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I Violated a Code of Conduct

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Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#271

Post by kordlessagain »

ahelwer wrote: post #19
echelon wrote: post #6

We're literally tearing ourselves apart, and I don't want to hold opinions about human beings anymore. Anyone can be an enemy or dislike you. Social media has rotted us from within and from all sides. Left, right, it doesn't matter. Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people. This is madness. Yes, I did read the article. We're cancelling people over criticism . Somebody needs to hide Linus. I don't like cri…

I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era. Here's a taste: in 1970, the national guard murdered four unarmed students at Kent State. A poll showed 58% of Americans blamed the students, who were widely smeared. Maybe the real rot of social media is how it erases in peoples' minds the idea that anything could have happ…

Media abuse is not a new thing. Understand that the current iteration is worse than the last one and that has resulted in worse polarization is probably a better way to put it.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#272

Post by googthrowaway42 »

tptacek wrote: post #258
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wh…

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.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#273

Post by donor20 »

sgustard wrote: post #236
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A vocal minority is enough to dox you, to bother your workplace, your school/college, to get you fired/expelled, and alltogether, to make you "too hot" to hire, especially by large tech companies, who have whole departments of "vocal minority" people dealing with tiny stuff like that. Cancel culture has to stop.

Can someone give me specifics on who's affected by "cancel culture"? It's a meaningless label to me. I mean, I think Bill Cosby has been cancelled. Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling. And the lady who called the police on the black man in central park. Some of those may be unjustified. Is this really the biggest problem in society?

I had a teacher in high school (black). He was an absolute favorite of students of all backgrounds. Extremely strict, very buttoned up. In the arts department. I think he literally was the advisor for like the multi-cultural club (that did somewhat lame lunch multi-cultural stuff).

He put on a performance that turned out was racist or sexist or something. Think les miserable - we were always doing stuff like that, so the stories were very varied.

Bam, he was gone. Even the students in the group that should have been offended were like, he's great. But there was a very very vocal very small set of more activist parents (white BTW!) with one or two students who were after him. Reminds me of the (white again) liberals in Portland or Seattle going after the police chief to cut her pay etc (black women).

I was like, who cares what two parents and their kids think. But they got in the paper talking about the racist (I think?) environment he created / messages being sent / cultural appropriation etc. This is theatre - people dress up as different characters so no question an identity politics issue was there most likely.

And yes - he was gone the next year after something like 12 years of building up this amazing program. His performances were sold out for multiple showings (literally everyone in school, every parent, every relative, randos went). The shows were major. All the context was overlooked (this guy was so formal he was never crude / rude or insulting). He'd spent all these extra hours doing all these things to bring different groups together - through music and more (he was an immigrant).

Two to three people, a scared / sensitive admin team, and boom, thousands of folks the worse for his going.

Everyone is worse for this. A lot of the categories of offense are extremely broad or very subtle and penalties are very severe.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#274

Post by ajsnigrutin »

free_rms wrote: post #267
klmadfejno wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, cha…

Who's in charge of "unpleasant things"? Are these things that a vast majority of the anglosphere, including POC, women, etc, wouldn't take offense to? Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language with no mandate.

> Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language from the top down.

The problem with that tiny % is, that they are loud, and that we give them attention. And by we, i include everyone, from a reddit upvter to mainstream media.

It's 2020, milk is racist, rice is racist, syrup is racist,... and all that because of a few loud people powered by the media, grabbing views from the offended few and utraged many.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#275

Post by meowface »

ben0x539 wrote: post #230
meowface wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer to make the implicitness explicit, in that case: "if the project owners consider your behavior overly assholish, you may be blocked from contributing, and the owners will add a notice to a page documenting the sanction and rationale". This makes it clear upfront that it's inherently and deliberately subjective. Then people understand what the CoC is: the project owners just moderating the project as they s…

> and the owners will add a notice to a page documenting the sanction and rationale I mean, that's basically a CoC-by-example. I don't really disagree with that modulo some surmountable reservations about giving too much attention to either bad actors or victims. Where I think this falls short is that, when spinning up a new project, you'd start with a blank page, so people _don't_ have the opportunity to determine w…

>Where I think this falls short is that, when spinning up a new project, you'd start with a blank page, so people _don't_ have the opportunity to determine whether they disagree with your moderation style until enough bad things have actually happened. Why not carry over your learnings from previous projects?

