alt Hacker NewsTrouble is, the people who are most likely to need a code of conduct to tell them how to behave are also the most likely ones to strongly object to one on the basis that they don’t need a CoC to tell them how to behave.
Trouble is, the people who are most likely to need a code of conduct to tell them how to behave are also the most likely ones to strongly object to one on the basis that they don’t need a CoC to tell them how to behave.
So what? You have simply stated that jerks exist.
True, but what you have ignored is that jerks exist equally on all sides of any CoC.
It's just as often as not that the producers and promulgators of some CoC are the jerks. In other words CoC's don't fix anything by merely existing. A few lines in a charter or mission statement already does the same to have something to point to just for formality and documentation sake.
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[edit to expand or re-state a little...]
It's not that there is no problem and everything is fine already. It's that CoC's are almost always a thoughtless and ineffective, even actively counter-productive response to the problem.
A coc is an attempt to make an easy solution for something that there probably IS no easy solution for.
The problem takes the form of a continual fresh stream source of problem. IE a forever stream of new jerks, and existing jerks who dodn't just do one thing today but continue to exist tomorrow and the next day.
And so the solution can only be a matching continual case-by-case counter-effort, from intelligent insightful people who have good judgement.
Yeah, that doesn't scale and isn't easy and only some people do even a half-way good job of it.
It's just not a problam that you can bash script away.
But trying to do so is an example of being just a different color of jerk making life worse for others, but just in a different way and employing different mechanisms.