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Rust Moderation Team Resigns

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Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#311

Post by Latty »

dolni wrote: post #298
remus wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around. While this is generally true the workarounds can and do take time, and while all this is happening there's a lot of space for a person to do significant damage to the project in the meantime.

> the workarounds can and do take time That's a feature, not a bug. Most big decisions can and should take time. Usually because it's not a simple matter of "this guy is a massive dick to everyone and contributes hardly anything." More often it's "this guy carries this project, and he is an asshole when people show up and run their mouth because they think they're smarter than they are." Which is to say - it's a shad…

Is it coincidence that it is so common toxic people end up being the ones "carrying the project", or is it that because they are toxic, they push away other contributors and create a fragile project with a bus factor of one?

Seems to me getting rid of those people sooner rather than later is better for the health of the project overall.

Of course, I'm sure some will argue that it's no coincidence because being effective and being toxic are inherently positively linked, but that's simply untrue in my experience, wishful thinking on the part of toxic people who want an excuse for their behaviour. Linus himself has said he was wrong to act as he did, and has worked to change that, and seen improvements for doing so.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#312

Post by ziddoap »

donatj wrote: post #82
scandox wrote: post #16

> In this message, we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability. We've chosen to maintain discretion and confidentiality. We recommend that the broader Rust community and the future Mod Team exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation. Isn't that a kind of scorched earth statement? I read it as "we will be discreet and…

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.

They explained why: accountability and structure.

Do you need specific instances, date and timestamped?

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#313

Post by azeirah »

iudqnolq wrote: post #222
foldr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a longstanding issue that a lot of people are unhappy with the level of control that Evan exercises over the development of the language. On top of that, a lot of the development of the core language happens behind closed doors, which has given the impression of stagnation over the past few years. As I understand it, the fundamental reason for this situation is technical. It is really difficult to enforc…

Evan also wants to prevent people from making packages that solve certain types of problems so that he'll be able to make a better package in the future without needing to worry people might not want to switch because of backwards compatibility. I think that's entirely his right, but I'm skeptical it'll work.

Clojure and Common Lisp managed to have super stable community-built libraries. I'm not entirely sure what contributed to this (ie did this happen because of a stable core? Did this happen because lisps are somehow naturally conducive to stable extension?) but it's possible to have this happen without preventing community built-libraries.. :<

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#314

Post by cjaybo »

whimsicalism wrote: post #194
bruce343434 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my personal experience such statements are pretty rare actually.

Oh, I think they are not as rare as you think. People are actively deterred from, say, Linux kernel development because of the community.

Yet the kernel is one of the most successful OSS projects of all time. I'm not sure it makes your point very well.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#315

Post by throwawaygh »

dolni wrote: post #228

I don't believe proper free software projects require significant moderation of behavior between individuals. If someone says something that rises to the level of a crime, report it to your local authorities. Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around. Note that expelling a person from a project for being a jerk in one or more instances may do more harm than good. What is the value o…

> Note that expelling a person from a project for being a jerk in one or more instances may do more harm than good. What is the value of their technical contributions? Just how much of a jerk were they?

The way we used to deal with this was by divorcing communication from contribution. Someone might be banned from a mailing list or IRC channel but their contributions could still be merged (and they might even have write access to the main repo, in extremely rare cases).

I think it's still the case that a lot of the "pro vs con" debates around mod teams could be addressed by divorcing the social aspects of development from willingness to consider PRs. And I've never seen a cogent justification for not making this split.

> For better or worse, competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges.

I don't buy the causal link at all. I think it's more likely that competency in software often used to let OSS contributors get away with being assholes because there was so little free-as-in-beer competent labor available. Programmers, even ones who will work for free, aren't such hot shit anymore.

> snowflakes

I think we've gotten to the point where we can s/snowflakes/meany-face/. It's juvenile name calling that distracts from your point and makes people take you less seriously.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#316

Post by ivraatiems »

dolni wrote: post #228

I don't believe proper free software projects require significant moderation of behavior between individuals. If someone says something that rises to the level of a crime, report it to your local authorities. Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around. Note that expelling a person from a project for being a jerk in one or more instances may do more harm than good. What is the value o…

> You can't have a complex technical project that is successful without some minimum level of competency. For better or worse, competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges.

This is just nonsense. Plenty of intelligent and capable people are perfectly friendly and non-toxic.

Your philosophy demonstrably doesn't work. Its failures are so obvious that even Linus Torvalds, who people always seem to bring up in these conversations, has repudiated it[0].

> And, in fact, some people contribute a _negative_ amount overall. Which is to say, the project is better off without their participation.

This is true. Toxic people aren't worth the effort to keep them in, no matter how good their skilled contributions are. There can and should be a way to remove them.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#317

Post by smitop »

foldr wrote: post #106
nzach wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on the Elm breakdown? I don't remember reading about it.

There's been a longstanding issue that a lot of people are unhappy with the level of control that Evan exercises over the development of the language. On top of that, a lot of the development of the core language happens behind closed doors, which has given the impression of stagnation over the past few years. As I understand it, the fundamental reason for this situation is technical. It is really difficult to enforc…

The compiler literally checks what GitHub org originated the package. If you fork a package that uses FFI, it won't work unless you remove the check from the compiler or use a hacky workaround to trick the compiler: https://github.com/elm/compiler/blob/770071accf791e817144070...

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#318

Post by gdy »

danShumway wrote: post #270
gdy wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"viewable by others" And I'm sure that the authors of the message are aware of that but made the decision to write what they have written anyway.

Yes? This is posted to the Rust Org's issue tracker: that is an appropriate place to post a resignation notice for an open org with heavy community interactions, and it's an appropriate place to inform the Rust community in general about their decision. That it happens to be public outside of those groups is beside the point. Do you often show up on Open Source projects complaining that their public scrum boards or p…

"just telling you what their decision already is"

That's not the only thing that they did. As the Russian saying goes, 'if you said A, say B'. I'd have no problem with the message 'We are resigning because we had a conflict with a certain team and it didn't get resolved in our way', but they have said more, just enough to make a public accusation without any chance for the accused party to refute it.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#319

Post by morelisp »

simiones wrote: post #289
dolni wrote: post #228

I don't believe proper free software projects require significant moderation of behavior between individuals. If someone says something that rises to the level of a crime, report it to your local authorities. Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around. Note that expelling a person from a project for being a jerk in one or more instances may do more harm than good. What is the value o…

> Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around. This often puts a considerable drag on the whole project, one that can easily climb to way above the contributions of that person. Even worse, this is often not visible at the project level, as multiple people start independently avoiding this person, even finding technical work-arounds to avoid working with them; while their direct contr…

Well, we know it’s not zero. Several major contributors have cited it specifically as reasons they have quit or backed off.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#320

Post by throwaway894345 »

DrBenCarson wrote: post #283
throwaway894345 wrote: post #235

> 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. I'm less familiar with Rust community moderation, but as an example of what not to do, I would offer up the Go maintainers' strategy of advertising unrelated, partisan, ideological content on their web pages and then shutting down any kind of critical conversation a…

> Providing legal representation to those who may have been denied a fair trial This is partisan?

Obviously I was talking about "Black Lives Matter".
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