[dogma1138]

"this shitty thing shouldn't happen to anyone" you are not going to abolish "harassment" (I intentionally used quotation marks I don't some one who uses slur or thinks you shouldn't exist as harassment just another idiot with an opinion...) from human cloture it's included in the price you pay for living in a free society where free speech is an actuality and not a slogan. You won't cure the world of idiots, troll, or even simply cruel people and the price you'll pay in trying is way too high for my taste.

[geofft]

I'm not entirely sure that it's to the advantage of an operating system development project to have free speech as an ideal.

At the very least, there's the empirical argument that the major operating systems are overwhelmingly developed by private corporations, and you can be sure that if a developer said "hey, this new hire is getting his white supremacist followers on Twitter to attack me," the new hire wouldn't be working on that project very much more. And we generally don't find the price of this less-than-free speech too much to pay.

Can you explain why it helps develop a better net installer or Linux emulation layer to be able to use slurs against fellow developers?

[dogma1138]

What this has to do with software development? A COC has nothing to do with software development it's not enforcing anything related to actually committing code and collaborating.

A COC forces you to be compliant to it every where on social media, on regular media, in person, on private forums... everywhere - this is thought police.

A COC forces you to "hide" your personal beliefs, ideas, who you vote for who you donate money to etc. on the off chance they might be considered offensive to some one.

We already had a CEO who had to resign due to a political donation, COC's will have the same effect you post something offensive on facebook? you're out, you go to a political rally that some one finds offensive? well though luck.

If COC's only covered official project channels no one would care about them, and the people that want them would not push with such vigor because they could not be used for thought policing.

On a side note I find it ironic that people who had to hide who they are for most of history and maybe for most of their lives want to force the same thing on other people just because of their personal beliefs.

And on another side note the wworse of the humanity tends to fester in dark rooms when things are out in the open you know here everyone stands and you can ridicule them for that if you want.

[lillian-lemmer]

> On a side note I find it ironic that people who had to hide who they are for most of history and maybe for most of their lives want to force the same thing on other people just because of their personal beliefs.

I love how you're comparing the choice of being a person who dehumanizes and threatens vulnerable people as like... a demographic to compare to being a woman, or being trans, etc.

[rewqfdsa]

This thread is the most depressing thing I've read on Hacker News in months. I completely agree with you, dogma1138. You and I appear to be only ones who don't view the world through justice-colored glasses and who understand that attempting to enforce strict ideological conformity is self-defeating.

[tptacek]

You should read the news more. This is not the most depressing thing to happen in months by a long stretch. Maybe you'd have an easier time getting over simple disagreements with other people if you, you know, got some perspective.

[dogma1138]

Most people tend to stay away from such threads as they will quickly get downvoted and flagged and will either be buried like most comments on this post that or will be deleted like some of the early comments here that got stomped over. People tend to downvote comments that they do not agree with (regardless of HN rules) which leads to either self censorship (not commenting in the first place or deletion of comments that get a few down-votes) or actual censorship as comments which get downvoted to -10 get buried by the HN system.

[DanBC]

> (regardless of HN rules)

Please can you show me the HN rule that tells people how to downvote? Specifically, the rule that tells people not to downvote for disagreement?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

> I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

> Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

> IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement. Or more precisely, a negative score has: users seem not to downvote something they disagree with if it already has a sufficiently negative score.

[awesomerobot]

If someone mourns for a death do you just say "well everyone dies, suck it up?" — no, because that's ridiculous. So when someone is being harassed why say "it happens to everyone so get over it"? Why go out of your way to invalidate how someone feels about something?

where free speech is an actuality and not a slogan.

Harassment isn't protected speech, and that's beyond the point because this isn't an issue of free speech at all.

the price you'll pay in trying is way too high for my taste

Someone in an organized community was being harassed, and they're upset that leadership of that community didn't seem to think it was a problem. The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?

[fche]

"Someone in an organized community was being harassed"

Note that one of the twists & turns in this sorry saga was that the same freebsd developer submitted a documented harassment complaint against Randi. The freebsd CoC was in effect by this time, but it doesn't seem like it was helpful.

[dogma1138]

>Protected speech

That's an american definition, all forms of speech should be protected even hate speech, when hate is being pushed to the sidelines it only festers and becomes worse, let it be in the open and let it be ridiculed.

>Someone in an organized community was being harassed

Some one claimed to be harassed (there's a very thick and really not one sided story behind all this), considering the authors day to day activities allot of the things she does are also harassment or is calling out some one all the time for their beliefs is only harassment if those beliefs are currently socially progressive?

>The price being paid is that someone harassing a community member isn't part of the community anymore. That's a high price?

Well the price in this case was that she wasn't in the community any more, mostly because of her doing I would guess but I really don't want to get into that.

Communities tend to cast out the ones that cause the most disturbance and disturbance is often not a person who aggravates some one but a person who gets aggravated allot, usually by many people and about many issues.

Most communities are self managing (and do it quite well) if you find your self out of place all the time and being constantly cast out and "harassed" even if you are in the right it might be worth the time to take a deep look at one self and understand how you can adapt better and what different actions you might be able to take to avoid that because clearly; dichotomy and my way or the high way doesn't work and even in cases when it does it won't work for long and at the end will might be your own undoing because there always will be a more progressive agenda that will just as easily hijack the current one as yours did before it.

I really miss the days when progressiveness was about open dialog, accepting others and most importantly being open to your own ideas being challenged as much as you challenge the ideas of others, today progressiveness especially in online communities boils down to some unholy checklist which gets updated every so often with the latest social fab being mandatory for maintaining membership privileges.