Fewer Words, not More!

Question

All the guidance that a self moderated community should need:

Be respectful.

With the instructions to the elected moderators on enforcement, use your best judgment.

This is respectful to the community and those trusted in enforcing the code.

The elected moderators are just that, they are elected by those that they will be moderating. They should know their communities better than anyone else.

If they are trusted to be fair and equitable by the community and make sure the communities are perceived in the best light possible they should be respected and trusted by the company.

This is reasonable, it scales, this allows for handling anything, this allows for mistakes and corrections.

My experience has been,

If someone needs more than two words to know how to behave, a thousand more is not going to make a difference.

Why can we not just have this as our Code of Conduct?

Answer 1

Works in real life

I worked for a CEO that saw a dress code that was 10 pages of what men and women could and could not wear.

She changed it to this instead:

Dress appropriately.

That was it; managers and HR were told to use their best judgement on when to correct what someone was wearing. Dealing with each incident on a case by case basis.

Here some excerpts from the article about this:

"The HR department ironically posed my first hurdle. They started arguing with me, saying, it can be ‘dress appropriately’ on the surface, but in the employee manual it needs to be a lot more detailed. They put in specifics, like, ‘Don’t wear T-shirts that say inappropriate things, or statements that could be misinterpreted.'”

“What does inappropriate, in the context of a T-shirt, even mean,” she asked the audience, half-jokingly. ”So I finally had to say, ‘No, it’s two words, that’s what I want.’

What follows is what has been removed from by SE on every update:

“What I realized is that you really need to make sure your managers are empowered—because if they cannot handle ‘dress appropriately,’ what other decisions can they handle? And I realized that often, if you have a lot of overly prescriptive policies and procedures, people will live down to them,”.

she continued with ...

“But if you let people own policies themselves—especially at the first level of people supervision—it helps develop them. It was an eye-opening experience, but I now know that these small little things changed our culture powerfully. They weren’t the only factor, but they contributed significantly.”

the article goes on to state

By simply stating “dress appropriately,” Barra does exactly what she asks of other leaders: She avoids assumptions, instead choosing to trust her employees’ judgment—and has found the experience remarkably liberating.

The Dress code has never been a point of contention as far as I know.

It this works at a company of that scale, then the same approach would work here.

Answer 2

All the guidance that a self moderated community should need:

Be respectful.

That doesn't work. Why? If we all agreed on what "Be respectful" meant, all of this wouldn't be happening.

But it's obvious that we don't all share a common definition of "Be respectful." Some people think it's respectful to use "he" as a default pronoun, while others do not. Some people think it's respectful to use the singular "they" in place of a known pronoun preference, while others do not. Some people think it's respectful to write answers and comments saying that transgender people are mentally ill and should seek treatment, while others do not.

And that's just for this one issue. Some people think it's respectful to copy/paste their entire homework assignment into the question box or to ask vague questions with no research, while others do not. Some people think it's respectful to write "don't be lazy just google it," while others do not.

We could do this all day, and basically have been for a couple weeks now. A system in which individual moderators take action based on their personal judgements is not a coherent system. Moderators exercise a great deal of judgement, that's what we elect them for, but there has to be some guiding document that goes into at least some detail on the norms we're all going to adopt, even if we don't entirely agree on all of them. Otherwise every moderation decision is just subject to the personal whims of whoever happens to see it.

As other questions have noted, a number of members of the community are on the spectrum. For some, it is more difficult to intuit social norms and culture, and clear social rules may be more helpful than vague principles. Similarly, we're a widely international and culturally diverse community, and social norms differ, so even among the vast majority of people here who aim to act with respect, everyone has a bit of a different interpretation of "be respectful."

Finally, "be respectful" opens up the giant question of intent: "well I didn't mean to be disrespectful, so surely I wasn't violating the code of conduct." The code of conduct puts the focus on the content, not on assessing whether the user posting it was trying to be respectful.

If someone needs more than two words to know how to behave, a thousand more is not going to make a difference.

