Funnily enough the only people that need a CoC on a Site like Stackoverflow are the people that are not worth keeping because they don't contribute enough to outweigh the disruptions they introduce.
Fun fact, one of the ways that the jannies infiltrate open source projects and ruin them with their petty bullshit is they make changes to the CoC or general policy in order to get in as 'contributors'. They don't know how to code in the slightest, so they infiltrate through the back way and then start making demands and with enough drama cause everyone to either leave or capitulate.
Yah, I've seen the Coraline (or whatever his fake-name was)-Story.
What an utter mess and because 'be nice to each other' sounds so unsuspicious they get to take power they neither deserve nor have the will wield responsibly.
But it is a helpful red flag. If there's a CoC the project is subverted and to be avoided, lest you help people that hate you and/or you'll be destroyed.
When I see a "cock" in a project I'm weighing for my company's use, that decision is a huge negative. If I find two projects with equivalent goals and one is run by assholes, I'll contribute to the other. I also enjoy passive-aggressively forking just to remove the documentation on the "penis" a political activist added, and do nothing else. If they look at their downstream graph and see my commit "extraneous documentation removed" and wonder what I did, my job is complete.
We do not allow political content that encourages harm to others or that supports, celebrates, or furthers the cause of violent actors and hate organizations. We may, in some places, allow pointed or harsh criticism of political figures, their policies, and governments (including satirical statements) as long as they do not otherwise violate this Code of Conduct. Read more in our Harmful Political Content policy.
EG - We'll allow whatever hate speech or political content that promotes our causes and that's perfectly ok because our cause is just and righteous and, besides, it's spelled out right here in our code of conduct!
Misleading information
We do not allow any content that promotes false, harmful, or misleading information that carries the risk of harm to a person or group of people. We also do not allow content that promotes false or misleading information for the purpose of promoting the interests of a political party, government, or ideology. Read more in our Misleading information policy.
And this is the ban on any non-political speech - like how mRNA vaccines aren't real vaxxes or sudden death syndrome.
Note this also opens the doors for them to be just like all other social media ratings systems these days and take money from corps to block speech the corps find... troubling...
This happens to line up quite a bit with my own work because I regularly browse and even post on programming forums depending on where. You're correct, the veteran programmers who actually know their shit seem to have moved on from these types of places precisely because of this nonsense.
There was a big drama not so long ago involving Unity game engine, once because there was a pretty significant security breach through node.JS where a Ukrainian activist managed to brick several peoples' PCs allegedly because they were targeting Russian IP addresses and even left a note through the auto-update function. This affected users of discord and unity who even if they weren't on Russian IPs got a text file on their desktop.
Second was the infamous Unity Ironsource merger, a company that I hadn't known about until then but was allegedly pretty notorious for harvesting data among other things and an ex-EA executive was behind all of this. Everyone started jumping ship even a mod I saw on the Unity forums who got completely fed up of the Unity staff's bullshit. I also imagine that them covering up the fact the breach happened didn't do wonders for confidence.
Quite a lot of Unity programmers including myself went over to Godot forums and that's now the main hangout for a lot of devs I feel. Either that or they went over to Unreal instead but I think a lot in the indie scene can't stomach the idea of Epic any more than gamers can.
I bring all this up because it's important to note all the detail happening in the background. In spite of everything, there's general agreement even on the Godot forums that we don't want to see free speech ruined on the site. When a Ukrainian activist tried to start shit over there they were shut down immediately which is great.
Yeah, you're not going to find good programming discussion on many of these mainstream sites anymore. It's been frustrating for me switching engines even though it's worth it in the long run because I'm having to often make fresh threads on very specific topics that aren't covered in the documentation to make sure not only I but others have up to date information on various programming topics and focus the autism a bit.
The bot problem with these sites certainly doesn't help things much, useless moderators caring more about political posts than keeping the place free of spam.
The biggest cultural break I've noticed between Gen X/Early Millennial techies and this modern cohort is the latter's obsession with bureaucratizing and proceduralizing everything. Whereas the former was openly hostile to those things and in many cases entered the field to seek refuge from them.
A techie speaking like an HR drone is anathema (or at least should be).
No older techies would have done something like what the sqlite devs did: adopt the Rule of St. Benedict as their Code of Conduct, and a week later cave to pressure and adopt a "normal" one because the matter "was distracting us from our work".
"We do not allow discriminatory content towards a person’s ... gender identity and expression"
Sex is not listed. Interpretations of this that do not assume malice/insanity on the part of the authors:
A) By "gender identity", they must mean sex.
B) They just forgot. Doubt this though because feedback on drafts of the CoC pointed this out.
The world has genuine incompetence in spades, and one should never assume malice, but I would guess that this is deliberate shenanigans.
If by "gender identity", they don't mean sex, then officially, sexism is permitted on stack overflow. Presumably they'd just say it was discrimination on the basis of "gender identity" though. (whatever that actually means)
Funnily enough the only people that need a CoC on a Site like Stackoverflow are the people that are not worth keeping because they don't contribute enough to outweigh the disruptions they introduce.
