> Censorship, or even just the threat of censorship, causes far greater harm to a software community than a small number of thin-skinned people getting "offended" every now and then, usually over trivial and irrelevant matters.
Projects that do not promise to at least enforce a basic level of civility however lose a potential coder base as well, and that is people who are not "mainstream" and have to fight for survival (all too often literally, even in Western countries) in the meatspace already all day: women, gender-queer, people of color, people of non-Christian religions... last thing they want is toxic gamer bro culture seeping into spaces where they are active.
Anecdata, but anyway: I've been on HN for a few years now and very often the lead developers for extremely complex and interesting stuff, particularly reverse engineering, fall under that umbrella somehow. The "free market" shows just exactly where the highest talent classes are, and it's not the whiners whining about CoCs preventing them from spamming "I identify as an Apache helicopter" memes.
Projects that do not promise to at least enforce a basic level of civility however lose a potential coder base as well, and that is people who are not "mainstream" and have to fight for survival (all too often literally, even in Western countries) in the meatspace already all day: women, gender-queer, people of color, people of non-Christian religions... last thing they want is toxic gamer bro culture seeping into spaces where they are active.
Anecdata, but anyway: I've been on HN for a few years now and very often the lead developers for extremely complex and interesting stuff, particularly reverse engineering, fall under that umbrella somehow. The "free market" shows just exactly where the highest talent classes are, and it's not the whiners whining about CoCs preventing them from spamming "I identify as an Apache helicopter" memes.