My idea is that people can collaborate in a civilised manner without pointing them to a set of “don’t do this, don’t to that”. I just think this is mostly demeaning to the contributors having to read a document that says “we agree to not insult other contributors because they are disabled”. But that’s maybe just me being naive, having never be a moderator.
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You see but that is in a way why I wrote what I wrote: I have reasons as to why I believe making empathy mandatory (!) is very dangerous. I don’t believe having empathy is necessarily bad. But I think making it mandatory is dangerous and shouldn’t be done.
And calling my view as such “seriously disturbing” is at least an indication to me that proponents of Codes of Conduct are not really upholding what they to claim to uphold: to be “respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences.” Which is where it quickly gets contradictory. There are more such contradictions, even in this Code of Conduct, of course. But my post was long enough already.
All of this is what that nourishes my skepticism against these documents.
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Well, no offense again, but you said it at the end of your post. I call this wishful thinking and in practice, online communities (but any community really) has to deal with that. If you know of better ways than being explicit, please do mention them, otherwise you are just saying “Hey, I have no significant experience on the matter, but I think doing X is enough”. It is difficult to answer such things because we do not share the same mutual understanding of those questions and there is no specific venue prepared to explain why / what / etc.
I will mention some reading Diversity — Unofficial Python Development (Victor's notes) documentation because I will interpret the current problem as a lack of knowledge on the matter.
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I will give charitable interpretation to your post, but I will mention that what you are writing is indistinguishable for me from Concern troll - RationalWiki. You are free to pursue your rational examination of the CoC, the CoC need, and pondering many things that, I wish, would constitute baselines.
But for the sake of people who may not feel welcome in a community because things like that have to be questioned, I am standing my ground and I will tell you that the view of making empathy mandatory is not a differing viewpoint or experience when you don’t explain even why this is problematic. From my perspective, this sounds like “why should we bother with empathy?” and this is seriously disturbing.
We have many more matters to fight against in this technical project, I would like to work with people on the basis that everyone tries hard to have empathy otherwise this is just a free hell we are creating.
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@APCodes if you have a practical concern with the NixOS code of conduct as implemented, please share it. This is not a philosophical forum, so I ask that you take general philosophical discussions about code of conducts to other places on the Internet.
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Why are you ascribing hostile attitudes to me the very moment I start to raise a question that really concerns me?
I also have to stand my ground here:
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I am not trolling, I really want a reasoned reply to my questions. I think as a human being I deserve that.
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If you really want to foster an environment in which everyone tries hard to have empathy, why do you not respect my viewpoint as a baseline at least for 20-30 min? You don’t have to share it of course, just let it stand for a little while. You are doing exactly the opposite of what you claim you would want. Why do you tell me, for instance, that you are being charitable, but then retract that statement immediately and give a hostile and very uncharitable reading of what I said? Even though the Code of Conduct that you are defending would mandate actually being charitable.
Is this arbitrariness going to be a general thing against anyone you deem not sufficiently concerned with empathy? Because that is exactly the kind of concern that I have. That reaction is the reason I am against mandating empathy. Mandating empathy is an excuse for aggressive behavior against all those certain people deem insufficiently empathic.
Also the article on concern trolling states: 'the term is open to misuse" which it clearly is. It is a good term to outright discard peoples concerns you don’t want to be discussed. That is clearly not an example of charitableness.
- I never said that we should not bother with empathy. I said something very different. And I stand by what I said: Mandating (!) empathy is very dangerous. And your reaction to me is exactly why I believe that.
Mandating empathy makes people very agressive against people they view as showing a lack of empathy and it delivers even a justification for that aggressiveness. And I personally, subjectively experience your reaction to me right now as quite agressive and outright dismissive. Again, if your Code of Conduct would improve things, as being applied to your own conduct vis-a-vis me right now, I have a feeling that shouldn’t happen.
That this happens the moment I ask a question, tells me the Code of Conduct will be outright dismissive of things that really concern me, and will foster a very hostile attitude against me. And all other people who are like me in this respect.
So yeah, I really really did not intend that to be an attack at all. Nothing I said was intended as trolling. I EXPLICITLY stated that I am only a simply NixOS user, and I may not have the background knowledge necessary to understand why this is being done here and now. And I really wanted to know this as it is not obvious to me at all.
However the reaction tells me: I indeed did encounter a serious issue with adopting a Code of Conduct. For some reason it unleashed and unearthes a certain agressiveness. I would hope that there is a type of Code of Conduct yet to be discovered that avoids just that.
Anyways, I am out for today. I am not a troll and I don’t feed on the kind of environment I inadvertently helped express itself here. I don’t draw energy from that type of response.
If anyone else feels offended or distrubed by my views, I am sorry for that. That was not my intent.
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Good idea breaking this out into its own topic. I’m happy to see the moderation team put written words to their practices. I think Nix has done very well without a code of conduct thus far and I expect it to continue to do well in the future with this code of conduct. Regardless, it’s the hard work of the moderation team that has helped the Nix community do so well, if they decide a code of conduct will make their jobs easier than I can only support it.
