and I have a slightly used bridge to sell.
I used to organize meetups and I visited meetups organized by others who had code of conduct, and I just never understood what they were hoping to achieve with that.
If someone behaves poorly, you can point at a document all you want, but it doesn’t help you deal that the problematic individual. A document that you put in a markdown file is not enforceable.
And we didn’t even talk about how it is being misused. People would point to these documents to silence and shut out people they don’t like and at the same time tolerate poor behavior that are clearly in violation of code of conduct by people they do like or whose politics or opinions they share.
It is all just a charade to help you pretend that you are impartial.
Has it occurred to you that's actually exactly why they exist? :)
... I understand that's the theory, but in practice, I've never seen it working that way.
I don't see how having the CoC affects any of this. If someone is behaving poorly, first of all, a CoC will not deter them. If someone behaves so poorly that you decide you need to remove them, the community (the small portion of people who give a f) should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.
It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say (without pointing to a document you put in your repo when you were bored), that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision".
Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.
I think you mean, "if someone is behaving poorly, the coc did not deter them".
The people who it did deter aren't behaving poorly.
Humans should be able to interact politely in any setting and if they don't, the issue needs to be settled with good old human interaction anyways.
No, CoCs - or rules in general - are not inherently bad. HN has some, which the moderators and the community enforce well, and it's generally one of the best platforms on the Internet for intelligent discussion.
Yes, heavy CoCs can be weaponized and abused, if there is little or no trust between the community and its leaders. But with or without a CoC, such a community will always be prone to such abuse. You think moderators need to establish a CoC to push their politics on people if they want? How does that even make sense? Why not just... do that, without a CoC?
I don't think this is what generally happens, or what people are wary of. I think group participants [sometimes] coerce moderators into establishing a CoC in order to have a tool to reach for in service of silencing voices they regard as "problematic".
I'm going to push past this extraordinarily bad faith framing. I'm going to assume you're referring to people who are made to feel uncomfortable or are harassed by other members of the community.
So if that community doesn't have a CoC, and those members talk to the moderators, and the moderators take action... is that coercion too? Is that the moderators or those members pushing their political views on the community? Should the moderators just not do anything?
It has been my experience that there are both members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who have been harrassed, and also members of groups typically regarded as marginalised who harass others. There are surely more variations of this too.
My most recent experience of this was a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised harassing one of my colleagues — who is also a member of a group typically regarded as marginalised, but perhaps less so if you subscribe to the legitimacy of intersectionality — at a software development conference with an established CoC.
The incident was reported, and the repercussions for the harasser amounted to exactly nil.
> So if that community doesn't have a CoC, and those members talk to the moderators, and the moderators take action... is that coercion too?
No.
> Is that the moderators or those members pushing their political views on the community?
That really depends on the circumstance.
> Should the moderators just not do anything?
Moderators should take action on CoC violations as proportionately, fairly, and impartially as they can.
> I'm going to push past this extraordinarily bad faith framing.
It is extraordinarily tiring and depressing that anything proffered that contradicts the orthodoxy of the culture that most readily endorses the establishment of CoCs is immediately dismissed as an argument in "bad faith".
However, there's probably a cutoff point for core infrastructure where we should move away from having a single person in charge.
> Participants are expected to be tolerant of opposing views.
If you can't tolerate that others will have different perspectives to you then it means you're likely to be a very difficult and inflexible person to work with.
What matters is that people are operating in good faith.
I would also say that IF you have been accepted as a member of a community then you and your feelings must matter to that community unless and until you are ejected from the community. There needs to be a system for accepting and expelling people, and that system should rest on the judgment of people that the community has selected as trustworthy (until and unless those people are expelled).
I feel that having a detailed COC, while a very good sentiment in theory, in practice must bring about people who will try their best to skirt around the edge of COC and make trouble for the maintainers - who I expect want to stay "nice", but they're forced to act harshly in the end anyway.
The implied subtext of "avoid topic the US finds morally objectionable and when in doubt act like an American would" is what I dislike from a theorical point of view but the truth is, it doesn't really matter on a day to day basis.
So yes, CoC seems mostly harmless but also mostly useless. I tend to agree with the article point that if this is the case, keeping them short seems optimal.
Not having a CoC doesn't mean a project is going to be unsafe to work in. But it means when another community member refuses to work with you, or belittles your work constantly, there is nothing to be done. For many, why take the risk. This means that projects are starving themselves of contributors because they don't create an environment that is safe.
Ruby's "CoC" is actually a fantastic example of why you need to spell it out too. "Participants are expected to be tolerant of opposing views." is often weaponized by abusers who like to paint basic requests like "please use my chosen name" as "not being tolerant".
I can agree that heavy & strict CoCs can be daunting and probably overkill for small open source projects. And they're far from flawless, as shown by the Rust mods resignation incidents. But to say they're useless and anti-meritocratic is to forget (and/or silence) these people that wanted to contribute in an environment where they wouldn't feel threatened (incidentally, sometimes despite being skillful contributors, so much so for the supposed meritocracy of the CoC-less projects).
I'm not sure strict CoCs are the answers to these real problems, but this feels like dismissing these problems altogether.
> What is needed now is not the unthinking adoption of a one-size-fits-all template, but a “right-sized” approach tailored to the scale, culture, and goals of each individual project.
I feel a lot of the heavy CoCs are a product of low-trust cultures, particularly the US, which attempt to replace interpersonal relationships with legalese. This is honestly not necessary in most projects, which are generally high-trust environments.
A_D_E_P_T•53m ago
At this point, in 2025, does anybody seriously doubt that they're a "tool for troublemakers"? A lot of people who would otherwise contribute see a hyper-particular CoC, written by an HR type or an aspiring lawyer, and walk away. Others don't bother to read the CoC and may later be dragged through coals over something exceedingly minor, despite their contributions.
In open-source, the best policy is to avoid CoCs and avoid those who write and promote them.
warp•17m ago