Rust Moderation Team Resigns

If a project can't survive without its toxic people, then perhaps it shouldn't survive.

This comes at a large cost of a lack of any kind of formal consensus process or coordination. It is very hard to run a large ship when it's not organized, and that decision often ends up reflected in how projects evolve.

Compare and contrast programs like Krita/Blender that have formal processes that keep them aligned with artist interests with either free-for-all or "benevolent dictator" Open Source projects that much have less direction. You give something up when you decide that your design/contribution process is going to be totally anarchistic; you lose the ability to keep a program/project focused on a singular goal and to plan for the future.

> Linux has changed the world -- in a very substantial way and much for the better -- even though Linus flew off the handle at people for years.

Note that Linus being toxic doesn't mean he wasn't heavily moderating Linux. Linus's personality problems weren't a problem of lack of moderation, they were a problem of how Linus moderated and what he moderated. In many ways, Linus's toxic behavior was a form of moderation/gatekeeping: it demanded a certain style of contribution and interaction when you entered into the mailing lists. Far from being a free-for-all, Linus demanded (and still does, although he's trying to be better about the way he demands it) a lot of focus on code quality, standards, and communication style when submitting and describing contributions.

But make no mistake, Linux moderates: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/22/22398156/university-minne...

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

I think we would save some time if we recognized that opposition to moderation policies often comes down to disagreements about specific social debates (is it OK to be a jerk if you're good at your job, are certain words OK to use, what communication styles should people use), rather than philosophical disagreements about the nature of moderation in general.

It's also worth noting that the assumption here that the mod team's complaint is about people being rough around the edges is just an assumption. The mod team has not given a public complaint other than that there were incidents that they felt were mishandled, and that they felt they were out of alignment with the core team on moderation direction. We don't know what happened.

I suppose we're of different opinion, as I considered the resignation letter to have enough clarity to the intended recipients to be acceptable. They didn't say "I quit, the end". They pointed at the specific areas of issue (accountability, structure) of which the core team is likely well aware of the minutiae.

Just because it wasn't explained incident by incident to the public does not mean the "employer" (or, in this case, core team) did not understand the message.

I would wager that incidents were brought up, not addressed (or addressed as a WNF), escalated, then resulted in this resignation. The people relevant to each stage will be familiar with each stage, and should hopefully be able to follow the progression.

The public does not need to be privy to each and every individual incident, as much as everyone would like to butter their popcorn.

Echoing simiones, 'worked around' here means that other productive members of the community will become disillusioned and leave. The toxic person will become a 'known problem' that is talked about in hushed tones. People will devise small scale strategies for avoiding the bad behaviour.

> 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?

We had a publicly 'productive' architect for many years that loved to talk about his technical contributions to the President and CTO, but the actual effect of his contributions was negative.

He refused to coordinate with other teams, and everyone who had to interface with his work were forced to rework APIs according to his current whims.

He belittled people publicly when they weren't present, and I watched him steal credit for other's achievements. He would then complain that no one appreciated what a hard worker he was to anyone who would listen.

On top of all of this, his actual architectural decisions were unsound, as they centralized his work, that only he could maintain, as a core component of the system. In 10 years, he only had one direct report that could tolerate him enough to help with his codebase.

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

An unsupported assertion. I've personally found that toxic people are much more willing to aggrandize and lie about their competency to people who don't know better. The best programmers I've worked with were all cooperative and positive 95+% of the time, focused on the product and not their ego.