Rust Moderation Team Resigns
github.com
github.com
> 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., 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.
Seems to be a wide variety of possibilities and leaving the nature of the situation ambiguous* will likely make it difficult for a new mod team. I hope the now-former mod team are open and direct with new or potential mod team members about the environment they're entering.
* I do think it's right for the mod team to not reveal the specifics in public; that would likely provoke targeted harassment and make the situation much worse
If that was the case, the obvious response would be a formal statement of rebuke and censure wrt. the offending member's behavior, which would clarify that such things aren't welcome in the project. The fact that we aren't getting anything close to that extreme suggests that this is in fact a big fat nothingburger. (Unless you think that CoC violations are so widespread in the Rust Core Team that naming the specific people involved would have made no discernible difference, but so far we've seen nothing to indicate that.)
> 'wie A zegt moet ook B zeggen'.
Someone else mentioned "the Russian proverb, 'If you've said A, say B'"... In Swedish it's "Har man sagt A får man säga B". Seems rather international.
I agree a hostile takeover would not be good for anyone but if the existing management structure turns out to be a roadblock maybe stewardship from a big tech company wouldn't be so bad.
> Subteam, and especially core team members are also held to a high standard of behavior. Part of the reason to separate the moderation subteam is to ensure that CoC violations by Rust's leadership be addressed through the same independent body of moderators.
It's not clear to me that they're claiming a violation occurred.
The wording is vague, but one interpretation is that they simply wanted more control over the core team but the core team didn't want it structured that way, so the mod team resigned.
IMO, it would be strange to make a moderation team the highest authority in an organizational structure. I don't really agree with their demand to be the ultimate authority over everyone.
Violation or not, I wish they could have come to an agreement without throwing ambiguous accusations out into public as they quit. Between this and the "I refuse to let Amazon define Rust" post a few months ago we're getting a lot of drama with few, if any, details. There's a lot of "just trust me, but don't listen to what anyone else says about the situation" in this post.
Their closing statement asking everyone to not trust anything the core team says makes this feel particularly petty:
> We recommend that the broader Rust community and the future Mod Team exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation.
I really hope that drama like this doesn't become one of the defining features of the Rust community.
Disclosure: I am an outside observer, and I find Rust to be excessively syntax dense. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Between Oct 2018 and Oct 2021...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1635638400&dateRange=custom&...
"So, upon hearing that the .net foundation is spending all of its time generating stacks of bureaucracy and causing internal drama"
"Oracle provides RHEL build and it's pretty good. No CentOS drama, it's free and just works."
"I'd be surprised if you found any dramas with the language."
There's no actual drama. Until page 4, when i find:
"Completely a drama"
In an article about Rust.
But I remember a lot of drama on Ruby and Rust.
First comment is referring to something that happened years ago.
Second comment isn't about Rust at all.
Third post is about Steve not liking something that came out of Amazon.
Reading on it appears to be more references to Actix, Amazon, totally unrelated/ irrelevant results, etc.
1) Rust in the Linux kernel 2) Amazon MUST NOT define Rust 3) Turbofish issue
So, yeah, you have to do a bit more work to pull events from Algolia. It’s better than a feeling though and it’s real timestamped data. It’s not Google or Wikipedia though- the most relevant results aren’t just on page 1.
I believe that would very quickly kill the community. Corporate MS cannot be patron here. You will never find me in a development community that puts compliance over people. I accept that in my job because it makes sense there and is necessary. But there are current sensibilities about conduct I do not share and I am not ready to keep up with the newest etiquette to be honest. I think moderators should go against obvious trolls and spammers, but aren't fit to mediate in conflicts.
HN has a strong moderation, but I think these are rules that the community accepts because everyone profits. It could just be a power grab by some mods that feel neglected, at least that is what they seem to display here.
I think it makes sense, scoped to their domain. Eg a security team can’t do their jobs effectively if they can’t apply their policies to the CO or if CO can arbitrarily undo it — security needs to have the last say on security policies, but that doesn’t put them on the top of the chain.
The same would be true with whoever does financial auditing and verifies everything is done to process & legally, as well as HR guarding against violations, and so on. The C*O must be held accountable as well, because their violations are also the most potentially damaging
Personally, I think absolute power hierarchies will sooner or later bring out the worst in people, attract bad personalities, no matter the appeal of a tale about leadership and ruthless decision making or whatever. Checks and balances will prevent things from starting to rot. A good foundation likely needs the expenses, work, "ineffectivity" of a thoughtful/elaborate distribution of power.
It is like HR staging a coup d'etat.
Instead, we have countless people bantering and taking "sides" about hypotheticals. In a world mostly devoid of secrets on the web, I think they could have, at the least, masked identities and summarized the issue.
>burntsushi ripgrep · rust 31 points 2 hours ago
>If we had an answer to your implied question it will necessarily reveal things (via obvious logical inferences) that we carefully avoided revealing in our statement.
https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...
If they outlined specific issues then it would invariably devolve into armchair quarterbacking of those issues rather than the the underlying question of what kinds of checks-and-balances should exist for the Core Team -- gossip, accusations, and political discussions are a lot more fun than debating governance structures.
