[beaconstudios]

my understanding is he was appealing to going back to the informal way of dealing with conflict, where you try to empathise with people being flawed and only reserve the big guns like banning, ostracism etc for people who are being willingly nasty. Because once you codify behaviour standards it can potentially become a weapon in power struggles and political in-fighting, even if the intent is a positive one ( to prevent the creation of a hostile environment).

[SolaceQuantum]

A lack of codified behavior standards also results in internal confusion on what is acceptable, especially given the higher levels of people in this general community with difficulties in recognizing unspoken social rules. This results in a different sort of in-fighting that has the effect of creating a code of conduct that is unspoken and enforced inconsistently, which tends to work poorly for anyone who happens to knowingly or unknowing violate that code of conduct.

[beaconstudios]

my point was that when someone seemingly violates good conduct, people who are more "in the know" with the community's social values should talk to them from the position that they weren't being intentionally unpleasant (or in other words, with empathy). It's usually pretty obvious when someone has been accidentally rude versus intentionally trolling.

The problem I see with these codes of conduct is it can turn the haziness and ambiguity of human communication (especially across cultural boundaries and with people with social difficulties) into black-and-white "if you do X you are a bad person and should be banned". Especially if "X" is defined in a very politicised way or the people who choose to call out offenders are doing so as political enforcers rather than trying to foster good communication.

[SolaceQuantum]

> It's usually pretty obvious when someone has been accidentally rude versus intentionally trolling.

It's difficult to know this for certain due to the variety of neurodiversity we see in our community. While I agree that codes of conduct have cons, not having a code of conduct also has cons that should be discussed.

I also believe that there is definitely a case for black-and-white "if you do X you should be banned". For example, I believe people who call other people ethnic or sexuality-related slurs should be banned, 100%, and anyone who calls anyone else a slur should be considered hostile to the community. There's very little positive communication to be had if someone refuses to stop using slurs, and they should be banned. Of course, there is a gradient of reasonability to this, but I can see in the most basic points where "if you do X you are a bad person and you should be banned" where X is also political (like homosexual people) where calling anyone a gay slur should be bannable.

[alyptik]

Thanks for actually phrasing one of my points far better than I did, haha.