Also, let’s not end up like Hyprland. I know even without a code of conduct our standards are way higher than that, but let’s not forget how nasty people can be on the internet in absence of any meaningful moderation.
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fair enough, that might be a fair point. But I think the fourth question I asked is quite practical.
Well, no offense again, but you said it at the end of your post. I call this wishful thinking and in practice, online communities (but any community really) has to deal with that.
None taken, as I said, I admitted it as a possibility.
If you know of better ways than being explicit, please do mention them
No, I’m pretty happy with the way the moderation team has been operating so far.
In fact, from a few episodes listed in that link, It seems to me their Python equivalent have been unnecessarily aggressive, but I don’t know the contexts.
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I expect a technical project to care both about a document as implemented and the same document as written.
Thus the question of whether the applicability and downstream status of the code is clear from the code as written is a relevant question even if implementation itself doesn’t raise concerns.
On the other hand, I do not see any language in the code as posted that makes encouraged traits mandatory all the time. Which is of course good.
As I have said, I do believe that the moderation team implements a reasonable vision, and the code is an attempt of «serialising» it which doesn’t affect back the implementation in an especially powerful way. Still the question whether the code is misleading about some parts of expectations can be meaningful.
Nixpkgs has long passed the size where relying on empathy was a good idea. We should have sympathy to others’ perception to which we cannot empathise because they are too different and too dissimilar to our own. Failure to admit that we need to learn to find a not-too-bad tradeoff across a gap too wide for empathy to cross will not magically make the gap disappear. After all, diversity of perceptions with which one can empathise is much narrower than the entire available spectrum.
Just to give a hopefully no longer too charged example: basically any presentation for a large amount of text will either be called wall-of-text by some, or be called visual noise by some others. As a pro-wall-of-text anti-visual-noise person, I find it way more promising to ask and to tell which things are OK and which are not, than to use empathy to things we don’t really perceive in creation of a lossy model to be used to replace a sympathetic but honest dialog.
(And in any case there is a trade-off between acceptability to different groups and the overall complexity, we should admit conflict of different interests when there is one)
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I just want to say that I see your points and I definitely do not agree that you have engaged in any type of trolling.
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This was already answered in the original post. The CoC is a tool for the moderation team and makes implicit things more explicit. For example, providing a clear escalation path is valuable.
There is also a set of people looking at the CoC as a signal that the ecosystem is managed. It makes them feel more at ease that they will not be attacked. This is a good thing in my book.
Maybe this doesn’t apply to you, but moderating is also about making room for all different kinds of people.
I can assure you that this is not the motive of the moderation team. We looked at a bunch of existing CoCs, and the Contributor Covenant was pretty close to what we wanted. I get that it has a bit of a leftist taste to the wording, but I wouldn’t get too hung up on it. Fundamentally, the document is about setting a range of acceptable and professional behaviour. And the application is still done by the same moderation team.
I really think we should divorce this idea of politics and acceptable behaviour. If you go to a church, it comes with a set of behaviours and social norms. And people from both sides of the parties conform to it. This is a bit the same. We should be able to enjoy hacking on Nix together, even if we disagree on other facets of our lives.
I really think you’re getting hung up on those two words. There is a whole gradient there between having some degree of empathy and inclusivity and going full zealot mode. I can tell you that the moderation team is very reasonable.
One problem that the moderation team encounters from time to time is that some individuals take no feedback. If you think about it, this is problematic in an environment like nixpkgs almost entirely based on consensus. This means that they can dictate what they want. And people more sensitive to consensus are then left with this feeling of unfairness and frustration.
If we want to work together, we also need all the participants to accommodate a little bit for each other. I don’t think this is really political or controversial.
The moderation team’s scope is the entire NixOS project, and the Code of Conduct also applies where the team has authority.
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Thanks for the reply!
Let me make the following remark on each of your points.
- The very fact of me asking four substantive questions has led to a somewhat hostile reaction against me personally. That tells me something. And it doesn’t increase my trust that a Code of Conduct is beneficial to the community that I am, albeit on a low level, a part of.
Also on the signaling issue. I see Codes of Conduct specifically, as distinguished from general sets of rules, as being part of a larger trend in the industry. I believe this larger trend is not beneficial, but something that one should stand against if possible. And I believe it is in part driven by ideological reasons that make life worse for many people.
Let this be clear: I am not opposed to moderation rules or a set of moderation guidelines. I am for civil conduct and discussion. But I believe the general trend of recent years that software projects adopt these corporatist things called Codes of Conduct, is something to be opposed. It is really bad.
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The idea of politics and acceptable behavior cannot be divorced successfully if the standard of acceptable behavior itself uses an already politicized language. That much should be obvious. But I do agree that 95% of the text is actually not that bad.
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So my pragmatic improvement proposal would be this: remove the little bits of left-sounding language. It is just a few words after all. And they don’t really matter that much to you as you said. Also, among the long list of protected groups in the very beginning of the Code of Conduct. Add: differences in political orientation and opinion as illegitimate grounds for discriminating against people. I have a feeling the fact that this is missing is part of the slight political bias of this type of Code of Conduct. Adding it would help remove that bias. Also, demote the role of the Code of Conduct from project level to moderation guidelines and call it accordingly.
