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GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

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Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#201

Post by maleldil »

brvsft wrote: post #14
JonChesterfield wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair warning, I do not like codes of conduct. They're an authoritarian power play justified by fear. Codes of conduct are more about changing who is in the community than about changing the conduct of existing community members. Periodically someone runs afoul of the ruling elite who pass judgement upon them behind closed doors, usually leading to excommunication. The atmosphere of knowing what you say will be report…

Language is power. It is simply a power grab where people invent new language and initialisms intending to claim ownership and control of them and use them as a tool to, like you say, exclude people. DI became DEI became DEIB in less than a decade. They are working on new initials as we speak, to confuse and demoralize anyone who opposes this make-it-up-as-we-go-along sophistry. Inventing all of this language infrast…

Can you explain what the abbreviations are for those of us out of the loop?

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#202

Post by klodolph »

davidjfelix wrote: post #197

There's an awful lot of straw man accusations going on in this thread from people who seem to feel threatened by some invisible person who is going to persecute them for something they believe or say or are as a person. Even just an ounce of empathy and you'd realize that's possible without a CoC too and the goal of establishing these boundaries is to protect the people who feel that same way daily because of who the…

Yes, this thread feels like stepping into bizarro land. I see a lot of people equating the presence of a CoC with some kind of 1984-newspeak future.

This reminds me of the complaints about seatbelts. Yeah, every once in a while, a seatbelt makes a crash worse. Requiring seatbelts takes away the sense of freedom you have in a car. That sort of thing. Sometimes, a CoC will be abused to harass people. Step back and look at the overall impact of CoCs (and seatbelts). CoCs help moderators make consistent decisions. When decisions are more consistent, people can worry less about whether they are breaking the rules and focus more on getting work done.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#203

Post by arp242 »

speeder wrote: post #35

I see a lot of people here forgetting a real case of CoC abuse. There was this famous Drupal dev that wrote a transcript of a fetish wedding on his fetish social media profile. An enemy of his on Drupal quoted that transcript and used it as examples the Dev should be punished. Drupal, like GCC proposed rules, allow punishment of someone for something they did outside the community, and not only the guy was punished,…

I got hit with a "code of conduct violation" once for, in a social chat space with many people, saying that I thought "homeopathy is a load of bullshit", or something to that effect.

It was worded rather sharply and I apologized; probably shouldn't have put it like that. I'm not the "internet atheist" type of person who enjoys challenging other people's beliefs in an attempt to come off as "smarter" or "more rational", but ... it is a load of bullshit innit?

I'm not vehemently against code of conducts; I rarely even notice if there's a CoC and I feel the overall goals are fine. But it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. No, we shouldn't go around trumping on other people's beliefs and be respectful of them, even when you personally think it's a load of bollocks, but at the same time making any challenge outright forbidden also doesn't quite sit well with me. It's also my belief that pseudoscientific quack medicine is harmful, so, you know...

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#204

Post by dom96 »

Like with many things, the devil is in the details. Many people seem to have had some bad experience with a moderator and are blaming it on a CoC. Whether a CoC exists or not, it's down to the moderators to be fair and professional. So don't blame the CoC, when you should instead be blaming individuals.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#205

Post by hnbad »

not_your_vase wrote: post #2

Has there been any project which had its community change its conduct after adopting a CoC? Or any projects which had a profound impact due a CoC? I see that having CoC is getting standard with OSS projects, old and new alike. But have no idea if it actually does anything.

CoCs like all codes of law, exist to have something to point to when it is decided that you did something wrong. They also exist as a signal, both to attract people who agree with it and to deter those who oppose it.

Ideally a community should not need this. But most so-called communities are not communities. Membership and participation can be fleeting so there will be a constant influx and loss of members and participants, all of whom hold different values and some of whom the original founders would have never invited in the first place.

So the risk is that a project built by people sharing a common set of values may be recuperated by people diametrically opposed to those values. Defining those values helps with that. For the primary demographic of HN, usually "don't be a dick" suffices for this. The problem is that lists of values don't provide an enforcement mechanism.

This means you likely end up with one of two situations after a preexisting project adopts a CoC: either nothing changes because the code of conduct is not enforced (or only inconsistently), or nothing changes because everybody already involved in the project agrees with it and those e.g. throwing slurs at existing members or otherwise harrassing them would have been kicked out anyway.

