An intervention felt necessary, so I’m grateful to the CoC WG for doing so, even as I feel sad about the whole situation, and, like Paul, wish that substantially softer interventions could have sufficed.
This is an entirely reasonable mindset for CoC enforcement for a large community. Note there’s a difference between an HR response and a legal response. While I’m not sure the posts I read ever clearly crossed a line for myself, several of them felt at least off colour to me… If enough people feel something is questionable, I feel that’s a sufficient and desirable standard for an HR department to attempt some (hopefully small) course correction.
I don’t think the person was really doing themselves any favours; it’s a pretty bad strategy to take a sardonic tone and assume your readers will catch your nuance when talking about difficult subjects in a heated conversation while also posting at volume and also engaging people who did clearly cross lines. I disagree with the interpretation of some specific items on the bullet point list, but it’s easy for me to see how people would construe things that way.
I thought the SC’s previous post about expectations was excellent and despite being less specific, makes a clearer case. At a certain community scale, you simply need to be more pessimistic about the effect your words may have on people, because they will have that effect on someone. I think the core dev sort of willfully missed this point (the irony that they repeatedly made the point that we should be more forgiving of people who miss the point is not lost on me). I can appreciate that it must feel strange for old timers to see an HR department in what was once a tiny community, so I’m glad to hear from Mariatta that the SC spoke with person privately… I trust that softer, more personal course corrections were attempted and rejected, leading to our current predicament. I do think we owe it to ourselves to make our large community feel small.