RailsConf 2025 will be the last gathering of its kind • Hacker News Board

Re: RailsConf 2025 will be the last gathering of its kind

#11

Post by clra » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 5:05 PM UTC

hitekker wrote: post #9

clra wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rough timeline of events: * Thinking they held all the cards, RailsConf uninvited DHH from the conference in 2022. They would never admit this, but the reasons were extremely petty, and all due to Ruby Central's (organizer of RailsConf and RubyConf) hyperpartisan nature. For example, DHH dared to suggest the audacious policy of "no politics at work" during a year where extreme politicization ran rampant. This may sou…

The details I'm not sure about; what I'm sure about is the pettiness on the part of Railsconf organizers. Just a few samples on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35686266 shows one of the organizers belittling Dave and accusing him of causing the drama ( https://web.archive.org/web/20230424072347/https://chelseatr... ) which the organizer then watered down after backlash. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

> shows a moderator of /r/rails rewriting history, implying Dave not going to RailsConf 2022 was his fault, along with airing bizarre grievances like "We inserted snark at DHH in a Rails release candidate."

Yeah, I've unfortunately been watching this in real time over the years, and the bad faith from these guys is just on another level. First, they were fairly overt about what they'd done because they were proud of it. Later, they mischaracterized it through rewriting history. And these days, they just don't talk about it at all (notably, there isn't a word about it in the article linked above).

Here's another example: the original Reddit thread from 2022 talking about DHH being uninvited, where the same person abused his moderator powers by actually just outright banning anyone who dared to talk about why it actually happened:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/t5u3fe/dhh_is_cancel...

Re: RailsConf 2025 will be the last gathering of its kind

#12

Post by ksec » Sun, Jan 05, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

clra wrote: post #11

hitekker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The details I'm not sure about; what I'm sure about is the pettiness on the part of Railsconf organizers. Just a few samples on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35686266 shows one of the organizers belittling Dave and accusing him of causing the drama ( https://web.archive.org/web/20230424072347/https://chelseatr... ) which the organizer then watered down after backlash. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

> shows a moderator of /r/rails rewriting history, implying Dave not going to RailsConf 2022 was his fault, along with airing bizarre grievances like "We inserted snark at DHH in a Rails release candidate." Yeah, I've unfortunately been watching this in real time over the years, and the bad faith from these guys is just on another level. First, they were fairly overt about what they'd done because they were proud of…

There were a lot more interesting conversation on twitter at the time.

Interesting I am seeing a lot of these unfolding then and now. And in hindsight Rails is now much better because Rails Foundation. Now if we can do the same for Ruby itself.

Re: RailsConf 2025 will be the last gathering of its kind

#13

Post by atonse » Mon, Jan 06, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

clra wrote: post #6

atonse wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we please get a broader TL;DR of what happened? Who is RailsWorld? Was there increased competition from a global conference? Is RailsConf attendance declining enough to sunset the conference?

Rough timeline of events: * Thinking they held all the cards, RailsConf uninvited DHH from the conference in 2022. They would never admit this, but the reasons were extremely petty, and all due to Ruby Central's (organizer of RailsConf and RubyConf) hyperpartisan nature. For example, DHH dared to suggest the audacious policy of "no politics at work" during a year where extreme politicization ran rampant. This may sou…

Whoa, I knew about them uninviting DHH (a move I disagreed with), but I didn't know about all these events that followed.

If I was deciding to attend a conference, I would 100% prefer to attend one where DHH and other pioneers are organizing/speaking. And also one that had more meat rather than the "softer" topics as you suggested.

And I 100% agreed with their "No politics at work" stance.

I had a policy in our company against discussing politics. I used to say some variation of "We provide products & services to our clients, and they pay us money to do so. Our politics or our clients' politics don't matter." (And it was easy to make this statement because there was no chance of our product being used by authoritarians or something, we were building software for COVID response).

So we had a hard rule that there would be no political discussions on company "property" (company slack, company emails, etc), exactly what 37signals had. If you want to text each other personally, go right ahead.

Nobody seemed to have an issue with it.

So in a nutshell, sounds like the personal political views (and attitude of partisanship) of the organizers ruined the conference.