The problem is when projects that don't have a strong ideological/emotional investment in codifying a set of shared values (or lack a consistently shared set of values altogether) treat a CoC like a DEI program and just bolt it onto their project to tick a box and stop people from complaining. This misleads those who treat CoCs seriously into joining while also weakening the signalling effect of CoCs for other projects. In my experience this is the case for most OSS projects and in the worst cases it leads to overeager admins enforcing the letter of the law because there really was no spirit of the law to begin with, going through the authoritarian motions of enforcement without any ulterior purpose - and of course these projects will still selectively spare particularly influential individuals regardless of their misdeeds.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#206

Post by klodolph »

ozr wrote: post #180
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your C compiler is the result of a committee of hundreds, if not thousands of people; every line of code used is the result of collaboration, with the actual line of code being an implementation detail. You can't have a product like this without its community, and you can't have a community without rules.

So prior to today, GCC didn't exist?

Prior to today, the rules were unwritten, which means that any enforcement was somewhat arbitrary.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#207

Post by numbsafari »

j16sdiz wrote: post #168
numbsafari wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In most instances it is not the rules that are the problem, it is the people enforcing the rules that is the problem This is the key to any group organized by the Rule of Law. Having the rules written down, in theory, means that everyone knows what the boundaries of their liberty happens to be, and they are free to behave without constantly asking for permission. That's the theory. The reality is that sometimes tha…

Most CoC, unlike law, only list some general idea / ideology... In this specific CoC GCC use, "Be friendly" / "Be respectful" can be _very_ subjective.. This is super flexible and open to abuse.

The problem is that there's a committee that largely operates in the dark.

Instead, the committee should be limited to gathering the information and, if any action is to be taken, it should ultimately be decided by a "jury of one's peers"--eg a group of non-committee members of the project selected at random. You'd probably have the project leadership operate in some capacity as a "judge".

I mean... there's a reason this stuff exists in the "real world". It's amazing that folks just throw all that out and try and start over from scratch, rather than actually, I dunno, trying to learn from what's already been tried. But then, we're software engineers, so... I guess that says it all.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#208

Post by foldr »

userbinator wrote: post #70
foldr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony here is that you're using the same kind of logic (the project can't survive if it's closed to transphobes!) that's mocked in the following comment when the shoe is on the other foot (LOL the project can't survive without trans people): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430649 This does highlight the point that diversity is to some extent a zero sum game. You can welcome trans people to your project, or…

You can welcome trans people to your project, or transphobes, but not necessarily both. You don't need to "welcome" either. You just don't talk about that stuff because it has zero relevance to your project, unless you're trying to use it as a political statement (which technical projects shouldn't be at all.)

You’re essentially proposing to do nothing and have faith that everyone will get along and that everyone will feel comfortable contributing. It’s a nice idea, but it tends not to work in practice.

Left to their own devices, people will talk about things that aren’t directly related to the project. How would you propose to stop them if not by enforcing certain conduct rules? You’re effectively just advocating for a different code of conduct, whose ban on all political discussions could also be portrayed in a rather Orwellian light by people opposed to it.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#209

Post by dijit »

woodruffw wrote: post #111
theepauk wrote: post #79

The only effect of a Code of Conduct I have ever personally witnessed was that people were being bullied for greeting others. The greeting they used was "hey guys", and instead of recognizing that language is fluid and different to different people they tried to impose their linguistic views on others. The people who encouraged this behavior were people on the Code of Conduct committee and at the top of the project's…

Can you provide more details? I’ve been working on open source projects for about a decade now, including years of professional work, and I have never seen or heard someone chastised for using “guys” informally. This includes in communities with established, formal codes of conduct. It strikes me as something that most people wouldn’t even notice , unless the speaker was intentionally using it in a way that implies g…

I think hangops slack has one of those; https://twitter.com/hangops

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#210

Post by foldr »

Dalewyn wrote: post #61
foldr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Say you're a car mechanic and you work at a car shop. The car shop fires you for saying the Moon is made of cheese during a BBQ at a friend's on Saturday, because it's against the nebulous code of conduct. Or maybe we’re slowly but surely moving to a world where the rights of women and minority groups are being slowly eroded after decades of progress, and before long me and all the other gays will be rounded up and…

I'm going to ask you this again because you seem to have reading comprehension problems: What part of having absolutely nothing to do with the company or its business do you not understand? This is framing "violations of this code outside [spaces managed by the GCC project]" in a context more relatable to common men.

I already responded to that question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36431254 I may have misunderstood what you meant by it, in which case it would be helpful if you could explain what you did mean.
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