Stall The Ball

So far I have refrained from posting on the Code of Conduct “storm in a tea cup” stuff until I had a chance to read and digest the various points of view.

Tim O’Reilly came up with an idea to have a Code of Conduct that blogs could adhere to complete with a little logo to show how civil you were being.

It rattled a few cages and in general the consensus seems to be “Who do you or anyone else think they are to be imposing rules on us”

For me the tin hat was the little Sheriffs badge as a logo.

I don’t know about you but to me that suggests enforcement.

According to Tim “The Sheriff's badge was also a bad image both because of its local cultural context (the American west) and because it might imply that the internet as a whole is some kind of untamed frontier.”
No, it implied a police force! Big difference.

Several comments on his website have asked how exactly this was going to be policed. No definitive answer is forthcoming.

Probably the most useful comment of the lot referred to this site with 4 simple rules for posting on the internet.
http://asimplecode.com/.

A Simple Code for Posting on the Web
Say Everything As If Speaking To Everyone
(because you are)
If You Must Be A Jerk, Don't Be An Anonymous One
(because that's cowardly)
Encourage Others To Abide By This Code
(because it's neighborly, plus recursive rules are fun)
When Others Don't Care To Abide, Ignore Them
(because they're not worthy of your time)

Although there has been much to do about the contents of the code I’m not too bothered by that. Let’s assume that it’s a reasonable stab at codifying what’s generally acceptable and what isn’t. It’s how Tim plans to enforce this code of conduct and why he feels that it is required that interests me.

One comment was "Two questions I have not seen answered:

If this is about the Kathy Sierra thing, can someone explain to me how this "Blogger's [sic] Code of Conduct" would have prevented it from happening, or even changed the course of events one iota?

What is to ensure that people who put these badges or post this Code of Conduct on their site actually adhere to it? Does this Code of Conduct not become meaningless without enforcement?

I'd like to see answers to all three of these questions, please.“

Pretty good question I thought.

Tim replies “Here's how the "code of conduct" would have helped the Kathy Sierra thing:

Social mores are the prevailing values of a group. One of the "values" of the internet is that unfettered speech is better than any restriction. This keeps people who might have spoken up sooner about a conversation getting out of hand from saying anything. If the prevailing value is that you can say what you want to say without being insulting, and comments that are offensive in various ways are deleted, the general tenor of conversation becomes higher.

The point is that we tolerate on our blogs a style of conversation that we would never tolerate from people in our physical presence. Taunting, bullying, nastiness are not OK, and the fact that they are happening in comments on a blog or on a mailing list doesn't make them OK.

I'm trying to change the general perception of what's OK.

Before the Kathy Sierra flap, I would probably have just said, "don't read that stuff." (And that's still good advice. I had some pretty nasty stuff said about me on fuckedcompany.com during the dotcom bust when we had layoffs, and I had to have the discipline just to ignore it. Fuckedcompany's mission was to create a place for that kind of stuff, much as an inflammatory talk radio show does, or a gossip rag.

But if people had said those things on oreilly blogs, I would still have been conflicted about deleting the comments, because I would have been afraid that it would have been interpreted by readers as censorship.

This is why I wanted to try to move the needle to say "let's clean up our act and be a little less tolerant of abusive speech."

And it's also why, in the course of this discussion, I'm getting much more interested in better mechanisms for "demoting" comments rather than just deleting them. Demoting might mean disemvowelment, but I love the way that librarything lets people flag offensive comments so that they are hidden but still accessible.

With mechanisms like that in place, it would be a lot easier to deal with the gray area of "do I let this one stand or moderate it down?" The binary act of deletion is hard. So as a result of the discussion that's been started here, I'm probably going to focus my efforts on getting better moderation tools into the major blogging platforms.
“

I have read that paragraph a few times particularly the opening line “Here's how the "code of conduct" would have helped the Kathy Sierra thing”

And the only point I can see in the whole reply that actually attempts to answer the opening line is "I'm trying to change the general perception of what's OK."

The original commentator responded later with a similar opinion “Tim
I asked this:

If this is about the Kathy Sierra thing, can someone explain to me how this "Blogger's [sic] Code of Conduct" would have ***prevented*** it from happening, or even ***changed the course of events*** one iota?

Nowhere In Tim O'Reilly's response does he show how this code of conduct would have prevented people from posting anonymous comments, from setting up new blogs to harass her, or from sending death threats. How would hiding or deleting the death threats have **PREVENTED** -- notice that key word -- or **CHANGED** -- another key word -- anything?
Tim O'Reilly, you really need to stop talking down to everyone as if what they need to do to solve this nonexistent problem is adopt your idea of this code of conduct and some meaningless, unenforceable badges and things will start getting better.
“

Tim has yet to reply on that post but has had a bit of a rethink and goes forth boldly here

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/code_of_conduct.html

In this post he responds to a comment asking who enforces all this with “Seth asked: "Who enforces this?"

The answer is, the site owner, who can delete comments and ban commenters, or moderate them before posting. The "we" in the case of Radar is the set of people who post here. On some other blog, it's the individual or group who runs the blog. It's not like this is some law that's enforced on other people's sites. It's just a statement about what you'll allow on your own blog”

Emm how exactly is that different from what is going on right now???????

Probably the best blog post I have read about Tim's persistence is here
http://www.unreliablewitness.com/2007/04/11/warning-may-contain-nuts/

My gut feeling is that Tim is suffering from “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” syndrome. From reading down through his replies and comments elsewhere MY take on this is that instead of calling it a Code of Conduct he should have stated he was creating a list of guidelines and publishing them for re use if someone wished to use them as a template for a TOS on their blog because more and more it's looking like that's exactly what it will end up as.