I wanna tell a story that happened a few years ago (edit: turned out to be loosely related stories as I remembered them)... Suddenly #ruby had a new rule: the word "guys" was banned to refer to people. Why? Because it's suddenly become the most exclusionist, sexist, oppressive, whatever-bad-you-want-it-to-be word.
Bots were automated to hand out imputations and strikes, followed by kicking people who continued to use the word "guys" (regardless of the context). This automation was later reluctantly refined to be less trigger happy.
Trying to prompt discussions "about the G word" was bannable (without a proper warning): New person joins, sends "thanks guys" after a question, gets slandered by the bot as the scum of humanity and then given a four-message long wall of text about why the word "guys" was intentionally given its modern-day meaning because of something-something subconscious and it's designed to manipulate you. Naturally, person complains about this cultist-looking spam. If a mod is online: fuck that new gu—person; BAN. Immediately. A ban. I think maybe the bot mentioned it it one of the messages that discussion is forbidden, but I don't think people read the whole message. It was worded in a very patronising "you're a worthless idiot without a single fucking shread of human decency, so let me lecture you on how to behave in my version of a beautiful society like you've just turned six" way that I don't think most people got defensive and didn't give a flying fuck about the consequences.
The next in line for the woke firing squad were pronouns. ALL pronouns. This luckily never happened; I don't know why not, but I remember it being called regressive instead of progressive behaviour[2].
The G word rule ended up causing a lot of drama in-channel; and I remember at least one GitHub issue that got heated over this (they wanted it removed from the rules IIRC). At one point #ruby became a fusion of linguistic nuances, colloquialisms, culture, and social issue topics (pretty much what's happening here) that conversation about Ruby looked like it was off topic. I'm talking about hours of discussions about these subjects[1], and people with Ruby related questions get outright ghosted by everyone. This was why the earlier mentioned banning rule was introduced; mods noticed a slow exodus and a small decrease in activity in the channel when people weren't engaging in flame wars.
I'm a white guy, but I'm queer (gay). I won't delve into my background too much, but short story short is that for most of my life I was living in confusion, fear, and alienation because of sexuality, so I know how it feels to be Queer, and that I always try to be compassionate and understanding in these issues, and I always try really hard to make everyone feel welcome and included[3] and look for compromises. A lot of active people in the Ruby community started feeling alienated and unwelcome because of this rule (no joke: they were called snowflakes by the woke folk in the ops channel).
But these "woke" people on #ruby? Let me tell you: they're not woke at all. They're just hungry for control. They have all the textbook behaviours of a toxic parent (I'd know I grew up with one)/person. They wrapped their motives in good intentions, and manipulated most of the ruby community. I don't know if the "results" of their actions will be good or bad, but I'm not talking about results: I'm talking about motives and morals (which is what the focus is).
Small digression: It was really disappointing to see some of the BLM things unfold where white-assed Americans (this is by no means exhaustive or exclusive to Americans or whites) tried to steal the spotlight with their "performative workeness" where they made being woke a pissing contest about how to outwoke the rest and be the most woke. It's the same thing as people who post those "fake" instagram pictures: the only difference is fake thoughts and woke tokens instead of "likes." It's absolutely disgusting that people abuse real social issues to "promote" themselves (companies who used this for PR are just as scummy). They're the fucking Cruella De'Vils[4] of this world and they don't even see it.
This same person ("evil") that led this anti-guys movement on #ruby tried to get someone ("misguided" due to religious indoctrination) fired from _their own_ project (open source project) over a retweet. That's right, it wasn't even an original thought. She almost got her way, because some people were really supporting the.
Like, people created accounts just to be able to harass the "misguided" person via github Issues. The evil person didn't get their way in ruining someone else's life. So What happened next? They made it all about them; they were the victim in this whole story. They resigned from the Ruby community with something like "not wanting to be in such a toxic community". They came back again, because they probably couldn't find a more effective way to assert their psychological dominance/control over another naive community.
I've never experienced ANY toxicity, exclusivity, animosity or anything even remotely resembling discriminatory behaviour in my five years in the channel (at the time) until one asshole decided to ban a well-established English colloquialism. I find it incredibly ironic that they created the very thing they wanted to avoid: a fucking toxic community.
The cherry on top of this was that in those five years of being part of the community, did I ever see anyone single member complain about the channel's community being not exclusive or not welcoming. Nobody raised this before or after. The only people raising this was a handful of who invented victims to protect so they could give themselves purpose and importance in the community, when they were a nobody before.
This person who started the movement, their GitHub is littered with them doing "God's Good Work™" by opening CoC pull requests to random projects that were trending on HN or Github that week. I've never seen them talk in the Ruby channel other than the ops channel; there they would occasionally bring up someone's way of communicating wasn't sterile enough (my interpretation). They'd _almost never_ help with any Ruby related issues; the only reason why I can't straight up say "never" is because I remember they'd give wrong advice sometimes/
Anyway. I've been typing this our for a while now trying to organise a bunch of jumbled events/thoughts/ideas that happened over a long period of time, and it's getting hard. I've written so much already that I'm sure most people will just think it's TLDR and skip it, and the worst part is I don't feel like I've said enough. Feels like I'm only 20% of the way there. Recalling these events stirred some old emotions (mix of anger, disappointment and sadness).
I want to finish by saying that even with all this said—and it did have big (IMO negative) impacts on parts of the Ruby community—the Ruby community as a whole is _so_ much more than this toxic squad of performative woke bullies. The Ruby community already _is_ accepting, inclusive and non-discriminatory. I love the Ruby community even if I'm not as active as I used to be. Stay beautiful, and don't let trolls guilt-fish you toxicity. ---
One last thing, I used "woke" with a bad undertone throughout the text. I want to make clear that being woke is great, but being woke for the sake of your twitter followers or so you can feel "less guilty," or as a power move, or—anything that's not pure, basically, is just performative wokeness. There's very few people who do it for "knightly" reasons (as in goodness-of-their-heart reasons, I don't mean to be sexist).
I already said this has grown way longer than I planned. I know I threw out a lot of things and they might seem a bit like a gishgallop, but that wasn't my intention. I love talking about social issues (as you can tell, I have strong opinions about this) and doing what little I can to make my circle of people feel good and inspired. Anyway I refuse to make this post longer, so if someone wishes to talk with me about any of these points further, feel free to reply or reach out.
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[1]: Nobody wants to hear they're a villain or that their moral compass is wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias Also people always selectively quote parts of your message, then they construct fake a context/narrative that makes them feel morally superior in their screenshot.
[2]: I tend to agree.
[3]: One of the reason this situation/anegdote is really sensitive for me is because I was accused of being oppressive, anti-LGBTQ, etc etc etc. This brought up a lot of doubts, insecurities and other dark thoughts all back: Like, hello, I'm gay and I'm making other marginalised people feel even more marginalised?! What kind of trash human am I?
[4]: From the originals, not the recent live-action film with Emma Stone; that Cruella is awesome