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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.
This is not adult behavior, this is childish behavior. They are attempting to coddle, marginalize, dictate speech, etc etc in an effort to control intent Adults can say that's stupid or you're a moron as part of normal healthy discourse it's intent that matters. Healthy razzing friendly banter etc etc is part of normal adult communication.
No sir I dont like it.
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*.
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.
Mellow greetings, special butterflies.
Today (not to disrespect those on the other side of the national dateline - when I say today, I mean everyone's today!) I (with full credit to everyone everywhere, of course) would like (this is not a statement of exclusion for things I don't like) to introduce SJW, the language you can share without fear (not that fear is wrong, of course.)
SJW:
o No insert() function: Instead, we have crafted a flawless nomeansno() function
o Fully complementary yesmeansno() and maybemeansno() functions
o No try:, because every function generates an exception!
o exit() has been replaced with aloha().
o Procedure calls have been replaced with the respectful request paradigm, which obey the global mood settings
o 100% private internal assumption for all functions; offering data requires guessing if the function will take it or crash (exceptions guaranteed)
o Every access from within a function to another function must be embedded in a call to politewrapper()
o politewrapper() implements infinite recursion by use of counters instead of ever returning up a level
o Every function ends with a sequence of calls to apologize(), cleanup() and washreturnvalue()
o All programs will be created equal: all code is treated exactly the same and does exactly the same thing, which is apologize for running.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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