptance. But they didn't do that.

It's fair to see someone condemn what they believe to be one instance of a violation of a principle, and ask why they picked that one and not other, larger or more impactful, violations of the same principle.