Tim Peters (@tim.one), in post 6:

I can tell you for a fact that more than just a few PSF members are terrified by the possibility that the CoC WG will ruin their careers. Do they bring that up with the WG or SC? No. They’re already terrified.

…

Reflect that back. When someone is saying they find the SC’s actions or statements are over the line, that too is an expression of pain. But they increasingly fear to say anything in public, so, ya, in a “like” popularity contest, I’m always going to lose.

I’m not (unless this happens automatically in some way that I don’t know about) a PSF member, but what you say rings incredibly true. I’ve lost count of the cases I’ve seen elsewhere in tech where such terror was either described to me or I could immediately empathize.1

At the risk of redundancy, I’m going to give my own perspective below, because it’s just that important to me now. When I see things like this happen, it makes me less interested in joining or working with the PSF.

Filipe Laíns (@FFY00), in post 5:

Like @gpshead said, some styles of communications that were common in the past are now recognized as inappropriate, which is something I don’t think is surprising to most people. The problem are those styles of communication, not rational discussion.

The point, I think, is that it’s simply beyond imagination how a wink emoji could be “recognized as inappropriate”, or something which could “be misconstrued or perceived entirely differently by different people”. Aside from which, if this is sincerely the position of PSF Code of Conduct enforcers - that a complaint about such indeed has merit - then why are we using software that automatically converts that sequence of punctuation into an image?

Or is there, then, more than one way to “use” an emoji? If there is, I can’t understand the distinction being made, so I don’t know how I should properly look out for my own conduct going forward, aside from “just don’t type the close bracket after the semicolon; someone might take offense”. As far as I’m aware, the use of a wink emoji is that one inserts it into text, and it conveys the meaning that the preceding part was either not meant seriously, contains wordplay, or otherwise is intended to have a more light-hearted or jovial interpretation than the literal text would suggest. None of that sounds potentially inappropriate to me in the context of a forum discussion.2

Nor can I understand, from what I read in the thread, how any “soft conduct moderation” was “resisted”. To the extent that a problem was pointed out, it appears to have dealt with content that had been censored (whether preemptively or upon request, I don’t know) and which was relevant to the discussion. If there was something else, I missed it entirely, sorry. (I acknowledge here that there may have been posts deleted before I could see them.)

And where workplace sexual harassment training was brought up, I frankly don’t understand how it could be said that anyone was “making light of” it. If anything, the central point of the comment I recall reading, was to highlight the problematic nature of the situation - whereby those in power go unpunished while innocent third parties are at least inconvenienced and potentially shamed. If anything, that seems to me like progressive messaging.

Not to mention, also, the idea that styles of communication “are recognized” as such and so, as if that were an objective matter. This particular bit of rhetoric is far too familiar to me. Specifically, I’m accustomed to hearing it from people who in another context would rally fervently against linguistic prescriptivism (if there were any risk of “excluding” people by proposing to correct their grammar, for example). And it has never left a good impression for that reason.

And now I feel the need to move up a level or so of meta in the discussion.

I merely lurked in the previous thread (I didn’t even “like” any posts) because I could see that the primary topic of discussion had become politically (in the broad sense) contentious, and I’ve been trying to cut that out of my life, or at least to compartmentalize it. I’d prefer not to talk about issues like this as a programmer. I’ve even held my tongue, elsewhere on the internet, when people were verbally abusive to me and blatantly falsely accused me of sexual discrimination. (I’ve even gotten this when I didn’t know the sex or gender of anyone involved and can’t think of a solid reason why I should have been expected to.) In fact, I only even read the previous thread because it was referenced here, and this one because the forum software drew my attention to it. I wish I hadn’t read it, but the temptation was apparently too strong.

I don’t like bringing it up, because I have a general distaste for identity politics and don’t think it should ordinarily give my argument any more weight (whether from pity, “skin in the game” or supposed authority) - but I consider myself to be to some extent on the autism spectrum. I self-test fairly high in several categories3, and many of my personal habits and tendencies seem strongly suggestive of ADHD4. I’m sure (on the balance of probabilities5, circumstantial evidence, and also at least one admission I can recall) I’m not alone in this, either.

But I bring it up regardless, because: if pronouncements like this are what “inclusivity” looks like, it doesn’t seem very accommodating at all. I don’t feel included when I know (or sense) that I’m being expected to navigate all of that. Other communities have given me the impression that “diversity” isn’t actually meant to include neurodiversity; but I’d prefer to try to stay charitable here. So let me try to explain what I find problematic, from a personal perspective. Of course, I don’t mean to speak on behalf of anyone else, whether neurodivergent or neurotypical.

When I sense that I need to scan my examples for non-obvious potential causes of offense, that can actually take quite a bit out of me.6

When I learn that I’m being expected to pick up social queues from plain text and that I could be deemed a rule-breaker if I get it wrong, panic sets in.

When I read that what seems to me like a common marker of normal socialization - the sort that I’ve had to consciously teach myself to do, just in order to fit in when in public and not surrounded by people with a common interest - could be “misconstrued”, that panic doubles, and synergizes with confusion and a looming sense of injustice. (I should understand when others are aggrieved, but not attempt to express my own emotions? - Except it looks like I’m going to anyway…)

But most importantly, when I know that all of this is nominally about the pain and trauma of others, and the sheer importance thereof, a wave of emotions I don’t have names for washes over me, fueled by the past trauma (going back at least 15 years) of witnessing (and, unfortunately, getting involved in) prior discussions of this sort.

Those discussions are the bulk of why I’ve been trying to avoid discussions like the previous thread, and the current one, for the past few years. Because I have a pretty good picture of where they invariably go from here. And because they never leave me in a particularly good emotional place.

But I’m hitting the Reply button anyway.

Because Tim Peters is someone I’ve known of for almost as long, and first got to interact with over a decade ago7, and greatly respected that entire time. On top of which, I’m deeply concerned with the direction things appear to be going here.

So I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t.

  1. Just as I’ve lost count of the times I was simultaneously asked to empathize with someone else and told that doing so is impossible due to immutable characteristics of my person; but that’s another story… ↩

  2. When I read this paragraph back to myself, it sounds a bit snarky and, well, hurt. I don’t really intend to convey that, but I genuinely don’t know how to fix it while actually conveying the message. At any rate, while no snark is intended, I do feel hurt. ↩

  3. …but notably not WRT language processing - which may or may not have something to do with the fact that I’m perceiving what I am here. ↩

  4. To the extent that I’ve understood the research I’ve been able to do, of course. I don’t expect anyone to take this self-diagnosis at face value. ↩

  5. Probabilities which are, of course, conditioned on the fact that this community is focused on the act of programming. ↩

  6. I can count at least three things in this post that I either preemptively self-censored, or felt I had to go back and edit, because I sensed the potential for entirely unintended sexual innuendo. And now I feel like I should delete this footnote just in case; but I won’t because the internal conflict illustrates my point so clearly. ↩

  7. I ask you to picture the still-mature, but less experienced me, star-struck - talking on Stack Overflow about a problem where a naive application of sorted resulted in substandard performance, only to receive praise and an insightful back-and-forth from the person who’d implemented it! ↩