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Rust Moderation Team Resigns

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Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#321

Post by dogleash »

JohnBooty wrote: post #252
dogleash wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was replying to someone who said the content of the resignation was a refusal to drag drama into the public. I did not say dragging it into public was a bad tactic for accomplishing their goals.

>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.

No I wouldn't. I will stand by my claim that they said more than necessary to raise the structural issues they perceive in Rust's governance. They very well may need to say more than that - or even more than they did say - to see their desired changes to the governance system enacted. Not what I was responding to.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#322

Post by shkkmo »

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?

EJI has fought against the death penalty and taken sides on other partisan issues. I wouldn't call it a partisan organization myself, but I can see how someone could reasonably form that opinion.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#323

Post by throwaway894345 »

malaya_zemlya wrote: post #300
radlad wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that the Equal Justice Initiative[0] (linked by the Go homepage) is considered partisan. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Justice_Initiative

i think the parent was referring to https://github.com/golang/go/issues/45970

Yes, this is what I was talking about. Shame on me for thinking people wouldn't overlook the first three words of the banner. (:

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#324

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

cycomanic wrote: post #261
capableweb wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you can resign with a lot less "drama", for the lack of a better word. Simply make the PR remove people from the moderators list and say "We don't want to be moderators anymore", but instead they give clues to what could have happen for them to take this action. I guess you can say that their action was "semi-public". It wasn't trying to be completely private, and neither completely public, but somewh…

But if you just say "we don't want to be moderators anymore" nothing would change would it? The whole point of the statement is that the mod-team believes something in the organisational structure needs to change. What would you have done in that case?

I would explain what went wrong. It's clear that their organizational suggestions were prompted by a member of the core team doing something they consider terribly wrong - how can it be so bad the Rust community has to know about it yet not bad enough that the community needs to know what it was?

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#325

Post by unanswered »

zozbot234 wrote: post #309
unanswered wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any good way to craft a message like this? "We are resigning and our reasons have been shared privately with X group. " But since the goal of the whole exercise is to generate publicity and drama, the above was an unacceptable approach and the approach actually taken was highly effective.

They're committing to sharing these reasons with other Rust Team members, though. Just not the broader dev community.

So set `X = "other Rust team members"`. Everything else in the comment was just for drama.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#326

Post by pulisse »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #307

I mean, is it any surprise? When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they probably recruited a bunch of SJWs who went around looking to be offended, then were told where to go (I mean, they're non-technical members of a technical project) and now they're acting offended...

> they're non-technical members of a technical project

As part of the moderation team they're serving in a non-technical _role_, but they can and do play technical roles as well.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#327

Post by foldr »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #293
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…

> As I understand it, the fundamental reason for this situation is technical. It is really difficult to enforce purity in a strict language with an FFI, because the behavior of side-effecting functions would be predictable and they'd be easy to use. My understanding is that 1. FFIs are still available to NoRedInk, Evan's employer. 2. The change was partly justified as a way to manage the Elm ecosystem. In general, Ev…

I think the revealing term here is 'implicit promise'. A lot of people seem to have very fixed expectations about how open source projects should be run, and feel that they've been betrayed if a project isn't run in that way. I don't think Evan is to blame for that, though.

The bottom line is that no project that's run by one person in their free time is able to give assurances of anything over the long term. I do think that if half of Evan's critics had the experience of running a reasonably popular open source project, they'd realize how meaningless any long-term 'assurance' is.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say that Evan broke everyone's code. I was writing Elm code as part of my day job during the 0.18-0.19 transition, and it was not particularly painful.

But this is all by the by. The fundamental question is the following. How would you propose to keep Elm pure while still allowing community libraries to access the FFI?

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#328

Post by DanHulton »

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…

And how many incredibly-productive people have been chased off of products by the toxic individuals that were being "worked around?" We may never know. You act as if we can have perfect knowledge into what the tradeoffs will be, but that just isn't the case.

Also, I don't think there are very many people who match your strawman -- "snowflakes [who] like to believe that everyone contributes equally." If you've worked in software (or really in any industry) for any time at all, you know that everyone is an individual performer with their own individual pace. But if you believe that that pace is solely a factor of their own productivity and isn't influenced by the environment they're in, you're being incredibly naive. Those toxic individuals are usually the ones that contribute the "negative amount overall" you mention, due to how they poison the atmosphere and reduce everyone else's output.

Which is to say, the project is indeed better off without their participation.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#329

Post by frozenlettuce »

nzach wrote: post #54
ferdowsi wrote: post #36

These organizational breakdowns in tech communities (recently Rust,.NET, Elm) make me much more appreciative of long-running, relatively healthy communities.

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

some examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808306 https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ and there's also the elm-pine issue, where an independent package manager was shunned by the core developers (note that the official package manager doesn't support basic features as repos not on Github)

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#330

Post by ben-schaaf »

nopcode wrote: post #301
Ticklee wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my eyes someone is allowed to be as hateful as they want as long as they contribute good code.

Yes, and this is the policy of many long-running and successful FOSS projects (e.g. kernel developers). Rust however wanted something different and attracted a lot of "snowflakes" because of it.

The Kernel also has a code of conduct: https://www.kernel.org/code-of-conduct.html.
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