On the other hand, if no specific issues are raised then people are frustrated by having only a partial understanding. Because it's a lot simpler to evaluate an argument if you already know whose side you're on.
A resignation is a public action, and as this team knows very well, such actions need to be held to account.
"We are resigning and our reasons have been shared privately with X group. <eom>"
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.
I don't understand. How do you resign from a public project without resigning from that public project? If it is not about the resignation but about the message, do you think that a "we are resigning as a whole team that was made pbulic and we do not provide any public reason for that" would work any better?
It's not like there's some membership card with paid dues. Their responsibility was to anyone that viewed themselves as part of the Rust community, and consumes anything to do with that community (whether or not they put anything into it).
Not informing all the people of that community because it appeases random public commenters would be a far worse failure of their duties than letting the general public gossip.
They did have the option of finding replacements before leaving.
Going public may be against the point of the group, but it might also be the only way seen to fix the problem and address the problems that prevent your group from doing its job.
So you're left with the unenviable option of explicitly doing what your team is not supposed to do in order to try to fix the team so it can function in the future. The responsible thing to do at that point would be to resign, so someone else can come in and gain the benefits you fought for, and your prior breaking of the rules does not taint the team.
I think that's the charitable view. I don't know if it's correct, but I do think it's worth considering.
> we wish to ... focus on Constructive Criticism: how to improve the state of things, moving forward.
> There are many potential topics that are worth exploring: > What should the Rust Governance look like?
> How should the Rust Moderation Team be structured? What should be its responsibilities?
> How can we ensure accountability and integrity at the top? Who Watches The Watchers?
and I don't see how these can be meaningfully discussed by someone who doesn't know what went wrong. You can't diagnose and find a remedy for a problem that you can't even see. So while the sentiment "let's talk constructively" is fine, in public at least it seems like a non-starter.
Note that I'm not saying that this means they should publish a tell-all either -- but it needs to be recognized that, without that openness, the divide between insiders and outsiders remains. And the outsiders can't do anything constructive about these questions.
[0]:https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...
The "what went wrong" appears to be an organizational dispute, at least if we're to believe the statement.
Moderation team wanted authority over the core team. Core team disagreed. Moderation team resigned.
It's not clear that there was a violation, though their intentional vagueness does tend to push the reader to that assumption.
The problem seems clear to me when I read the Github pull request, they can't enforce their moderation over the Core team. The remedy they suggest is for the community to decide how the moderation team should enforce moderation on the Core team (or if they should at all).
What would talking about the issue give more? It will just polarize people and push toward a specific solution for that specific issue, while the actual issue is over being able to moderate.
I can't tell if a specific issue occurred, or if everyone is just assuming that there was an issue because the post is so vague.
They seem to make it clear that their primary complaint was about the organizational structure: They wanted to have authority over the core team, but they weren't given authority over the core team.
That makes it very clear that they had some specific grievances beyond unaccountability, otherwise it wouldn't sense to say they've avoided airing them.
How are team members selected? Who has authority to kick someone off a team? How are team leads selected? Who can remove team leads?
Is it the core team? If so, who picks the core team?
I can't find anything online, except this very bare-bones WIP stub. [1]
This seems to be a glaring and surprising oversight.
Especially at this point, with Rust becoming more and more popular, the foundation in place for almost a year, and corporate interest flooding into the project, I would have expected proper procedures to already be in place for quite some time.
There certainly seem to be other cracks in the system. See for example "I refuse to let Amazon define Rust" by core team member Steve Klabnik, extensively discussed here on HN. [2]
[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/governance/blob/master/common/m...
p.s. pronouns used are from https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/495360fba7a46 , I don't think singular they is correct thing.
I cannot imagine that this action is frivolous.
It doesn't sound like they directly work on the compiler?
Maybe the problem wasn't Amazon, and HN shouldn't have jumped to conclusions so quickly...
Not part of the general Rust community, just an outsider, so maybe I'm missing something obvious.
> In this message, we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability. We've chosen to maintain discretion and confidentiality. We recommend that the broader Rust community and the future Mod Team exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation.
With the earlier bit about the Core Team not having to adhere to the Code of Conduct, it could mean something awful has happened and a Rust Core Member is above justice or pressuring the mod team’s investigation?
But, of course up to them what they feel comfortable sharing with the public, if it's something that has to stay private I guess that's the way it will be.
Edit: I think if some action will be made public then everyone will focus on debating why that action was correct/incorrect , then a lot of mostly politics dirt will be thrown around etc.
This stinks. I wonder if the moderators are concerned they'll be found culpable as well, if the problem is revealed.
I don't think the moderators are concerned about culpability. I think they're concerned that what appears to be an internal debate is going to get dragged out for months on end, in public, with all context loss, and with even less ability on their part to do anything useful or constructive.
If I were in their position, I would very likely do the same thing and try to learn some lessons and move on with my life.
