[MaKey]

Overall I think Code of Conducts are a net negative. Alleged violations of them seem to be used to lend credibility to actions that otherwise would be hard(er) to justify.

[seanhunter]

Overall I wish we lived in a world where they are not needed. But in every community, some people are assholes so they are often needed.

[MaKey]

Communities were doing just fine without a CoC up until they became a trend. People got banned too but the moderators couldn't hide behind a CoC to justify questionable decisions.

[account42]

It just means you get different kinds of assholes who are better at navigating around the CoC or even weaponizing it.

[Brian_K_White]

I would say incorrect. All that is true is that something is needed, but there is nothing about the problem that requires that particular poor framework for dealing with it.

[chasd00]

It just dawned on me that CoC docs are basically HR for open source. Point to a violation and voila, that person is gone. “Sorry, nothing personal, CoC violation, there’s nothing I can do”.

[MaKey]

Exactly. Without a CoC the persons making hard decisions have to stand behind them. With a CoC they can hide behind the CoC and wash their hands in innocence. This lowers the barrier for making questionable decisions and overall decreases honesty. We've seen this with the suspension of Python core maintainer Tim Peters.

[pamcake]

There are bad CoCs and ways to abuse them and people who do. That doesn't mean the concept of setting social expectations for a collaborative project is inherently bad. Same as for discussion forum guidelines and moderation.

No CoC is better than a bad CoC or one where interpretation is centralized to someone with an agenda. But many times a decent CoC can help newcomers in reading the room and support well-intended moderators in making judgement calls.

I also think good CoCs are small and mostly reactive. It's premature social engineering to spend energy on formulating general policies for things that happened once or twice if ever for the project.

Like, maybe wait until you actually had a couple of slop PRs before spending time, energy, and political capital on an AI contribution policy.

[micromacrofoot]

This is like saying "overall laws are bad" because whoever is applying them is doing so maliciously. Even in the absence of COC companies like this always find a way to justify this sort of pressure. If not a COC, it's a TOS or NDA or whatever document acronym you can find.

[mikkupikku]

Nobody would accept the rule of law if we didn't all know the alternative was the local bullies with the most friends and guns declaring themselves warlords and selling your family into slavery.

An open source project without a CoC on the other hand is quite normal and harmless. Maybe some people sometimes get their feelings hurt, but CoCs obviously don't prevent that anyway. The whole thing is dumb.

[tpmoney]

I would argue that laws are “bad” if there’s no way to get a proper hearing when you’re accused of violating them. Laws should constrain both sides of the law (the person subject to them and the person enforcing them) otherwise they’re just arbitrary rules by the person with more power. And while that’s a perfectly valid way to run something, it’s dishonest to dress “arbitrary personal decisions” up in the trappings of law. And realistically that applies to all the things you listed, COC, NDA, TOS etc.

But if someone can just drag out a law and vaguely accuse someone else of violating that law and then enforce a punishment with no way for the accused to get a hearing or present their case and have a real chance to prevail, then yes I would say the law is bad.

[calvinmorrison]

This is nothing to do with Code of Conduct and just one business chosing not to do business with another.

[15155]

They're a weapon of "social justice" - 90% of CoC rules are common-sense stuff that doesn't have to be said, combined with one or two "progressive" ideas shoehorned in.

[fortran77]

I was once told I couldn’t present a calorie counting/diet app at an Elm conference because it violated their CoC about discrimination based on “body size”.

[KaiserPro]

Mate, thats just rules. rules you don't agree with.

[swed420]

And "social justice" is often a weapon of capital interests in disguise.