@MaddieM4 In Our personal experience as a moderator of different online communities (usually with plenty of nerds but not centered around tech in particular) is that the CoC is only ever as good as the moderators in charge of enforcing it.

Really, "enforcing it" is the wrong angle to describe it from, no moderator is going to enforce a rule they don't believe makes sense, or at the very least they're not going to do it consistently, and, conversely there's often nothing in the way of stopping them from enforcing their personal beliefs even if the CoC doesn't mention it.

Nor is every CoC entry meant to be always enforced, some rules are at their most effective as a blunt tool against whataboutism, like a "no politics" rule that's really a "use this hammer when bigots complain" rule. Of course, this can be abused in the other direction, too.

In Our opinion, the CoC works best not as a tool of enforcement, but as a reference for community values, combined with said community doing most of acting on them, in a way where top down enforcement only becomes necessary for those who refuse to approach things in good faith (trolls, fascists, libertarians, etc.).

Now, this is incredibly hard to get going from a fresh slate, not only does it require cooperation from all the moderatorship, which is just not always a given, depending on how and why you found yourself in this position, but also - most folks are just not used to this kind of arrangement, they'll just assume that staff is king, because that's how it almost always works, and their mind gets a bit blown when this is brought up as a possibility, not to mention that most newcomers just won't have the deeper understanding of a structure they didn't (yet) help build, nor the personal investment to really do anything with it.

But it absolutely pays off once it gets going, when the community itself has enough knowledge and feels responsible enough to respectfully keep each other in check and explain why we do things certain ways. This has a sleuth of advantages - simple disputes get resolved before you even become aware of them, you can feel more like part of the community rather than their overseer, you can focus more of your time and effort on the actually complicated disputes that are the ones that actually require someone with your expertise, suddenly dropping out becomes much less of a liability, and in general the biggest factor for moderator burnout gets taken away.

And once such communities get going, the CoC becomes much more of a glossary for existing members and a promise for new ones. This may sound silly, but there's been rules that were de-facto there for years without actually making it on the CoC yet, just because they were so simple and in-line with how the community sees things already, it'd actually just take that long for somemany to point out that the CoC doesn't actually feature the rule, often to the surprise of the members, including the moderators.

It's a lot harder to scale this kind of thing than "here's a list you need to punish people for", but also We've yet to see any large enough community that We wouldn't feel uncomfortable in, so We would wager it's not like the traditional approach is any good, either.

@MaddieM4 There's this dynamic that I often see in group/institutional behaviour that punishes the person pointing out the abuse, never the abuser. Usually because tolerating abuse is seen as improving group cohesion, pointing it out is "rocking the boat".

CoCs seem to me to be quite often used as a formalised way to do this, because as you point out they end up with the shallow tone policing usage.

Which is not to say that having some principles is a bad thing, just to have a sign to tap..