Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 18, 2022 5:31 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165)
In reply to: Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org by k3ninho
Parent article: Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

CoCs were not initially very controversial, but subsequent alleged abuse of them has become so.

The line is somewhere between, "people's perception of your violating the CoC is hurting your credibility", and "my perception that you violated the CoC justifies me in banning you." That is a pretty wide gap, and different people have different ideas about where to draw it, but anyplace where it needs to be far from the first one is a place I would rather not remain involved.

Cf. "Eternal September"

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Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 19, 2022 18:12 UTC (Sat) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (1 responses)

They are controversial because some folks who seems to have a lot to lose are making noise to make them controversial.

If we look at the incident in Pycon 2013, the problem wasn't the CoC reporter, the people who were reported nor the organisers. All was managed correctly on the CoC side. The organisers said "you shouldn't do that", people agreed, and that's it. However, because the reporter posted something on twitter (a picture), it became viral and attracted a online group that jumped on her. Virality wasn't intended, and the reaction was disproportionate. It snowballed and resulted in, if I am not wrong, everybody fired and receiving death threats, etc, etc. Tweets do not become viral by magic, mob do not assemble by themselves, someone has to push for that. This was pre gamergate (who started in 2014), and yet, no one ever seems to go look deeper on that side of the issue.

The controversy is mostly linked to that type of mob. I do not say CoC wouldn't be controversial by itself, but the discussions around them are a order of magnitude more controversial due to some forces that are under discussed most of the time. That's like with systemd. You would think a init system change wouldn't result in someone sending a threat on the answering machine of his main developer, and yet, it happened.

You can see that for almost every high visibility cases. There is lots of time where CoC violations are handled without trouble, but we almost never discuss them because they are not high visibility. If you look at the stats provided by projects, such as Fedora ( https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-code-of-co... ), you can see the majority of tickets are not resulting in anyone being banned. And that 1 lone ban is likely Daniel Pocock, whose story have been already told.

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 20, 2022 0:57 UTC (Sun) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

Very few people truly believe that a project should have no rules that govern conduct, but the debate is not about having to follow rules in the first place. It's about scope and enforcement, and the problems that can occur when rules are poorly thought out, hastily implemented, abused, or overused.

The issue isn't the CoCs exist, but how they're sometimes implemented. I don't doubt that there are people who want to make it controversial in bad faith, but you shouldn't make the assumption that anyone who is concerned about a CoCs implementation is the same type of person who would mob someone on Twitter and threaten them. In general, there are very few examples of harassing or aggressive behavior that were not grounds for expulsion before codes of conduct became popular, and as another commenter pointed out, small-to-medium projects may function fine without CoCs (or extremely minimalist ones), whereas larger projects may benefit from having stricter rules.