I just find it hard to understand on how you are suppose to see if the group is above the rules or how you can find any possible solutions, when what is supposed to have exemplified the problem is kept in the dark.
Perhaps you aren't?
This is still an internal Rust team issue; it's not a problem for us, a bunch of randos on the Internet, to solve. Our job is just to gawp from a distance, maybe gossip on Hacker News a bit.
If they really wanted to keep it internal, it would require even less effort to just remove themselves from the moderation list with a "We resign" message without further detail.
The people who own your employer, own your employer.
Does that sometimes suck? Sure. Is it often unjust? Absolutely. Do you sometimes need to switch jobs or fork a project? Yup (see: mod team resigning).
But don't ever get confused and think that an HR process can save you from the whims of your master, and don't ever believe a "rule" that says the owner of something is constrained. Unless there's a higher power that can enforce that rule (e.g., a government or a market). And even then, the rule isn't doing any of the lifting.
At its height, this resignation constitutes (a) a plea for people in power to exercise it better, and (b) for those people to voluntarily become more accountable for some pattern of behaviour. (A) might be effective, if only because Rust governance so far prides itself on all the things that come with having a Mod Team. Not having one is embarrassing.
But point (b), which is indeed the focus of the resignation message, is plain magical thinking to my eye. Accountability I understand it is the acceptance of responsibility, by someone, for some thing. Someone else fundamentally needs to know what that something is for that to happen. It cannot happen if the thing is kept completely under wraps, but it can be approximated with limited but trustworthy disclosure, and this is the basis for the levels upon levels of that in e.g. national security regulation. That is a very difficult problem in its specifics, but the theory is simple: inform someone trustworthy and neutral, and then tell everyone else that you informed them.
What this message lacks is any indication of which people do know what the specific acts by Core Team members were and who did them, and what position those people are in to verify if anything is done about it. If you are unwilling to muck-rake in public, you need to give everyone else a proxy by which to gauge your generic claims. In normal governments this takes many many forms, including ministers, Inspectors-General, privileged parliamentary committees, etc. But you do not need a formal role, you simply have to nominate someone outside your group and your opposition (ie appears neutral on the face of it) that is aware of the facts. Without that, everybody who sees this will have to gauge your claims on the extremely minimal information provided plus your own reputation, but with no credible claim to neutrality on the issue. Even one such person would be better than all of the co-signatures on that letter combined.
The answer(s) to that is (are) probably: The whole Core Team knows, and since they apparently aren't accountable to the Mod Team, the only entity that can do anything about it is the Core Team as a whole. So the ball is in the Core Team's court.
But for some reason, the formalization of conduct enforcement stuff around OSS projects still feels weird, off-putting, and very "Corporate HR"-y to me. I still get a kinda awkward feeling every time I see a code of conduct in a freaking code repository as opposed to an MOTD or mailing list welcome email or the like. The contents is normally reasonable and if it were in one of those other formats it'd feel normal, but checked into a code repo just feels wildly out of place and needlessly in-your-face?
Maybe I'm just getting old.
Edit: it looks like you've removed the part about Teams/Committees.
> How exactly are the groups of people working on various parts of the official ecosystem supposed to coordinate their efforts? The only alternative I've seen is a benevolent dictator, which seems significantly worse for a number of reasons.
Yeah, I guess I'm just getting old. The idea of an open source project with enough people to form an entire committee of moderators also feels weird, but is apparently fairly normal these days.
Again, I'm not even necessarily saying things should be different or proposing a better alternative. Just expressing a feeling.
If could change one thing in the corporate world, it wouldn't be to change how corporations work. Simply disabusing people of fantasies about how corporations work would be far better than any incremental improvement.
I guess I feel the same way about OSS codes of conduct. They're facade. To the extent that they're enforced, it's because the wizard behind the CoC curtain allows this to the case.
Should anything be changed? IDK, but everyone understanding this would probably be preferable to any incremental change to project governance. If that makes sense.
The weird paradox in this governance model is why we see so much fluff around the actual autocracy that - at the end of the day - is what matters. Why pay for HR, townhall events etc, etc, if in the end it doesn't matter?
I think the obvious reason is - ironically - making accountability optional, through selective enforcement. If you have an arbitrary and emotionally based strict set of rules, you can freely accuse practically anyone for breaking it, since the owners have last say anyway. As such, you can say "sorry, we had to let Tim go, because he violated policy" - and abracadabra, nobody is personally accountable. It's the woke equivalent of a firing squad.
In fact, if a process is not universal, but selective, it is just a power tool. And what's more attractive than a power tool? Simply throw process on people you dislike, and let the people you like through.
That's not to say there's some calculated malicious intent behind this. There are tons of people who genuinely think these systems are good and serve them, or people less privileged than them.
I think your normative justification for project dictatorship misses the more important point: there's probably a dictatorship either way.
In these cases, the main advantage of the overt dictatorship model over the layer of indirection dictatorship model is that you at least know who's really in charge.
In some odd sense, the mod team that just resigned is in agreement: their resignation lays vare exactly who's in charge.
