Communities were not doing fine. CoC didn't come out of nowhere because someone was bored. Having a CoC doesn't absolve moderators any more than having laws absolves judges from having to make good rulings.

> Communities were doing just fine without a CoC

I mean kinda, but also not. CoCs just codify what the moderators think.

Even Hacker news has a CoC: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html its just called a guide.

A community has to have a set of rules which most people agree on. One of the most common attacks in a moderated forum is "Oh but X did Y" and "thats not fair X can do it"

A CoC can be a simple way to "tap the sign" when someone is being a dick.

It also allows communities to set expectations at the start, not after someone has transgressed and pissed in the well.

In an ideal world, you'd just have a thing that says "don't be a dick" but that doesn't work for many and hilarious reasons. Engineers who who either have a god complex, parsing issues or empathy gaps (either learnt or inherent ) are notoriously difficult as a community to keep from getting into frothy arguments that colour everything and give off a bad smell.

CoCs are a tool, that can sometimes help.

Yes but it was always this way. Any organisation with rules can suffer from rules lawyers as a lot of people who have tried to contribute to wilipedia/serve on a committee of a voluntary organisation etc will testify.

I had never heard of the Tim Peters incident, but I just googled it. (It's not on his Wikipedia page.)

I found this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/1ep4dbt/the_shamefu...

Which points to this:

https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...

This characterizes it as completely unfair, and the /r/python community seems to agree.

Is there a rebuttal from the other side?

Honestly, this is the first argument against CoCs I've seen that I agree with. They do kinda act as a tool to deflect responsibility.

That's just absurd.

Often these "rules" extend to conduct far outside of the purview of a project - typically crossing into identity politics.

"If you espouse views I don't like on your personal Twitter, you can't contribute to this entirely unrelated software project."

No, the problem with CoCs is exactly that they are not "just rules".

They are something else hijacking the legitimacy of normal justified functional articulable rules.

That's why it was kicked into overdrive during/after Occupy Wall Street. The message of bankers screwing over everybody else in the country had clear broad appeal and people were paying attention and talking about the issue. Then, newspapers started reporting that the OWS protestors were using a "progressive stack" to silence white men and give all the talking time to the freak squad... I don't even know if that narrative had any truth or if the newspapers made it up whole cloth, but regardless it was something most American's certainly could never agree with, so OWS was overnight transformed into a social justice freak show in the eyes of the public and people stopped talking about bankers.