Ruby removed “Participants will be tolerant of opposing views” from its CoC
I wanna tell a story that happened a few years ago (edit: turned out to be loosely related stories as I remembered them)... Suddenly #ruby had a new rule: the word &quot;guys&quot; was banned to refer to people. Why? Because it&#x27;s suddenly become the most exclusionist, sexist, oppressive, whatever-bad-you-want-it-to-be word.<p>Bots were automated to hand out imputations and strikes, followed by kicking people who continued to use the word &quot;guys&quot; (regardless of the context). This automation was later <i>reluctantly</i> refined to be less trigger happy.<p>Trying to prompt discussions &quot;about the G word&quot; was bannable (without a proper warning): New person joins, sends &quot;thanks guys&quot; after a question, gets slandered by the bot as the scum of humanity and then given a four-message long wall of text about why the word &quot;guys&quot; was intentionally given its modern-day meaning because of something-something subconscious and it&#x27;s designed to manipulate you. Naturally, person complains about this cultist-looking spam. If a mod is online: fuck that new gu—person; BAN. Immediately. A ban. I think maybe the bot mentioned it it one of the messages that discussion is forbidden, but I don&#x27;t think people read the whole message. It was worded in a very patronising &quot;you&#x27;re a worthless idiot without a single fucking shread of human decency, so let me lecture you on how to behave in my version of a beautiful society like you&#x27;ve just turned six&quot; way that I don&#x27;t think most people got defensive and didn&#x27;t give a flying fuck about the consequences.<p>The next in line for the woke firing squad were pronouns. ALL pronouns. This luckily never happened; I don&#x27;t know why not, but I remember it being called regressive instead of progressive behaviour[2].<p>The G word rule ended up causing a lot of drama in-channel; and I remember at least one GitHub issue that got heated over this (they wanted it removed from the rules IIRC). At one point #ruby became a fusion of linguistic nuances, colloquialisms, culture, and social issue topics (pretty much what&#x27;s happening here) that conversation about Ruby looked like it was off topic. I&#x27;m talking about <i>hours</i> of discussions about these subjects[1], and people with Ruby related questions get outright <i>ghosted</i> by everyone. This was why the earlier mentioned banning rule was introduced; mods noticed a slow exodus and a small decrease in activity in the channel when people weren&#x27;t engaging in flame wars.<p>I&#x27;m a white guy, but I&#x27;m queer (gay). I won&#x27;t delve into my background too much, but short story short is that for most of my life I was living in confusion, fear, and alienation because of sexuality, so I know how it feels to be Queer, and that I always try to be compassionate and understanding in these issues, and I always try really hard to make everyone feel welcome and included[3] and look for compromises. A lot of active people in the Ruby community started feeling alienated and unwelcome because of this rule (no joke: they were called snowflakes by the woke folk in the ops channel).<p>But these &quot;woke&quot; people on #ruby? Let me tell you: they&#x27;re not woke at all. They&#x27;re just hungry for control. They have all the textbook behaviours of a toxic parent (I&#x27;d know I grew up with one)&#x2F;person. They wrapped their motives in good intentions, and manipulated most of the ruby community. I don&#x27;t know if the &quot;results&quot; of their actions will be good or bad, but I&#x27;m not talking about results: I&#x27;m talking about motives and morals (which is what the focus is).<p>Small digression: It was really disappointing to see some of the BLM things unfold where white-assed Americans (this is by no means exhaustive or exclusive to Americans or whites) tried to steal the spotlight with their &quot;performative workeness&quot; where they made being woke a pissing contest about how to outwoke the rest and be the most woke. It&#x27;s the same thing as people who post those &quot;fake&quot; instagram pictures: the only difference is fake thoughts and woke tokens instead of &quot;likes.&quot; It&#x27;s absolutely disgusting that people abuse real social issues to &quot;promote&quot; themselves (companies who used this for PR are just as scummy). They&#x27;re the fucking Cruella De&#x27;Vils[4] of this world and they don&#x27;t even see it.<p>This same person (&quot;evil&quot;) that led this anti-guys movement on #ruby tried to get someone (&quot;misguided&quot; due to religious indoctrination) fired from _their own_ project (open source project) over a retweet. That&#x27;s right, it wasn&#x27;t even an original thought. She almost got her way, because some people were <i>really</i> supporting the.