I only take active part in smaller OSS projects and corporate rules in general do suck the fun out of it. Maybe Rust is beyond that, but I would vastly prefer the eccentric dictator to corporate HR, because the latter is nothing else. The dictator or developer has other ambitions aside from behavior enforcement, so it is easier to cooperate.
And if you do not like the dictator, you might be able to fork the project and make it conform to your personal views to the same (overbearing) degree. Win-win.
In the scope of things, these are much more common that the few examples of projects that succeeded in spite of low bus factor and toxicity.
But if a community already approved such rules is it OK that those would not apply equally for all? Before joining a new community I always check and see if there is a lot of toxicity or just low effort contributions and I am avoiding those, it would suck to join a community because they promise moderation and later you see that the rules don't apply equally.
The facade of process masking Machiavellian reality is what rubs me the wrong way.
I'm always astounded by folks who don't understand that companies are feudal kingdoms and that all the stuff about processes and protecting people who are innocent/do the right thing is just hot air. And I've never been on the wrong side of HR, so this isn't a personal issue per se. But when I mentor new grads, I do make sure to find some time to explain how companies really work and stress that "getting along" with people is the most important skill.
I've always felt like the world would be a better place -- and workplaces would function better -- if Corporate HR was just honest: "this company is someone else's property, you have no rights to that property, we do what we want, so play nice and don't piss off the wrong folks unless you're ok leaving."
Most OSS projects aren't so dissimilar. I don't know about Rust, and suspect "Core" might have a different meaning here. But in most projects the core (aka primary) developers effectively own the project. Rules to the contrary are at best aspirational and at worst lies. If you disagree with the primary developers, it's much better the just fork the project than to imagine that there's some fair and rational process by which you will be able to plead your case and over-ride their edicts. Again, this isn't a value judgement. It's just a description of how reality works.
Managers are also just laborers. As laborers, they also need to know that "getting along with people" is most important.
> I generally expect managers to present themselves as first among equals, even though I understand in extremis that's not true, and I wouldn't work in an organization where they do a bad job at pretending.
If you're a senior engineer making anything less than 500k or so, your first-line and even second-line managers do have a complicated power relationship with you.
I.e., another way of saying what you said here is that your labor is in high enough demand that your mangers have to treat you with a certain amount of respect in day-to-day interactions.
A manager who doesn't show enough politeness/deference will have high turn-over, and in most situations that spells problems. Again, because they aren't capital owners. They are laborers.
Like I said, "getting along with people" is probably the most important skill. Finding yourself in an HR process means you failed at "getting along with people". The rest is noise. Don't rely on HR. Get along with people.
The reality, somewhat sad in my view, is that in most places, software shops, architecture firms, academia, pretty much anywhere where individual measurement isn't possible and most work is done in teams, most performance reviews are a thin veneer over a high school popularity contest. You get ahead by being liked, something that's at best loosely correlated to how much work you get done, or at what quality.
Of note, the best manager I worked for (in software) ran a great team by making work about the work, not being liked, or delivering great powerpoints, or other secondary things.
Most types of sales labor is a complete commodity. For every one high-powered b2b software sales person there are hundreds of folks selling commodity laptops to rural schools, pushing trim upgrades in car dealerships, cold-calling convenience store owners, etc. The high school politics in those sorts of sales shops are next-level.
> trading
Trading desks are often whole orgs, often with diffuse and difficult to measure contributions. Not so dissimilar from software shops, really. In fact, often literally are software shops!
> sports
I don't have first-hand experience with anything other than climbing and skiing, where "hussle" and getting along with everyone from sponsors to gym/resort owners to random community members is way more important than raw talent. At the end of the day you're basically an influencer. Instead of HR imposing rules to help with reputation management work, you're doing the HR reputation management job yourself.
> so play nice and don't piss off the wrong folks
"Play nice", "don't piss off" and "the wrong folks" are open to interpretation. I think having these at least somewhat codified is very helpful. Cultures differ a lot, and what may be considered "a useful, clear, concise and honest code review" in one is "blatant non-constructive shitstorm from an arrogant a-hole" in another.
However, such codification probably requires specific examples rather than "please be respectful to all people regardless of X, Y, Z" or "don't piss off people". For example, I really like how Recurse Center's "Social Rules" are described: https://web.archive.org/web/20211117232710/https://www.recur...
> Most of our social rules really boil down to "don't be a jerk" or "don't be annoying." Of course, almost nobody sets out to be a jerk or annoying, so telling people not to be jerks isn't a very productive strategy. That's why our social rules are designed to curtail specific behavior we've found to be destructive to a supportive, productive, and fun learning environment.
Yup. It's sometimes hard to figure out how power flows and the social preferences of the people who modulate those flows. Getting along in large orgs is a skill that requires both experience and intentional work.
The problem is that people rarely run into trouble due to abrasiveness among peers, so examples like the Recurse center can be helpful but are woefully incomplete as a guide to corporate politics.
Getting along while being ambitious is anything but easy. There are no rules.
At the end of the day, "social skills" and "social intelligence" are just that -- forms of skill and intelligence. "Getting Along" is always a learned behavior, albiet does come more naturally to some than others, and is far easier said than done.
