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Rust Moderation Team Resigns

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Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#681
post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Call me crazy, but I believe that you don't have to actively champion and invite openly racist people to conferences to show that you tolerate difference of opinion. Sure you don't have to, but if you do, it's a hell of a signal. (At any rate, Curtis Yarvin was invited for his semi-esoteric functional-based distributed operating platform, Urbit.) > If you're protecting personnel, even after a number of others in yo…

No, I think someone should be *excluded* from talking at a conference because they literally write Eugenics theory, regardless of the brackets, semicolons and spaces they write in a text editor. It sounds like we just have a difference in moral standards.

Yeah.

Well - at least if I ever run a conference, you can be confident that you will be welcome to it anyways. :)

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#682
post #84

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…

> 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. It's not…

This kind of drama is already a defining feature of the Rust community. They can’t go 6 months without some kind of incident like this. It would be a positive if they could have a BDFL or corporate sponsorship to structure the community going forward because it doesn’t seem like the current community approach really works in practice. I realize that’s probably not possible at this point though.. unless maybe Microsoft steps in.

Disclosure: I am an outside observer, and I find Rust to be excessively syntax dense. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Far too many promising open source projects have disappeared because the benevolent dictator lost interest and disappeared without leaving an empowered community. Far too many promising open source projects withered and died because the not-actually-benevolent dictator turned off every would-be contributor. In the scope of things, these are much more common that the few examples of projects that succeeded in spite of…

The code doesn't cease to exist. If one person is doing all the heavy lifting and decides to stop, it isn't their fault for not creating a social hierarchy.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#684
post #431
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the Rust code of conduct: https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct Can you provide an example of something in the code of conduct that you think makes people walk on eggshells?

Acording to the link I have to be friendly, safety inducing, welcoming, kind (non rude), keep unstructured critique to a minimum, non-insulting and be careful not to demean or harass anyone. This is ripe for misinterpretation and witch-hunting. It will get people to walk on eggshells. In my circles these rules are called comon sense. We don't have to write things down because every adult knows the rule: Don't be an a…

Most of this is the accepted behavior for white people in San Francisco (somewhere on the scale from nice to passive aggressive), but not so much outside the West Coast. Although, many British insults read as compliments to Americans, so maybe it's possible to maliciously comply.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#685
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the person(s) who caused offence probably have no bad intentions I'd give the mod team the benefit of the doubt that the offense they've all resigned over is not so mild that it could be committed unintentionally.

> I'd give the mod team the benefit of the doubt that the offense they've all resigned over is not so mild that it could be committed unintentionally. I don't think that's necessarily a safe assumption, particularly in today's cultural and political environment.

The people who freak out over trivialities usually don't resign; they try to get others fired.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#686
post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not every public information is written for everyone. Just because arxiv papers are publically available does not mean that a posted string theory paper should be written for you so that you can understand it (or I for that matter).

Nice example, arxiv papers (and any decent paper in general) contains an abstract to provide context about the contents of the papers as well as references to other papers cited within. Arxiv papers might not be written for me now , but if I got interested in a paper (and had time to spare, of course) I would probably have most of the content I need to at least grasp the general content of the paper. Thanks for the e…

No offense, but you don't seem to have read many specialized scientific articles.

The time investment to even grasp the general idea of very specialized papers would be significantly longer than the investment you need to make to become a respected member of the rust community and apply for the next mod-team. Then you could also ask the members of the previous mod-team about the specifics of their complaints.

Maybe you are right, maybe the example fits perfectly.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps no user avoided it (though that seems unlikely), but can't you imagine why some contributors may have avoided it? Wouldn't that lack of potential contributions be a material loss for the project?

Who's to say that more contributors are turned off by Rust-style behavioral micromanagement? It's impossible to prove counterfactuals. All we can say for sure is that dozens of critical projects in the past reached an amazing level of quality and importance to humanity without tone police lurking in the background and supervising it all.

I do wonder whether there's not some implicit benefit to this kind of management. Is it possible that by dissuading all but the most confident committers the project's contribution team self-selected for stronger devs? That would probably be bad for small OSS projects and good for kernels.

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#688
post #420

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me like any time there's a controversy surrounding code of conducts (and just bad behavior in general) with open source projects, it's always on Github. Conversations on Gitlab by comparison always feel a lot more serious and professional. That could just be due to numbers, since Github has way more people. The low barrier of entry to Github probably also contributes, since it attract…

you've missed the shitshow about renaming GIMP a year or two ago. I tried looking for it now, but it seems the threads got purged

There's an article on The Register about it [1], which includes a helpful link to the archived threads [2].

A quote from the article:

> "I have, on two occasions now, recommended this program to photography and graphic design educators (as an alternative to Photoshop) who told me that they considered it and found it good as software but weren't permitted by their institution to use it in the classroom because of the name."

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/08/28/gimp_open_source_imag...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190705030057/https://gitlab.gn...

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#689
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd give the mod team the benefit of the doubt that the offense they've all resigned over is not so mild that it could be committed unintentionally. I don't think that's necessarily a safe assumption, particularly in today's cultural and political environment.

The people who freak out over trivialities usually don't resign; they try to get others fired.

Sometimes they resign when they find out that they can't get others fired.

I don't know whether that fits in this case. I'm inclined to think not; I suspect that those who freak out over trivialities, try to get others fired, find out that they can't, and then resign, tend to have a public hissy fit when they resign. I'm not sure that what the Rust Moderation Team did counts; they seem to be trying to not air dirty laundry (or what they perceive to be dirty).

Re: Rust Moderation Team Resigns

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Repositories for most projects are more project repositories than mere code repositories. Indeed, but for some reason it still feels odd. I've acknowledged I'm getting old, right? ;-) Also, there is some rational justification to my feeling. It used to be that you might kick-ban someone from a channel or /dev/null their mailing list contributions. But if they made a technically meritorious merge request via SCM the…

This is a super mature, nuanced post so thanks for that. > It used to be that you might kick-ban someone from a channel or /dev/null their mailing list contributions. But if they made a technically meritorious merge request via SCM the contribution would still get due consideration. Even assholes can be good programmers, after all. That always felt healthy & mature to me. Finding a way to protect the masses from assh…

> [Moderation is] not something you can do easily in GitHub

That seems like a pretty significant design flaw :(

> Part of that is modern tools (Git forges like Gitea, sr.ht, etc) don't really enforce that separation [between "community" and "code"]

Indeed, this makes perfect sense.

> It makes sense to me that the Rust community would be more interested in treating interaction with Rust like a corporate project instead of a hobby club given that many of them are hacking on Rust for their actual job.

Yup, totally fair and makes sense.

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