There is a writers’ Facebook group which states its moderation policy like this: “the group is moderated very lightly. We are not your parents; if you have a disagreement, work it out among yourselves.” I like this policy.

And it kinda sorta works.

That’s not saying that CoCs were not a kind of response to some pathological behaviors in online communities: you often are going to get either socially inept man-children, or people on the spectrum, and there are kindergarten-level conflicts. You get programmers who attach themselves to their work too much, have very strong opinions, and often will treat a set of rules as a puzzle you need to game, without much concern towards any consequences.

But my oh my, do lots of popular CoCs look like solution for that problem invented by the same kind of socially inept man-children who are the part of the problem. They likely have read the word “empathy” in a dictionary, but don’t understand what it means in their bones.

I have an even less charitable theory of what CoCs might be about, really, but for now I’m applying Hanlon’s razor and stick to what I’ve stated above.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that adding something like that would make things worse and open the door to wasting your time on pointless issues like "Why are you using this code of conduct instead of $my_pet_code_of_conduct?", whereupon you tell them they're not working towards the project goal, which leads to even more drama. It's simply not worth it.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, open an issue about the code of conduct.

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md but it's just the Marine Core code of conduct.