These skills are often learned pretty early on in life. It's one of the reasons I encourage folks who are considering home-schooling to at least send their kids to one year of high school.
If this "moderation team" felt that there is no option but to quit, that means that they were rejected by the community, complete with the "CoC" they tried to enforce.
Seems like everything is fine to me.
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 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 assholes without exiling the asshole always felt like a sign of good community stewardship. It's something I strived to do in communities I moderated.
So, what? I guess this: Bundling the CoC into the repo violates this expectation. Just because someone couldn't get along doesn't mean we kick them out of the hobby. I think that's why it makes me uncomfortable.
In a hobby org, you don't let the known jerk on the board. You definitely don't let him man the booth at community outreach events! However, you also don't usually kick him out of the core activity. In a non-OSS hobby context, I've had folks steal things but still allowed them to stay in the community while taking away unsupervised physical access to common property. Measured tolerance and forgiveness are both important virtues, and sticking around in a community after public humiliation shows a commendable level of commitment to the hobby/community. The social bonding that happens via the process of apology and forgiveness often does far more good for the community than the harm of the infraction.
But, also, I've always considered OSS a hobby scene rather than a business model or resume booster. I guess if an OSS project is just a way for companies to commodify complements and for contributors to get jobs, then treating it like a Fortune 500 all-hands makes sense. But I'm not interested in those types of communities; I have hobbies, and programming can be a hobby for me, but I charge a lot for my labor and would never, ever work in a corporate environment for free.
I wonder how much of the conflict around CoCs boils down to this split in people's perception of what OSS projects are.
Again, getting old I guess.
I think putting the CoC into the repo is mainly to clarify that it applies to discussions on the issue tracker. If GitHub didn't also do issue tracking and other things where actual discussions occur, there would probably be fewer CoCs in repos.
> Measured tolerance and forgiveness are both important virtues
There are a small number of extremely toxic people in positions of power who will abuse "forgiveness" in order to deliberately commit an unending series of abuses on a string of people. People kept "forgiving" Harvey Weinstein for decades. The line between tolerance and enabling can get hard to distinguish, especially when someone has enough power to control the narrative.
So a community must be aware that its tolerance mechanisms can themselves be maliciously abused. But the alternative—intolerance and being unwilling to forgive—ends up harming the larger number of people who are fallible, do hurtful things, but can be remediated. It gives less room for people to be human.
Finding the balance between these opposing forces is hard. A maximally efficient and happy community is one of complete trust between all participants. But that is also the definition of a maximally vulnerable and exploitable one.
> But, also, I've always considered OSS a hobby scene rather than a business model or resume booster.
That line got really blurry when open source ate the world and many large tech companies now work heavily with open source. You have many employees (like myself) who work on open source projects full time at work. And you have others who work on open source because it helps them find employment at companies that use that code.
> 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 assholes without exiling the asshole always felt like a sign of good community stewardship. It's something I strived to do in communities I moderated.
To some extent I think this is because GitHub doesn't offer the same tools that running your own mailing list would. A mailing list can do what you said, /dev/null ML contributions while still letting patches through. That's not something you can do easily in GitHub.
> I guess if an OSS project is just a way for companies to commodify complements and for contributors to get jobs, then treating it like a Fortune 500 all-hands makes sense.
Rust has a pretty friendly community (from what I've encountered at least), but a lot of its core stakeholders do have a lot of corporate obligations, and many of them Rust related. 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.
> I wonder how much of the conflict around CoCs boils down to this split in people's perception of what OSS projects are.
Github is part of it, but in general I think a lot of today's OSS projects don't have a strict separation of "community" and "code" in the way that projects in the past used to. Part of that is modern tools (Git forges like Gitea, sr.ht, etc) don't really enforce that separation, and that older tools like mailing lists are cumbersome enough to maintain that newer developers don't actually explore using them very often.
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.
But there are other ways to deal with actions that go against a code of conduct, to de-escalate situations and encourage rehabilitation within the project - just like what a healthy project would do without an explicit code of conduct.
Because let's be honest - those hobby groups you're talking about almost certainly did have a code of conduct, but it was probably implicit and uncodified.
Why then do so many project choose to roll their own CoC? I'd expect that there would also be a relatively small handful of widely used CoCs to choose from, and a project could pick based on their projects' needs.
You can see similar with licenses. Stallman was initially controversial for his views on software licensing, and so in the early days there was a proliferation of licenses like the eclipse public license, mozilla public license, microsoft public license, CCDL, etc.
I've heard that large-scale enforcement of CoC is super easy and that all the big social media companies have it figured out ;-)
One would assume that the Mod team would be the first to air something egregious. The fact that they aren’t tells me they don’t like the optics of the issue and they’d rather stay silent.
Is the Rust mod team really just 3 people?
I'm really surprised to see this coming from Rust. I've viewed Rust's governance as one of the best amongst open source projects. Coincidentally we have very recently put together a mod team in Nim[1] that is significantly larger than just 3, it would be really great to hear more details so we can learn from this.
