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Could Go Community's Threat of Public Shaming, Lifetime Bans Make Go a No-Go?
theodp writes: At first glance, the proposal for A Code of Conduct for the Go Community (attributed to Google's Andrew Gerrand) seems reasonable enough. How can you argue with the goal of treating everyone with respect and kindness? But the Devil is in the detail, and the proposed Code notes there soon could be consequences for calling someone an "idiot" or saying something is "so simple even my grandma could understand it" (the latter "marginalises women and the elderly by implying that something need be simple for an old woman to understand it"). And the punishment meted out by the Go Code of Conduct Working Group to those who find themselves on the receiving end of an anonymous complaint could be anything from nothing to "a request for a private or public apology, a private reprimand from the working group to the individual(s) involved, a public reprimand, an imposed vacation (for instance, asking someone to 'take a week off' from a mailing list or IRC), or a permanent or temporary ban from some or all Go spaces (mailing lists, IRC, etc.)." And no, this doesn't appear to be a goof. So, might individuals and companies think twice about embracing a programming language whose community's Code of Conduct threatens to ruin reputations and ban people from technical support resources for life? Too late to get this added to the list of questions for Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan?
"This is a departure from the typical proposal process, since discussions Around Codes of Conduct tend to devolve quickly. By restricting the discussion Of this proposal to 1:1 conversations between myself and members of the Community, I hope to better hear everyone’s specific concerns without generating unnecessary noise."
This is a typical excuse from people who want to push things through without public discussion. They call public discussion "noise". I have no idea who this guy is, but he sounds like an egomaniac. Well guess what? We are calling you out. You don't get "1:1 conversations between yourself" and everyone else. This is the Internet.
I guess one can take solace that this has as much relevance to the world-at-large as being banned from the Modula-2 community.
If he just removed the line about "microaggressions" and the following two lines (and examples), it would be a reasonable code of conduct.
Of course, that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The whole point of this exercise is to use the CoC as a means to promote an ideology.
Now, given all the complaints this will surely generate, do you think he'll take his own advice?
Somehow I doubt it.
"Go" fuck yourselves, 'kay?
Hey Andy, have you ever wondered why Plus failed so miserably?
Well, good news - You'll get a second chance to learn this lesson in the very near future!
I simply cannot see how having a code of conduct based on treating other people in a respectful manner will result in discouraging desirable developers and companies from joining the community. Quite the reverse in fact!
I know the 'microagression' thing is a beloved trope of the left and fearless Social Justice Warriors. But the thing is, in order to show what a good person you are in this context, you have to keep moving and moving further and further to the left. It always comes to a point where it becomes ridiculous and counterproductive.
Remember the "Black Lives Matter" people who deliberately disrupted the furthest left presidential candidate America has ever had, the openly socialist Bernie Sanders? Yeah, that. If there is anyone who is a friend of the extremists in BLM, it's him - and yet they treated him like an enemy. Even if you're on the left, or the hard left, there are always others who are ready to show you just how far down the rabbit hole goes.
Now, this is just a programming language, this isn't the literal jackboot of oppression as employed by left-wing governments of the past. Nobody is going to be sentenced to slavery or sent down to the countryside for defying Andrew Gerrand. So, let's keep some perspective here. However, this is showing all the classic signs of the ever-ratcheting extremism that is a hallmark of the political left. They'll come for you too, even if you have a stellar record of social justice warrioring. A single offhand comment is sufficient. I thought I recognized the "theodp" account, and sure enough it's one of Slashdot's solidly left-wing contributors, with a long record of approved social justice friendly submissions. But even SHE is turned off by this kind of thing! :(
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Some people really love gigantic CoCs. It seems like big CoCs are the in thing right now, but personally, I find massive CoCs to be uncomfortable.
Dick jokes aside, while I'm in favor of having some community expectations of conduct, I'm not in favor of building a huge body of rules to cover every single situation. What you need are some simple rules ("conduct yourself with courtesy and professionalism", "don't be an asshole", etc) and a group of trustworthy moderators who enforce those rules fairly regardless of the political views of the person the rules are being applied to.
Even if your rules are well-intentioned, the trouble is that the larger and more specific the rule set, the more easily one clique or another will be able to manipulate those rules to their advantage. It's better, as a moderator, to be able to identify individuals who are toxic and remove them from the community than have a set of arbitrary and overly specific rules that you'll ultimately fail to enforce fairly. All too often, you'll end up deciding that you *want* to get rid of a particular community member due to them having an overall negative impact on the community, and then watching them like a hawk so that you can ban them for the tiniest violation of your rule set, all the while your regular (and less toxic) users are constantly committing tiny rules violations themselves.
To be honest, large rule sets *invite* toxicity, because a) people tend to see them as a challenge, and b) some people realize they're part of the in-crowd and can get away with flouting the rules while other people who *aren't* part of the in-crowd get banned for small infractions.
And this is to say nothing of CoCs which *aren't* well-intentioned. The GitHub projects CoC, for instance, explicitly carved out rights for people to bully others based on race, sex, orientation, etc, simply based on whether that person is part of the majority with respect to those particular attributes. I'm all for disallowing gendered and racial harassment, but I have to suspect the motives of people writing a CoC that gives certain people carte blanche to engage in that kind of harassment. Harassment is *ever a good thing*. You aren't losing anything by disallowing *all of it*.
SJWs are pushing these 'code of conduct' policies on open source projects so they can infiltrate and take over, just as they've done on everything else. This is why you never, ever, accept any of them into an open source project, and laugh when they suggest that you need a 'code of conduct'.
Of course, it doesn't really work with an open source license, since the coders they kick out of their own projects can just fork and start a new one. Except they'll presumably ensure that GPL4 has a section which prohibits cisgendered whitemales from using the code.
The problem is that CoCs are always enforced by those with the thinnest skins, because, almost by definition, they are the only ones who care.
The problem here is the same problem that plagues the rest of the Internet, and before the public Internet, dialup bulletin-board systems (BBSs): It's much easier to be a complete ass to someone when you don't have to do it in person to their face. People can and will say anything when it's just text on a screen, because there are few if any consequences. When you're able to be completely anonymous as well (no alias, just literally anonymous) it's even worse, because there are literally no consequences. Of course there's no help for it, as requiring everyone on the Internet to use their real name would destroy a large and very important part of what the Internet is all about. Civility and courtesy can't be legislated, they are qualities that an individual has to willingly adopt, and in my opinion the choice whether to do that or not is a great indicator of the character of the individual in question: Can you observe and respect the implied social contract that exists when you interact with people face-to-face, when you're interacting with them over the Internet?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
No. CoCs are now about shielding children from reality. It's all about appealing to insecurity in order to control narrative (and thus the organization). Once implemented, they encourage people to say/do stupid shit and then hide behind 'oppression' or 'discrimination' instead of facing up to mistakes and fixing them. Really, the end goal is to burn the project's resources in 'signal boosting' particular political ideologies towards society at large. The more relevant the group, the bigger a target it becomes.
This probably started at the topmost institutions in society (government, ivy league, corporates). Most of the individuals pushing these at lower levels are probably clueless about it, but some are not. These would be the 'crusaders' that've been discussed here before.