No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities
First off, there is lots of different potential abuse in a tech community. Second, not all of it comes from &quot;rock stars&quot; - the aggregate cases of abuse probably greatly outweigh rockstardom-enabled abuse. Third, the abuse was perpetuated not because Jake was a &quot;rock star&quot;, but because your community&#x27;s values suck and nobody would stand up and call him out, AND nobody cared once they did. This was primarily a failure of your community. But like I keep saying, this is a feature of all in-groups.<p><i>&quot;Why are rock stars so common and successful?&quot;</i><p>Because communities like &quot;leaders&quot;, and they have shit heuristics to determine it. And everyone loves an asshole, and there&#x27;s tons of asshole hackers.<p><i>&quot;How do we as a community prevent rock stars?&quot;</i><p>Stop being a community.<p>I&#x27;m serious. Communities breed power in individuals and it&#x27;s been proven time and again (and &quot;in studies&quot;, no less) that in an in-group, a person with power and low morals is more likely to abuse their power. It&#x27;s inherent to in-groups. Remove the community, you remove the power, you remove the social and other influences that bring the immoral, not-powerful person into contact with the vulnerable. No community, no abuse.<p><i>&quot;Our recommendations can be summarized as: decentralizing points of failure,&quot;</i><p>....What? This isn&#x27;t an Active Directory tree, these are humans. Every node in your network is a point of failure.<p><i>&quot;increasing transparency,&quot;</i><p>And what would that look like? Sending an e-mail to a listserv every time someone says something passive-aggressive to you? Again, there is no simple way to police the myriad of potential abuses, micro or macro, from all sorts of personalities.<p><i>&quot;improving accountability,&quot;</i><p>Which, for a community that shuns the police, looks like what? K-lining him from your IRC server?<p><i>&quot;supporting private and anonymous communication,&quot;</i><p>You already have that. This whole debacle has shown how anonymous communication is dismissed until a real face is put to a complaint, and many of them, all at once. This is pretty standard group dynamics, again.<p><i>&quot;reducing power differentials,&quot;</i><p>So... everyone is an op. Nobody is allowed to like anyone else more, and everyone has to be invited to your party.<p><i>&quot;and avoiding situations that make violating boundaries more likely.&quot;</i><p>No more alcohol or drugs and nobody is allowed to be in a room alone with one other person, AND no PMs allowed, everything in-chat and logged. Got it.<p>--<p>The points, one by one:<p>Codes of conduct won&#x27;t be followed if the people enforcing the code of conduct don&#x27;t enforce it. This is why there are police that police the police.<p><i>&quot;Start with the assumption that harassment reports are true&quot;</i> - if Jake had made the first report against his victim, now we would have to believe Jake. Default assumption of guilt doesn&#x27;t work - this is why our own country&#x27;s laws do the opposite. All the examples given of <i>&quot;investigating for bad behavior&quot;</i> are things regular non-rapey people do all the time. <i>&quot;nasty emails, stolen credit, rude behavior, and unethical acts big and small&quot;</i> ? That&#x27;s every fucking hacker troll alive.<p>Making it easy for victims to find each other is not a good idea, because coordination leads, again, to failed heuristics: one person felt uncomfortable with a consensual act, another was actually violently sexually assaulted, and now the first changes their story so they&#x27;re taken more seriously. (This is not something i&#x27;m making up to gaslight an invisible person, btw, this happens to real victims) It would, however, be GREAT if there were a community-specific organization that anyone could contact to discuss how they feel in a safe way.<p>Watching for boundary pushing and react strongly - yes, 100%.<p>Call people out for <i>&quot;monopolizing attention&quot;</i> - uh.... Right, popular female hacker scenester. Let&#x27;s police the social convention of &quot;taking credit for work&quot; or &quot;being loud and outgoing&quot;. You and I both know nobody&#x27;s going to shout down the hacker media whores - and there are so, so many.<p>The <i>&quot;deep bench of talent&quot;</i> thing is again, almost completely irrelevant to generally preventing abuse in communities.<p>You basically explained why your point about hierarchies is invalid, so no need to comment.<p><i>&quot;Failing up&quot;</i> is a minor aspect of corporate hierarchy and has nothing to do with social or personal power in in-groups, this is not relevant to the subject.<p>And, sure, <i>&quot;no relationships in the workplace&quot;</i>. You go ahead and explain to Sally and Joe (or Jane, or Zed, or whatever) that Sally is going to have to support her kids without Joe&#x27;s help because Joe needs to leave the company because you feel uncomfortable that they might one day have a domestic dispute.<p><i>&quot;Avoid organizations becoming too central to people&#x27;s lives&quot;</i> - this really has zero to do with the subject.<p><i>&quot;Distribute the keys to the kingdom&quot;</i> - Same.<p><i>&quot;Don&#x27;t create environments for potential boundary violation&quot;</i> - Like I said above - no drugs, no alcohol, never leave anyone alone with another person. Your parties are gonna be a blast. Chiptune, diet shasta orange, and vacation slides. Wheeeee.<p>--<p><i>&quot;We waited too long to do something about it.&quot;</i><p>Correct. Now, next time, do something about it. That is really all that needed to be said and all that needs to be done.