If every single project on GitHub right now removed its CoC, how much would really change over the next month or two? The vast majority of people know what's generally acceptable or unacceptable, and the vast majority of open source project owners share that sensibility. There may be a rare case of a project owner who thinks saying "hi, it might be better to do [X]" is offensive, or a contributor who thinks it's okay to say "this code is fucking terrible, you're a moron", but unless you're dealing with Linus Torvalds or someone else really unusual, it's almost never a concern.

When contributing to a project with such a blank page, you run the risk of encountering that odd project owner who seems to diverge from almost everyone else in the community, but I think the risk is so low and the impact so minor that it's not worth worrying about it much. And if it's truly a concern for some reason, you can just click on the owners' other projects or Google their names/monikers to see if anything concerning comes up.

I definitely think project owners should moderate shitty behavior, and I think for other sorts of communities (like message boards) there might be stronger requirements for somewhat more explicit rules, and if a particular project for some reason has had more than one instance of behavior the owner finds unacceptable but contributors don't then it makes sense to explicitly clarify some things, but in general I don't really understand all of the bureaucracy surrounding this.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#276

Post by cambalache »

jml7c5 wrote: post #125
ausjke wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch "the social dilemma" Political correctness is killing this country, inside out. The media and big-tech are now the big brothers. The network did not bring people together, it drove us apart. Even this post will be downvoted, because it does not sound "kind and nice", because it complained about big-media-tech's censorship, thus it must be censored at HN

There is a lot of division over political correctness, but I would not suggest that it is the cause , any more than a cough is the cause of a cold. There is something that is driving us apart on many, many issues, and political correctness just happens to be one of the more prominent ones. And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general. It's when a post veers too far into conspiracy o…

> And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general.

As long as you blame the "correct" people. You can blame politicians, rich executives, Russia, China and you will be lauded here.

You blame the hypocrisy of certain social movements, FAANG employees, Nordic countries, in general anything that can impact the POV of the average HN user and you will be downvoted swiftly. Most websites, this included, do not work to amplify the spectrum of opinions presented but to concentrate it in a tiny, fiercely regulated window. In that sense, old forums, usenet and even the daily mail comment section were more egalitarian.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#277

Post by tptacek »

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #272
tptacek wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. ;)

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#278

Post by canjobear »

ekianjo wrote: post #80
ahelwer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era. Here's a taste: in 1970, the national guard murdered four unarmed students at Kent State. A poll showed 58% of Americans blamed the students, who were widely smeared. Maybe the real rot of social media is how it erases in peoples' minds the idea that anything could have happ…

> I encourage anyone who believes social media has divided our society like never before to read a small amount of history of the Vietnam war era. You are missing an important point though: with machine learning, you can make sure all social media will be optimized naturally to put the maximum amount of people's hair on fire, all the time. Outrage create clicks, replies, and with recommendations engines it's served t…

Outrage spreads just fine without machine learning. All you need is a platform that makes mass signaling cheap. Maybe machine learning intensifies the effect a small amount, but I am not aware of evidence that it is decisive.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#279

Post by the_only_law »

cambalache wrote: post #276
jml7c5 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of division over political correctness, but I would not suggest that it is the cause , any more than a cough is the cause of a cold. There is something that is driving us apart on many, many issues, and political correctness just happens to be one of the more prominent ones. And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general. It's when a post veers too far into conspiracy o…

> And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general. As long as you blame the "correct" people. You can blame politicians, rich executives, Russia, China and you will be lauded here. You blame the hypocrisy of certain social movements, FAANG employees, Nordic countries, in general anything that can impact the POV of the average HN user and you will be downvoted swiftly. Most websites, th…

Genuine question: what the hell do Nordic countries have to do with media censorship in general?

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#280

Post by ben0x539 »

lmm wrote: post #265
ben0x539 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't communicate what you consider to be dickhead behavior, so it invites fear, uncertainty and doubt both in whether my behavior is okay, and in what behavior of other participants I can expect to be "protected" from.

So like every other CoC, except with significantly less fear? (being branded a "dickhead" is something you can shrug off; being branded a bigot far less so).

I'd say it's more fear? If I don't get any hint as to what kind of behavior the individual maintainers consider dickheadish, I have to worry about that with every interaction. If you have a CoC with even very vague and subjective rules, I at least know what kind of stuff you care about and then at worst I can be extra careful around that.

(Sure, I can shrug off the judgement, but being blocked from their repo is still a hassle if it could have been avoided with better up-front communication.)

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