We acknowledged this in our statement. We suggested that the future mod team do a better job recruiting new members than we did.
I’m glad to see them resign, and I hope open source can ultimately route around the unearned power grab that the “CoC” movement represents.
1. I don't think we're actually talking about that much power, in most instances the issues amount to "not behaving professionally in an environment that wants to have a professional character"
2. What would it need to be for you to consider what power it gives as "earned"? I'm surprised since it seems that power being explicitly delegated by the project should be enough by any measure.
The Rust leadership doesn't make a good impression to be honest. I like the language itself but it isn't really an open source community I would want to engage in aside from the technical aspects (my involvement is limited in any communities because I mostly write commercial software, just dabble here and there, although I am clearly dependent on open source and try to point that out to those less positively inclined to the concept).
What really interests me is why you believe such COCs are necessary. Do you believe they improve open source communities? It is a necessary evil if a certain popularity is reached? Is formalization an attempt at transparency? As I said I dislike COCs, but the Rust one has less than 300 words. Does this reach any target audiences? Is "professionalism" worth striving for?
In my capacity as a developer I have professional exchange in a corporate setting. Sure that every corporation has their own behavior rules, but there is never a formal framework for such engagements that mostly involves people from different companies. Perhaps people behave better because otherwise their job is on the line, but why does it work here? And I believe for many working in such a setting a more "direct" method of mutual engagement seems kind of refreshing. Would be sad if open source tried to mimic the corporate work. There is no greener grass here.
Inter-corporate communication is not a good analogy here, because inter-corporate communication can't generally be modeled as a set of individuals freely associating with each other. Their status as representatives of their employers significantly changes the landscape. Companies are generally careful not to install people with less-than-stellar communication skills at their interfaces with other companies in the first place. I suppose the maxim to trot out here is, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
> I very much dislike COCs and overbearing moderation teams in open source communities.
Same. And I have avoided some such communities in the past.
But, I am not necessarily against overbearing moderation. For example, r/askhistorians is one of my favorite subreddits, and I would attribute that state to their intense moderation.
I had this 2 star repos for a niche problem with perhaps 2-3 visitors per month and someone quite aggressively suggested that I should put one up. At the same time more an more projects put one up and I wondered where this push in OSS came from.
Suddenly projects needed committees to enforce some form of weird compliance. I just think it didn't improve conduct in any community that I saw. Not that you have to look very far to find eccentric personalities but I never thought that to be a problem, on the contrary.
[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/r0en25/what_...
Not hired, but voluntary.
> moderation team in the first place
Because a community of any larger size needs moderation (small communities tend to self moderate, larger communities without any form of moderation are at serve risk of becoming toxic and/or unwelcoming places).
> OSS version of HR
Oversimplified it's a Team which steps in when the Code of Conduct is (potentially) violated to moderate (i.e. resolve) the situation with the goal of keeping the community open, friendly and well coming.
And how would you describe HR?
The difference is the moderation Team does only moderation.
But HR does all kinds of things, which often (but not always) includes moderation.
Although in this scenario, isn't code of conduct something much more "local" that the ringleader doesn't really need to step in every time to enforce?
CoC is just something I expect everybody to enforce when needed. Having a dedicated team to do that seems odd to me. I guess you still need someone to issue bans and to wield the ban hammer, but it _should_ happen infrequently that simply informing the violator of their violation should be enough (unless they're a troll and will continue violating, in which case they can be kicked).
[0] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-Jul...
That said burntsushi at least doesn't seem like an activist to me, so the grievances are probably legitimate. Coming from someone less prominent they'd not have anywhere near the same weight in my eyes. We just don't know what they are.
I take Linux organizational model over Rust's every day. A group of super competent people with no bullshit policy. It is proven. The problem is how to form the successor to the dictator.
EDIT: it's remarkable that there's none, aside of "someone said something"
Also, I would say that help-bash@ and the bash IRC channel are pretty toxic.
By "toxic" I mean that there's just a general culture of negativity, insults, hazing, and assuming the worst. There's definitely a thing where computer nerds try to one-up each other, and highly technical or obscure topics like Lisp and bash tend to bring that out.
I have a memory of comp.lang.c being pretty bad too, but I didn't participate for that long, and this was long ago.
Honestly it's funny to me that people think HN is toxic, because it's not even close to those forums in my mind. (well maybe that's because I almost never read the politics threads on HN, but still)
I strongly agree. I was reading the archive of an early infosec group the other day, the culture was extremely hostile. 70% of the posts were insightful technical discussions, the remaining 30% was full of personal attacks and name callings, merely reading those posts made me want to throw my computer out of the window.
I'm not saying HN is great, but to give a sense of scale: on HN, that type of posts would be flagged to death almost immediately.
This is an interesting topic I try to stay away from here, for obvious reasons, but so many lisp communities I’ve seen seem to form around these cult of personalities or have the most, err.. eccentric members. More so than any language I’ve seen. People like to joke about Haskell programmers being cult like, but I’ve been down some really wild rabbit holes with lisp.