<p>Like, people <i>created</i> accounts just to be able to harass the &quot;misguided&quot; person via github Issues. The evil person didn&#x27;t get their way in ruining someone else&#x27;s life. So What happened next? They made it <i>all</i> about them; they were the victim in this whole story. They resigned from the Ruby community with something like &quot;not wanting to be in such a toxic community&quot;. They came back again, because they probably couldn&#x27;t find a more effective way to assert their psychological dominance&#x2F;control over another naive community.<p>I&#x27;ve never experienced ANY toxicity, exclusivity, animosity or <i>anything</i> even remotely resembling discriminatory behaviour in my five years in the channel (at the time) until one asshole decided to ban a well-established English colloquialism. I find it incredibly ironic that they <i>created</i> the very thing they wanted to avoid: a fucking toxic community.<p>The cherry on top of this was that in those five years of being part of the community, did I ever see anyone single member complain about the channel&#x27;s community being not exclusive or not welcoming. Nobody raised this before or after. The only people raising this was a handful of who invented victims to protect so they could give themselves purpose and importance in the community, when they were a nobody before.<p>This person who started the movement, their GitHub is littered with them doing &quot;God&#x27;s Good Work™&quot; by opening CoC pull requests to random projects that were trending on HN or Github that week. I&#x27;ve never seen them talk in the Ruby channel other than the ops channel; there they would occasionally bring up someone&#x27;s way of communicating wasn&#x27;t sterile enough (my interpretation). They&#x27;d _almost never_ help with any Ruby related issues; the only reason why I can&#x27;t straight up say &quot;never&quot; is because I remember they&#x27;d give wrong advice sometimes&#x2F;<p>Anyway. I&#x27;ve been typing this our for a while now trying to organise a bunch of jumbled events&#x2F;thoughts&#x2F;ideas that happened over a long period of time, and it&#x27;s getting hard. I&#x27;ve written so much already that I&#x27;m sure most people will just think it&#x27;s TLDR and skip it, and the worst part is I don&#x27;t feel like I&#x27;ve said enough. Feels like I&#x27;m only 20% of the way there. Recalling these events stirred some old emotions (mix of anger, disappointment and sadness).<p>I want to finish by saying that even with all this said—and it did have big (IMO negative) impacts on parts of the Ruby community—the Ruby community as a whole is _so_ much more than this toxic squad of performative woke bullies. The Ruby community already _is_ accepting, inclusive and non-discriminatory. I love the Ruby community even if I&#x27;m not as active as I used to be. Stay beautiful, and don&#x27;t let trolls guilt-fish you toxicity. &lt;3<p>---<p>One last thing, I used &quot;woke&quot; with a bad undertone throughout the text. I want to make clear that being woke is great, but being woke for the sake of your twitter followers or so you can feel &quot;less guilty,&quot; or as a power move, or—anything that&#x27;s not pure, basically, is just performative wokeness. There&#x27;s very few people who do it for &quot;knightly&quot; reasons (as in goodness-of-their-heart reasons, I don&#x27;t mean to be sexist).<p>I already said this has grown way longer than I planned. I know I threw out a lot of things and they might seem a bit like a gishgallop, but that wasn&#x27;t my intention. I love talking about social issues (as you can tell, I have strong opinions about this) and doing what little I can to make my circle of people feel good and inspired. Anyway I refuse to make this post longer, so if someone wishes to talk with me about any of these points further, feel free to reply or reach out.<p>---<p>[1]: Nobody wants to hear they&#x27;re a villain or that their moral compass is wrong. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Confirmation_bias" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Confirmation_bias</a> Also people always selectively quote parts of your message, then they construct fake a context&#x2F;narrative that makes them feel morally superior in their screenshot.
[2]: I tend to agree.
[3]: One of the reason this situation&#x2F;anegdote is really sensitive for me is because I was accused of being oppressive, anti-LGBTQ, etc etc etc. This brought up a lot of doubts, insecurities and other dark thoughts all back: Like, hello, I&#x27;m gay and I&#x27;m making other marginalised people feel even more marginalised?! What kind of trash human am I?
[4]: From the originals, not the recent live-action film with Emma Stone; that Cruella is awesome