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Rust Moderation Team Resigns

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Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#251
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite: it's a "we refuse to drag this drama out into the public sphere" statement.

That's a naïve reading. They are dragging more into the public sphere than necessary to raise their grievances. They could have kept the statement confined to disagreement with the government structure. Leave it ambiguous between whether it was a theoretical weakness in the structure, or a practical one where they already experienced the inability to censure. People like goss. Wagging your eyebrows to imply something…

The mod team is in a difficult position and are trying to thread a needle.

* They actions they have taken have publicly-visible consequences, so they must publicly acknowledge it

* They want to be respectful, and so minimize the amount of information they make public

* They believe the Core team acts in bad faith. So whatever public statement they make, they must anticipate being attacked for it and pre-emptively defend themselves.

That's a difficult set of objectives to try to meet simultaneously. I'm going to choose to support they way they've handled it, even if I don't 100% agree with it, because I don't think a perfect solution is possible.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#252
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite: it's a "we refuse to drag this drama out into the public sphere" statement.

That's a naïve reading. They are dragging more into the public sphere than necessary to raise their grievances. They could have kept the statement confined to disagreement with the government structure. Leave it ambiguous between whether it was a theoretical weakness in the structure, or a practical one where they already experienced the inability to censure. People like goss. Wagging your eyebrows to imply something…

    They are dragging more into the public sphere than necessary
That's a bold claim. For you to accurately make that claim, you'd need to know every other piece of the story that lead to this point and lead them to feel that this public statement was their only remaining choice.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#253
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more them saying be skeptical of anything the accused says about the situation, which is common sense in that the "wrongdoer" will more than likely spin the story to save face. Unlike a court of law, they're under no oath. They may make a statement about the situation if the core team decides to release details on the situation, but they don't want to be the first to do so, so they're simply saying be skeptical…

Without knowing details, I can say from experience that those who feel they are the most righteous are often the most wrong. I’ve been on both sides of this. If this has to be aired publicly, then we need to be able to objectively assess. Otherwise, I’m reading this as ‘we don’t get along with those guys and gals on the core team and vice versa’, which is, fine, it’s just humans not getting along. Which reminds me, I…

I'd rather say that a specific very annoying type of wrong people feels righteous, for reasons that range from psychotic entitlement to not understanding what they are doing. Right people often feel righteous for valid reasons.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#254
post #49

Why does a language need a “moderation team”? C++ seems to do fine without one.

It absolutely does not, according to /r/cpp. There have been disputes that nearly led to physical violence, racial slurs, and more. It's just all more "private" by nature of happening in conference rooms and private mailing lists.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#257

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 enfor…

> 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

Did you edit your comment at some point after publishing to be a little more mild (e.g. remove the word "childish" or something)? I apparently downvoted you at some point, although I don't see anything currently in your comment that would have caused me to do that.

I'm not sure where I land on COC-style stuff myself, but I have zero patience for people who are insulting to those in favor of them with words like "childish." If you had something like that in your comment at one point, I would have downvoted it. (TBH your comment is borderline with claiming COCs are "arbitrary," but I wouldn't have downvoted just for that.)

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly are the groups of people working on various parts of the official ecosystem supposed to coordinate their efforts? The only alternative I've seen is a benevolent dictator, which seems significantly worse for a number of reasons. Edit: it looks like you've removed the part about Teams/Committees.

As a matter of fact no, benevolent dictator is not significantly worse. In fact historical evidence when it comes to OSS projects points to the benevolent dictator model being the most effective. It may not satisfy social justice activists pretending to be competent programmers demanding a seat at a table that they never earned, but most successful projects are not ruled by committee until they reach a significant le…

> benevolent dictator is not significantly worse

I think your normative justification for project dictatorship misses the more important point: there's probably a dictatorship either way.

In these cases, the main advantage of the overt dictatorship model over the layer of indirection dictatorship model is that you at least know who's really in charge.

In some odd sense, the mod team that just resigned is in agreement: their resignation lays vare exactly who's in charge.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#259
post #166

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 enfor…

It's not a power grab, because they just relinquished power, even going to the point of leaving instructions for the next group of people that would take over. Just this flaw in your logic probably landed you your first downvotes. Second, the CoC is not arbitrary, there's a link to it merged into the repository which means the core team (or at least a majority of it) agreed to it. Their resigning is just a signal tha…

>It's not a power grab, because they just relinquished power

Relinquished what power? If they had said power, surely they would have gotten their way yes? Perhaps this is just an incremental iteration of the ongoing fight for power, a last ditch effort to get public sentiment behind them.

>agreed to it

This could have been a tactical choice to avoid fighting head on in that battle, waging the larger war against the CoC by simply ignoring it over time. It is just as likely to assume many who "agreed" to it didn't really agree with it, evidenced by them not following it. And here we are, it seems these people have "won" as they didn't follow it and the the team pushing it/enforcing it lost. So perhaps this strategy was the optimal one. "Agree" to a thing to move on with more important matters and ignore those who nominally are tasked with enforcing it but have no real power, if ignored.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#260
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Assume all your worst fears are true" is substantially different in meaning from "exercise skepticism around public statements by the Core Team." I understand your reading, but I don't think it's warranted by the actual public announcement here.

Exercise extreme skepticism. It doesn't seem like that word is there by accident.

Translating from don't-sue-me "extreme skepticism" obviously means "they're a clique of manipulative liars".
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