Ironically I recall some allegations against Hickey a while back that if true would land him in that category.
It's almost as though software development skills aren't correlated with social skills...
We have significant, documented evidence of assholes producing world changing software.
We can’t do the same for the inverse personality type, can we?
I’d rather have amazing open source free software than the validation of a blue check mark.
Not unless you discount the idea that it could be even better software if those people hadn't been turned away...
It's not to say that StackOverflow is generally toxic. It is, though, unusable by beginners, and it's mostly by design. And I don't think there is a good way to communicate this to a beginner whose question has been just closed because it lacks details.
It is simply demonstrably, factually, clearly not true that a growing community needs the kind of structures that Rust imposed on itself.
It really makes me sad that a certain kind of person these days sees some kind of censorious overlord as essential for the formation of healthy communities.
> There's no shortage of guidance to "stay away from X tech because the community is toxic and non-serious"
A disaffected and loud minority says things like that, and the rest of the world goes right on ignoring them. Zero people in the real world avoided using the Linux kernel because Linus was brusque.
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.
Communal decision making, however, does not have that advantage. If both sides of an issue, so to speak, become turned off of one another, you are more likely to have an abandoned project. There are, of course, other advantages (you don't miss generally accepted "good ideas" because of the particular vision of one person, and you can apply community standards to everyone, rather than having to weigh "continued participation in this project that is important to you" vs "dealing with -that- asshole again"), but that is definitely one con.
Actually, the best example of a project where the leadership of the project was so toxic as to drive away potential contributors would probably be glibc under Ulrich Drepper, which got so bad that most distributions abandoned glibc for the eglibc fork. (See https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/ for a high-level discussion).
I know very little about NetBSD and am a great fan of OpenBSD.
But Theo is a very horrible person who often attacks people in a personal way for disagreeing with him. I got into a stupid argument with him over fundraising - a subject where I have deep experience - and it was quite bizarre. He had a set of assumptions and disagreeing with them got abuse from him, and some of his minions on the OpenBSD-Misc list, and (I was astonished) abuse in my INBOX from throw away accounts.
What an arsewipe!
Your counter examples are questionable at best.
Anyway, regarding Richard Stallman and those accusations of “various kinds of sexual misconduct”:
The article you shared also fails to defend many of the accusations against Stallman and completely ignores them, for example the "Emacs virgin girl" situation.
Since you seem to have a great interest in this, do have any concrete reference to the “Emacs virgin” situation? I have only a vague recollection that Stallman was referring to anyone who had not used Emacs yet as an “Emacs virgin”, and some people took it as meaning some kind of sex thing.
(Any other references to the “many of the accusations against Stallman” that wasn’t referenced in the linked article would also be interesting to see.)
I don't think this is a fair counter example, he's been accused for expressing personal opinions, on his personal blog.
The accusations led to nothing.
Linus changed his tones just recently, now that he's older and have children, the "previous version" of Linus brought Linux to where it is though.
He's still very harsh when things get highly technical, because he's one of the few people that know at heart what's best for Linux.
sex - sure, but gender? we got plenty of females in OSS!
Still a general underrep of women.
e: Oh I see - your comment wasn't in good faith at all.
not just yours :)
I hear this "a lot" very often, but then it seems to be from people who have no real interest in technical work of kernel/OS core development. Linux is not the only way to scratch your itch for interest in low-level system dev. Like, this is just personal experience, but I have heard this on the order of 50-100 times: someone parroting how toxic Linux kernel dev is because of drama they heard -- but then you kind of dig a little bit and see what kinds of software stuff interests them, what do they work on -- probably only once or twice has it been anything embedded, hardware related, close to the metal. I would need compelling evidence to change my opinion that most of the complainers have no interest in the work being done by the community they are complaining about -- and I am fully aware that a number of people have departed Linux development, but we are talking about a tiny number of the thousands of contributors over the years -- you can't please everyone.
The hobby OS, emulation and demo scene is a pretty good indicator for "natural"* gender breakdown. These tend to be tight, tiny communities or often lone wolves working on projects. It is male dominated. This can't be explained by any systemic or community gatekeeping - because there is no system nor any mandatory community for participation or distribution. Nothing prevents anyone from putting their work out there.
* I am not discounting there may be other systemic reasons that set up this condition - but it has to be societal conditions that are in place in early childhood -- something that happens a bit before one considers contributing to the Linux kernel.
without a mod team, you will still boot trolls or resolve a dispute. I think it's better to have a judge who can step in and resolve a situation than proactive police when it comes to OSS moderation.
My POV is one of privilege (I hate that word and concept, but it fits here). Being part of the majority most of the ways you can slice IT - except I am older but that one was a change!
In other fields I was made aware of what it is like to be part of other groups, and it can suck. I got married. My spouse took me on a tour playing "spot the detective". They got followed around shops in a way that never happens to me. When we stood together at a bar, they were served after me, every time.
A lot of people here know this from personal experience, a lot of people here it is academic reality, a lot of people here simply do not understand. OK. Believe me, it is real
I have been involved in groups that make efforts to embrace people from outside the main dominant (majority) slices (how ever you choose to slice it) and groups that do not. The former is much better.
