If you've never seen racist trolling on GitHub, maybe it's because you're not looking rather than that it doesn't happen
The laziest of Google searches quickly found people being racist on GitHub (... to a GitHub employee! With their own, non anonymous accounts!): https://www.tinykat.cafe/on-all-that-fuckery
(This incident also made it to hn iirc, but maybe you didn't read it that day)
I don't think anyone was suggesting that it literally has never happened, so much as that it's very, very rare. Moreover, that kind of behavior would get you banned irrespective of any CoC, so the question remains: what does a CoC add here?
I don’t see how you can possibly think that. Saying that you’ve never experienced something is not a claim that no one has ever experienced that thing. Mine is not a generous interpretation, but rather I’m not going out of my way to infer some nefarious subtext.
I think the problem is essentially this: if you're a white male, you may essentially never experience or see racism / sexism in tech.
If you are a woman or black or ... you will very likely experience sexism or racism. You will probably also see more, because you are used to identifying it.
If you say "a third [1] of the people in this group experience a bad thing" I would say that's pretty wide-spread.
The OP was specifically saying "it's not widespread, I've never seen it" [2]
I'm not trying to claim there's a nefarious subtext. I'm not saying the op is sexist or racist. I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people experience this, and one of the stated goals of CoCs in open source or at conferences is to help combat it. I think that's a good thing, and while you or perhaps others have pointed out that a community could combat such negative behavior without a CoC, the CoC does give some indication of how such behavior will be dealt with (before I join the community/attend the conference), which can increase my confidence recommending a conference or increase someone else's confidence attending (or participating in an open source community etc)
[2] not a real quote so please correct me if it's way off, I'm being lazy
Also, I know they were referring to open source - maybe they've seen workplace sexism etc and were specifically excluding that. In that case I'm definitely misquoting and apologize
I'm just speaking for myself, but in terms of the open-source projects I have been a part of, communication either happens over a mailing list, or a discourse forum. A lot of the time you only know the people you're interacting with as a screen name, so you don't even know their race or gender. And 100% of the content of the discussion is either purely technical in nature (e.g. how do I use this API feature, what JSON structure is expected etc) or is something operational like the timelines and priorities of the project.
It's just hard to imagine how racism or sexism would enter into to a community like this because the race and sex of the participants is not known, and you're not even discussing races or genders at all, heck you're generally not discussing people at all.
That fact that it's hard for you to imagine just means your imagination isn't very good
It happens. People leave tech communities because of it. I don't know what else to tell you. I've provided citations to this effect in a bunch of other comments.
It's important to note, though, that people can do or say racist or sexist things without targeting it at someone. That would still impact someone's decision to stay in the community, even if the person who said it didn't mean to offend them.
To be fair, the article in question is not about a software project, it's about an individual who is using github as a food blog being trolled using the github collaboration features. It's an example of horrible online behavior, but I don't think it's relevant to OSS communities.
I can understand how you might think that code repos are different from other social media sites.
However, they aren't. They require moderation because people are rude even when not anonymous.
Here's a quote from the vscode repo moderators:
> We deleted a handful of comments which we deemed too offensive to leave as-is (foul language, racist remarks, etc.). We also deleted a few issues that were overwhelmingly offensive. Unfortunately, that resulted in some non-offensive comments within those issues being deleted as well.
I'm not saying that open source communities are not in need of moderation. Of course they are, like any online community. Basically every open online forum is vulnerable to vulgar, hateful and abusive content being posted. The point this sub-thread is referring to, is that CoC's are there as:
> a way to assure newcomers that your project wasn't going to allow racist trolling on the mailing list
This is what seems a bit funny to me, because I would take it for granted that racist remarks would not be tolerated as a matter of course. It doesn't seem to me that you need a CoC to enforce this.
And I would repeat that in my personal experience, having been involved with OSS discussions for over 10 years, I have never personally encountered this.
Of course you don't need a CoC to enforce anything! You can moderate aggressively without one.
What it does is sets expectations. It sets expectations for everyone involved in any interactions. In general, this should give you confidence that there will be some moderation or recourse if you experience rude behavior. That may allow some people who have been burned by ruder communities to be willing to give yours a try.
