Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonlotito | Hacker News Reader

You might have missed a couple lines. It's easy to miss as it's right below the quote from the article mentioned: "This causes the now-usual Reddit uproar. It’s extra nasty this time. Some people go far, far, far over the line."

The issue isn't the article or the bug reports. It's the uproar from Reddit, and the extra nasty comments.

"Some people go far, far, far over the line."

There is a reason HN has guidelines for how to approach communication. It's because if we "go far, far, far over the line" and get "extra nasty" things devolve and this place becomes far worse. Rather than "toughen up" or "just not taking things personally," HN realizes that words matter.

Like I said, a couple lines easily missed or forgotten. It's not the bug reports. It's the extra nasty comments.

View on HN

This could very well be thanks to the moderators, but I hardly saw any nasty comments on r/rust. People were critical of the actix maintainer, sure, but I didn't see anything that crossed the line. Some comments in the GitHub issues were indeed nasty, but those were actually called out on the subreddit.

There's no way for me to know for sure, but it seems as though Klabnik was exaggerating here.

The nastiest response I encountered was at the end of the GitHub issue thread, right before the maintainer deleted it. (He also cites it in his postmortem.) It said things like "you should never write Rust again," with very little substance.

The problem with the r/rust thread, AIUI, is less "far, far, far over the line" and more just a huge volume of the same sorts of criticism. It sucks to see such a response on that scale, but it's harder to characterize any individual's comment as "nasty."

Yeah, that comment on the GitHub issue was definitely over the line, but it wasn't on Reddit. The comments in the subreddit were higher in volume, but way more reasonable.

Well, I've certainly seen some nasty behavior in topics touching the async-std crate that I didn't like and thought should not be written. It felt really bad and was the first time I felt how this community has changed from the years I started writing Rust.

>> It felt really bad and was the first time I felt how this community has changed from the years I started writing Rust.

I agree. I'm further disheartened by a lot of the reactions that happened since. One of Rust's greatest strengths is turning into a weakness.

The Rust community needs to treat this cultural exploit as if it were a critical technical exploit and apply the same sort of objective and collective examination of source and insightful exploration of assumptions made about existing grammars and syntax and come up with appropriately safe and forward thinking solutions to ensure that the code of conduct isn't just a progressive cliche.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com