Rust Moderation Team Resigns

If you’re not going to publicly state your grievances, so publicly posting your resignation seems at best political and at worst slanderous.

Either let the public in on the situation or don’t. Don’t badmouth someone and then refuse to explain why.

There are two statements here regarding things that have happened:

> the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves

> we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to

It's possible that there were CoC violations that they were not able to moderate, that the actions available to them were limited (e.g., they would have initiated a ban but they were not able to ban a core team member), that a core team member intervened to prevent effective moderation, or that the core team prevented the mod team from being able to access official core team channels in order to moderate.

Seems to be a wide variety of possibilities and leaving the nature of the situation ambiguous* will likely make it difficult for a new mod team. I hope the now-former mod team are open and direct with new or potential mod team members about the environment they're entering.

* I do think it's right for the mod team to not reveal the specifics in public; that would likely provoke targeted harassment and make the situation much worse

Absent some form of democracy, what does it mean for a leadership to be "accountable"?

Power extends from whoever has the authority to hold others to account. So this just reads like a power-grab from the moderation team. What would it mean for them to have the power to hold the core team to account? That they could sack people from it?

The goals of the project are set by the core team; not by a moderation team enforcing some abitrary CoC. Suppose a member who contributes 90% of new features to the project is "sacked" for an otherwise trivial CoC violation. This subsumes the project into an ideological purity-testing game.

Accountability here is just that the wider community has visibility on the actions of the core team, and will be up-in-arms if they are seriously unethical.

This is, in my reading, deeply bad press for the moderation team. The innuendo and insistence on their own power above that of the people leading the project... this "is a bad look".

EDIT: the immediate number of downvotes on this comment is interesting. I'd be interested in hearing from a down-voter on what their objection is.

> 4 Downvotes in 1 minute -- exhibit A

No. The downvotes probably come from the bullshit lies you're spewing:

> Almost every open source project is being overtaken by social justice warrior leeches.

False. Or at least it has to be assumed false until you back it up with numbers.

> Even Linus Torvalds was kicked out of Linux

False. Obvious lies.

> I'm surprised that the Rust community pushed back.

What?

I feel it's a bit of a tautology, the fact that they're resigning already clearly communicates there's an irreconcilable difference between the mod team and the core team. If the core team comes with an explanation that would make light of the situation surely the new mod team would be skeptical.

That said, there is still a bit of a game left to be played. The mod team just played their trump card, by instantly making the matter super public. But by keeping the specifics close to the chest they both keep their integrity and they give the next mod team some leverage for their interaction with the core team to resolve this situation.

It's really good btw that they're keeping the specifics private. Having someone publicly lynched is never a good situation, it's probably something that's offensive to a group of people, but the person(s) who caused offence probably have no bad intentions. It's hard running an organisation with a diverse group of people. You'll never get everyone to settle on the same moral values so it's inevitable that you'll get someone who is unapologetic about some value they hold.