I Violated a Code of Conduct • Hacker News Board

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#821

Post by hitekker » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #381

defen wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 relat…

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.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#822

Post by username90 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

blackboxlogic wrote: post #551

elric wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering about this. Obviously there's a demand for CoCs coming from somewhere, or there wouldn't be a supply of them. What is driving this demand? Is this demand driven by good intentions? By a genuine desire to improve diversity? To attract those who might otherwise feel less safe? Is this demand driven by a "fear of being left out" because big names in tech are setting an example? Is this demand entirel…

My hypothesis: a minority of adults with poor judgement cause legitimate problems. Organizers react appropriately and remove the person. Being expelled is scary! This person, or others fearing the same, ask "what rule did they break, is this rule applied fairly?". And the easiest way to make it less scary is to publish "rules".

If it isn't obvious that the person is a bigger problem than everyone else yet still get kicked out then the community isn't a place I'd like to be in. Either it is full of shitty people or people get kicked out for dubious reasons.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#823

Post by wrsh07 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:08 PM UTC

finnthehuman wrote: post #792

wrsh07 wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

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…

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.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#824

Post by jfengel » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

barumi wrote: post #220

tptacek wrote: post #7

This is one of those posts where the title is going to trigger a lot of unproductive subthreads, but the piece itself seems pretty balanced and thoughtful (and links to Valerie Aurora's excellent code-of-conduct training deck). The thing HN likes to do best with any story is to generalize it and find sweeping conclusions. Here, I think the story is pretty much just: people screw up, and if your project has a code of…

> 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…

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.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#825

Post by jlebar » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

rndgermandude wrote: post #778

jlebar wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This whole CoC thing is sadly fraught with virtue signaling psycho-sadists who enjoy playing tribunal. > > The people who actually cared about fostering inclusive human communities got bullied out of positions of power long ago, so that aforementioned people could run their own little Stasi It sounds like you include yourself in this group of people who care about building inclusive human communities? Generalizing…

>Generalizing to whole groups of people who support an amorphous thing, calling them "psycho-sadists", and saying they want to "run their own little Stasi" is...not exactly how I would foster an inclusive human community. Please be mindful that chmod775 didn't talk about about everybody who is (at least publicly) in support of CoCs. But rather the very vocal minority of people who try to push CoCs everywhere, then vi…

I recall I left Mozilla before the same-sex marriage fight, but I'm familiar with it.

Just as I wouldn't call Brendan or gerv a psycho-sadist, I also wouldn't call the people who called for their resignations names, nor group them all together.

I think name-calling, especially of a large group which shares only one thing in common is antithetical to building inclusive human communities. Literally we're excluding people and calling them Stasi members because we disagree with them.

If you want people to be kind to each other, and if you're against cancelling people for their opinions, it's got to start somewhere.

I also want to speak to your two other examples, Linus and RMS.

WRT Linus, I personally know many talented people who wouldn't touch Linux development specifically because of him. It's cool that Linus has made your life better. He's also made a lot of people's lives worse. Where's their due process?

WRT RMS, I take issue with the idea that he was not given due process. In fact he was allowed to stay for years, despite harassing women and acting inappropriately in his position. The Epstein email was a last straw. But also: What makes you think he wasn't given due process? He says he was "pressured" by MIT and resigned. Do you think he couldn't have fought it? It sounds like he decided not to fight it. That's different than not being given due process.

Again with RMS, it's clear that his behavior was deeply upsetting to a lot of people. https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... Where's their due process? How do they factor into your calculus of who's worthy of our compassion?

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#826

Post by skohan » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:16 PM UTC

wrsh07 wrote: post #751

skohan wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#827

Post by pseudalopex » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #714

pseudalopex wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever seen a community with more than 1 moderator and 0 written rules. At least not for very long. I used to help moderate a community. Spelling things out only helped us. Fewer incidents. More consistent moderation. Less litigation.

That's true, but it's either vague ("don't be an ass") or it's primarily a thing to have to get the moderators on the same page, not something the community needs, isn't it? In my opinion, if the rules include value judgements, they're superfluous as rules, because accuser, accused and judge can easily come to vastly different results. If you try to get beyond that and formalize it, you end up with books, and by that…

The community wanted the moderators to get on the same page. They were also tired of discussions turning into arguments like whether insulting things by calling them gay insulted gay people.

We didn't end up with books.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#828

Post by wrsh07 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

politician wrote: post #781

wrsh07 wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

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…

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.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#829

Post by fdw » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #711

fdw wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And unreasonable people don't care about lines and rules. I agree with this statement. Having or not having a CoC will not change their behavior, nor should it change your response. But the response to your response can differ: If you've been transparent from the start about your rules, there's less room to complain about you enforcing your rules. If you had no CoC beforehand, there will be some parts of the audien…

> If I'm vulnerable, why should I gamble that your views are similar to mine? Don't you do that with a CoC as well? Short of writing a long list of things that may and may not be said, you can only give a vague "please be kind to each other", but the concrete judgement what is and isn't kind depends on whether your views align with those in power. My experience is that vague rules are both a recipe for corruption (wh…

I'm sorry, I'm not sure, I totally understand your argumentation. You seem to be against vague rules ("My experience is that vague rules are both a recipe for corruption [...]"), with which I agree. That's why I want a CoC, so that the rules are open, known and overall transparent.

However, I'm afraid I fail to see why avoiding vague rules means that there should be no CoC at all. Isn't having no written/open rules the vaguest of all? Even if there are rules that only the moderators can see, how is that an improvement for the participants? They can't know what is acceptable, so neither can the accused argue against an unfair response, nor can a potential victim demand enforcement.

And why not have more concrete rules? Surely, they cannot be complete and there will necessarily always be room for intepretation, but I think it is better the more concrete the rules are.

Re: I Violated a Code of Conduct

#830

Post by username90 » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #695

ALittleLight wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rebuilt? Why? Do you read the code of conduct when you attend a conference? Personally, I haven't even read the code of conduct for my job, and certainly wouldn't read one if I was speaking at or attending a conference. The CoCs are completely unnecessary and, as shown in this example, arbitrarily enforced. In the blog post I read that their CoC prohibits threats and assaults. Consider how silly that is. If someone's…

"Why should rules exist? We should just operate on intuitive feelings of what is or isn't acceptable all the time." Why NOT formalize rules to some extent? Having a hidden set of implicit mores is far worse. In fact, you can easily read this post as a pro-COC argument. After all, the author is able to make a really strong case that he didn't really infringe on any part of the COC, and that the COC was poorly construc…

> Why NOT formalize rules to some extent?

Because code of conducts makes it easier to harass people. If there are formal rules then all a harasser has to do is to find something out of context and then start harassing the person by starting a CoC breakage investigation. Doing stuff like that without a CoC would get you kicked out.