Fun fact, one of the ways that the jannies infiltrate open source projects and ruin them with their petty bullshit is they make changes to the CoC or general policy in order to get in as 'contributors'. They don't know how to code in the slightest, so they infiltrate through the back way and then start making demands and with enough drama cause everyone to either leave or capitulate.
Yah, I've seen the Coraline (or whatever his fake-name was)-Story.
What an utter mess and because 'be nice to each other' sounds so unsuspicious they get to take power they neither deserve nor have the will wield responsibly.
But it is a helpful red flag. If there's a CoC the project is subverted and to be avoided, lest you help people that hate you and/or you'll be destroyed.
When I see a "cock" in a project I'm weighing for my company's use, that decision is a huge negative. If I find two projects with equivalent goals and one is run by assholes, I'll contribute to the other. I also enjoy passive-aggressively forking just to remove the documentation on the "penis" a political activist added, and do nothing else. If they look at their downstream graph and see my commit "extraneous documentation removed" and wonder what I did, my job is complete.
Jannies seem like a real dead weight on society
EG - We'll allow whatever hate speech or political content that promotes our causes and that's perfectly ok because our cause is just and righteous and, besides, it's spelled out right here in our code of conduct!
And this is the ban on any non-political speech - like how mRNA vaccines aren't real vaxxes or sudden death syndrome.
Note this also opens the doors for them to be just like all other social media ratings systems these days and take money from corps to block speech the corps find... troubling...
I feel like I've seen a lot less of those "died suddenly" posts on Twitter of late.
Loss of interest?
Less jab harm now that booster rates have plummeted?
Twitter suppression?
This happens to line up quite a bit with my own work because I regularly browse and even post on programming forums depending on where. You're correct, the veteran programmers who actually know their shit seem to have moved on from these types of places precisely because of this nonsense.
There was a big drama not so long ago involving Unity game engine, once because there was a pretty significant security breach through node.JS where a Ukrainian activist managed to brick several peoples' PCs allegedly because they were targeting Russian IP addresses and even left a note through the auto-update function. This affected users of discord and unity who even if they weren't on Russian IPs got a text file on their desktop.
Second was the infamous Unity Ironsource merger, a company that I hadn't known about until then but was allegedly pretty notorious for harvesting data among other things and an ex-EA executive was behind all of this. Everyone started jumping ship even a mod I saw on the Unity forums who got completely fed up of the Unity staff's bullshit. I also imagine that them covering up the fact the breach happened didn't do wonders for confidence.
Quite a lot of Unity programmers including myself went over to Godot forums and that's now the main hangout for a lot of devs I feel. Either that or they went over to Unreal instead but I think a lot in the indie scene can't stomach the idea of Epic any more than gamers can.
I bring all this up because it's important to note all the detail happening in the background. In spite of everything, there's general agreement even on the Godot forums that we don't want to see free speech ruined on the site. When a Ukrainian activist tried to start shit over there they were shut down immediately which is great.
Yeah, you're not going to find good programming discussion on many of these mainstream sites anymore. It's been frustrating for me switching engines even though it's worth it in the long run because I'm having to often make fresh threads on very specific topics that aren't covered in the documentation to make sure not only I but others have up to date information on various programming topics and focus the autism a bit.
The bot problem with these sites certainly doesn't help things much, useless moderators caring more about political posts than keeping the place free of spam.
Man, this is a new level of insane even for codes of conduct.
The "misinformation" section alone pretty much lets them ban you for anything they want any time they want.
The biggest cultural break I've noticed between Gen X/Early Millennial techies and this modern cohort is the latter's obsession with bureaucratizing and proceduralizing everything. Whereas the former was openly hostile to those things and in many cases entered the field to seek refuge from them.
A techie speaking like an HR drone is anathema (or at least should be).
or maybe they were already as bad as what we have now and were playing nice to get their foot in the door.
No older techies would have done something like what the sqlite devs did: adopt the Rule of St. Benedict as their Code of Conduct, and a week later cave to pressure and adopt a "normal" one because the matter "was distracting us from our work".
Thought you guys were potentially exaggerating but damn there's some spicy stuff in there.
It references https://archive.ph/wQ5vk "Harmful political content policy", which includes:
"We do not allow discriminatory content towards a person’s ... gender identity and expression"
Sex is not listed. Interpretations of this that do not assume malice/insanity on the part of the authors:
A) By "gender identity", they must mean sex.
B) They just forgot. Doubt this though because feedback on drafts of the CoC pointed this out.
The world has genuine incompetence in spades, and one should never assume malice, but I would guess that this is deliberate shenanigans.
If by "gender identity", they don't mean sex, then officially, sexism is permitted on stack overflow. Presumably they'd just say it was discrimination on the basis of "gender identity" though. (whatever that actually means)