Stack Overflow's New Code of Conduct
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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.
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?
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".
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)