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Now the role of the moderation team itself is somewhat obscure to me. Even after I read RFC 102. How can the moderation team make a Code of Conduct be applied at the project level as a whole? Because its role is moderation, right? Has this gone through the same consensus mechanism as everything goes in nixpkgs according to you? If not, who has given a team which is, if I understood correctly, essentially self-selecting at this point, such wide-ranging authority?
To be very blunt, my outsider suspicion at this point is this: some people decided it would be a good idea to use the moderation team to take the initiative and get a Code of Conduct accepted at the project level in light of the fact that the earlier consensus mechanism seems to have failed.
To me it is just obvious that a moderation (!) team isn’t a legislative assembly. This is not the right way.
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Indeed not. And a code of conduct isn’t legislation. It’s documentation. It describes how the system of moderation can be expected to function, the same way that code documentation describes how a piece of software can be expected to function. If the software does something that surprises you, the documentation may help you understand it; but changing the documentation to be more to your liking doesn’t fix bugs. Mutatis mutandis, likewise for codes of conduct and moderation teams.
That said, if I interpret this quote as a feature request for a change in moderation,
that’s an absolutely awful idea—and I expect/hope the moderation team would agree. ‘All X people should be killed’ is a political opinion, after all, and one that should certainly be considered legitimate grounds for taking moderation actions in most communities.
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I think it’s actually pretty easy. Every social group of people, no matter the form or size, has a set of norms, rules and power dynamics. Many of these are implicit. But some are made explicit, by publicly acknowledging them or even writing them down.
Implicit rules and power dynamics are always a bad thing for the entire community. It means less transparency in decision making, more possibilities for individual cliques to get their will, and more “gotchas” for newcomers to learn.
Therefore, the Nix community already has as Code of Conduct, the same way it had moderation long before the moderation team was formed. Prior to the moderation team, moderation was done by whoever happened to have administrative power (so mostly admin-adjacent people). I’m not going to say that it worked badly, but I doubt anybody would disagree that making that power structure explicit by founding the moderation team was a great improvement.
I honestly don’t understand what the problem is with writing our community rules down, so that people can look them up instead of having to guess and hope. The only people who benefit from not having a written Code of Conduct are bad actors and rogue moderators.
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If it is normative, it is not just documentation.
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Why is this an awful idea? This is even law in the EU. Now obviously that has limits, one of which is calls to violence, which are outlawed even in the most free speech oriented places, just as any call to criminal behavior will be in any jurisdiction.
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I strongly recommend reading Writing the Economy (Graham Smart, 2006) on that one. It’s a dynamic, iterative process between day-to-day practice, agreeing on and codifying a model of reality, and following the codification as guidance for practice.
Having worked on Nix documentation for a living for almost two years now, I see that happen all the time. Often, the first step to fixing a bug can indeed be writing down what it’s supposed to be like instead, and asking others if they agree.
If you really wish the code of conduct to change, please propose the concrete change you envision and negotiate it with the moderation team in place.
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Thanks for the interesting book reference @fricklerhandwerk. And also for the solution-oriented response in general.
I will think a bit about proposing 2 or 3 concrete changes / emendations. This is better than nothing. Even if the current team in place might reject them, I hope they at least provide me with some reasons as to why.
I might still remind anyone reading this of my more general issue why this is called CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in the first place if it is just a set of moderation guidelines describing existing practice. Which goes back to the initial post of @rnhmjoj in this sub-thread. I am not sure how fruitful it is to go into opening a PR here. But maybe I will reach out to the moderation team some time next week on Matrix or so and just ask them in a more private context.
Maybe it is enough for a while. I think I stated my concerns and defended them more than once here.
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Why do people need to introduce their political opinions, over and above the obvious good of free software and that derives from its underlying licencing model?
If someone’s political opinion threatens your well-being or existence, it is highly irrational to “forget about it”.
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I wasn’t going to write anything more. But it is what it is. And that one is kinda important.
I could go long and philosophical on this one, but I’ll be brief. I think organizations are more productive if people don’t hate each other. Waving your political opinions around these days appears to have the effect that people start to hate each other. Hence I said it is better to keep them outside the professional context. Logical, right?
I also did not say “forget your opinions.” I said don’t introduce them into a context that exists for a different purpose. In this case to make software that can be used by anyone. Introducing your political opinions, for the reason mentioned above, is harmful to that context.
More broadly: The view that you state here, I think, is very dangerous on larger grounds. It is destructive to civilized exchange as such. It easily gets you to the view that it is good, or in your words “highly rational”, to actively persecute people because someone authoritative deems their mere opinion “dangerous”. And I think it is important to at least say this because it is a view shared by some left-leaning people I know. I have heard it before.
And it is very bad.
This is the reason why I think a Code of Conduct should protect against discrimination on the basis of political opinion and attitude. That does NOT mean on the basis of political action. In fact I very emphatically believe that no one should be allowed to act upon the opinion you just shared. If people engage in actively harmful behavior and action (!!!) inside a professional context that should, of course, be stopped immediately. And I believe such harmful behavior includes discrimination on the basis of mere opinion alone.
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