If someone is determined to misbehave, then sure, no policy document is going to stop them. That's what the enforcement tools are for. But a code of conduct serves other purposes. It provides guidance to those who are genuinely unsure what is allowed and some sense of due process to those determined to break the rules. As the Contributor Covenant, adopted by many open source projects, states, a code of conduct is a statement that allows us to be "overt in our openness, welcoming all people to contribute, and pledging in return to value them." As such, a code of conduct is a public statement of the community's norms, which serves as a signpost to someone considering joining.

Answer 3

TL;DR

Why can we not just have this as our Code of Conduct?

I think your "Be respectful." can be a good start, but it lacks a lot of specifics. Respect means different things to different people so it's not very useful to explain what you expect from users. As a result, you will end up having arguments on specifics and that will lead to new rules and then the Code of Conduct grows larger.

The full version

There are a ton of examples where rules on how to act are in the order of books. As an example, the criminal codes of many countries are very verbose with amendments and exceptions. Furthermore, these codes are subject to change when the leadership thinks it needs to change. Of course, in healthy democracies most of what's in these codes should have the support of many citizens and be mostly self-obvious (so you don't accidentally break the law).

That said, I would reject your assertion that the number of words used to lay down the rules says much about how well they can work. I do agree, however, that a good set of rules, large as it may be with exceptions and nuance, should be in a way that it can be concisely summarized in a number of simple sentences.

I think your "Be respectful." can be a good start, but it lacks a lot of specifics. Respect means different things to different people so it's not very useful to explain what you expect from users. As a result, you will end up having arguments on specifics and that will lead to new rules and then the Code of Conduct grows larger.

Generally, I like the faq style way of laying out the rules as users can be pointed their to read in on their questions about the rules. Furthermore, it's concrete enough to discuss in detail and it can be added to if and when needed.

A different approach based on your question would be to start with a simple more ambiguous rule (on specific subjects) and elaborate them as needed. The best way to do this would be to engage with the community to ensure that the whatever is agreed upon is supported by many. After all, if many users can't accept the rules there will be friction between user's conduct and rule enforcement.

Answer 4

We count on everyone to be respectful. Most people are respectful, even if they sometimes stumble on the nuances of participating and communicating in a pretty global community. What's important is that many people show the effort by being polite, even if they're occasionally misunderstood.

The original CoC document was written knowing that most people naturally follow it, while being clear enough for others who struggle a bit to clearly understand the rules. "Be respectful" isn't easily and objectively distilled into things you need to watch out for if you're unaware that your idea of respectful deviates from what we endorse as the bar to entry.

So, we went on to specify some things to try our best to create a shared understanding of what we expect, and set expectations for enforcement so folks can decide if we're the kind of place where they might want to participate. We knew we'd have to tweak the document a bit, probably ~6 to 12 months past shipping it, to address cases that it didn't make intuitive enough. And, to that, we're essentially following the same kind of philosophy you mention:

• Start with what you think is exactly enough to create a shared understanding of enforceable rules, and,
• Add to it only when we feel like more specifics are needed.

We see respecting people's right to exist and participate while being afforded the same consideration as everyone else without additional struggle as something very fundamental, which we thought was pretty squarely covered by the original version. It's a perspective thing, we wrote it, we intended the use of stated pronouns to just be obvious there, but because we were so close to it, we didn't realize so many wouldn't see the same.

So we added it, because it's a disconnect. That's it. We don't anticipate many changes to the document. We're not going to start a bulleted list of arbitrary things we deem off-limits because for bad actors that just reads like a tempting obstacle course to pursue.

But "Be respectful" won't work, because you'd be very surprised when people say "Well, I respectfully said go to hell" -- see? At some point you have to just put the most complete and abridged guidance out that you can, and help those that lead pursue the intent of the document primarily.

And that's exactly what we're putting training together for moderators to help them do.

But there's no way we can go back to just "Be nice" or "Be respectful" or something like it, because it was failing to adequately protect way too many people by default. Part if it is because we have so many cultures here, and part of it is because the madder people get, the more open to interpretation ambiguities become.