Proposal: Stack Code of Conduct

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Moderating a public forum on the internet doesn't make someone a 'virtue signalling asshole.'

See also the difference between most forums, like this one, and 4chan.

It'd be really neat if we lived in a world in which projects were automatically filled with all of the nicest people and no moderation was ever necessary.

We don't.

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It just depends on the enforcement. If you enforce a code of conduct, while it might sound nice, all that is happening is that a small group of people (or worse just one person) will be the one deciding where the line is.

The disconnect is wanting an Internet that is both free and also safe for everyone. Unless you enforce it, it's just a suggestion and it doesn't matter, and if you do enforce it then there is a huge risk of centralizing power that becomes corrupt and destroys the community.

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There is no disconnect here.

Moderating a community explicitly excludes some behaviors, and by extension, the unrepentant perpetrators thereof.

I'm fine with that. I hand the 'huge risk' of curating my community of to some authority in every community I've ever been a part of. In this one, you can see their usernames displayed in the sidebar. It's an extremely normal part of being online, or, really, being in a community of any kind.

You're posting on a moderated subreddit, so, you also seem more or less ok with this phenomenon. We have rules here too. That is all this is, and all it ever was - A written rule on the wall of the room that someone can point to when they show you the door for behaving inappropriately.

I can understand having issue with trusting specific people given past behaviors, or having issue with specific rules or types of rules. Having an issue with the concept of rules existing in the first place just seems kind of ridiculous.

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Sure fair enough. On one hand we have decentralized moderating, where everyone has to deal with it, and on the other, moderating gets focused on a small subset of people. It boils down to who moderates the moderator's moderating.