Rust has truly benefited from it. Those in the comfy majority, it turns out, benefit too. I do.
Compare Rust and Swift (I use Swift professionally, Rust for fun) There is no comparison. Swift has so many corners that have not been rounded off. The ergonomics is mostly much worse (unwrap V ! is an exception). Memory management in Swift is almost non-existent, the threading model is appallingly bad. I could go on, but on one side is a vibrant community, on the other is a bunch of alphas, astroturf, and the weeds rolling through almost empty Apple forums.
The mod teams are a very important part of making the community a good place, making the community a good place is crucial for making the technology good.
Moderation teams are the cultural equivalent of a code smell.
The role of moderation is strictly to remove spam and move off-topic chit chat to the off topic bin. The expanded post-modern role of “moderation” is inherently toxic and degrading.
You have now painted a target on your project, every activist that finds your CoC in non-compliance now has:
1) a means to proposition your submission
2) a cudgel to bang you with should you reject #1
A far saner solution is to ban CoC and those who request a CoC. The CoC then becomes “don’t request a CoC”. Tolerance paradox in action.
If these types of people are in leadership positions, it’s too late and you need to move. If they’re below you, then you need to limit their reach and upward mobility.
Usually fair application of performance standards will flush them out anyways. Often people like that in your organization are shielded by a manager that’s protecting them.
The community does play a role in the ecosystem you’re buying into. You will most likely need to send PR’s / bug reports in at some point. If the core team tends to ignore bugs/external contributions, it is a point to consider.
Furthermore, if your first knee-jerk reaction to the behaviour you think undesirable in reports is to “limit their reach and upward mobility” I think you need to think seriously about what mentorship means.
We’re down to the last 2, in house rewrites have replaced the rest with superior performing alternatives.
I would normally support pushing our clean sheet rewrites MIT, but I need a license that prohibits the addition of CoC in all derivative/downstream/forks.
In the mean time I’ll settle for a competitive advantage.
Like this person being the executive director? https://archive.fo/f10KK
Absolutely, but the remedy is often worse than the illness. Codifying good behavior - and in particular policing language - tends to become a bureaucratic and endless black-hole project that sucks up all energy and resources, no matter the justification. There is no shortage of moralists in this world. A common misconception is that by declaring you are against toxicity, you cannot yourself be toxic. In reality, there is no such silver bullet.
Toxic behavior is either deliberate or unconscious. If you want to be an asshole, there's plenty of room within the guidelines - it thrives within wokeness, meritocracies and BDFL-run projects alike. And if you don't think you're an asshole, not even the best CoC will change your mind. There's no shortcut here, you have to confront people directly with concrete criticism, and allow them to change, or in rare cases remove them.
For instance, Linus toned his style down after realizing the effect it had on people, not from reading the sacred CoC scrolls. In fact, I have never seen or heard anyone who has meaningfully changed their behavior from a CoC.
In less censored circles, Rust has THE worst reputation of any programming language purely because of this kind of management. The entire reputation of Rust is "that language made by insane leftists... with some memory safety or something". I've never seen any language community with a worse reputation, including JS.
Meanwhile, above ground, JavaScript, Ruby, Haskell, and Scala all have worse reputations than Rust.
Setting up little etiquette kangaroo courts with the power to arbitrate who is allowed to remain in the community is just fundamentally alienating.
People tend to be careful with Rust because it is a relatively young language. Many medium sized business don't have much capacity to experiment but would still try it without too much convincing.
Far more relevant it access to professionals that have experience with the language. That is something that grows very slowly. The JS community is pretty "expressive", but it is still a popular choice because you find a lot of people with experience here. My boss would expect all these nerds to behave badly anyway. I doubt he will ever change his opinion but the next generation might.
Remaining small and consistent is still a nobel goal, but new features can be a boon to the community.
What do you do indeed?
Everything but writing a formal specification for some reason.
Isn't that a kind of scorched earth statement? I read it as "we will be discreet and don't believe anything anybody tells you in the future...instead assume all your worst fears are true".
It's not even this, it's only "believe the core Team wrt. this specific situation" as well as a implicit "we do not believe the core Team is suited for making decisions about the personnel of the new Moderation Team Members".
They may make a statement about the situation if the core team decides to release details on the situation, but they don't want to be the first to do so, so they're simply saying be skeptical if the core team speaks out because it may not be the whole story.
If this has to be aired publicly, then we need to be able to objectively assess. Otherwise, I’m reading this as ‘we don’t get along with those guys and gals on the core team and vice versa’, which is, fine, it’s just humans not getting along.
Which reminds me, I don’t get along with some team members either. I want to write an email just like this, a veritable ‘fuck off, you stink”. Feels good. Now what?
Move along everyone, we’re all adults after all (right?).
I think if you want to highlight problems with a process/structure it is much better not to get into specifics of one instance. This is what the (former) mod-team is doing.
Don’t be half assed about it. Ya’ll wanna air it out, air it out.
https://reddit.com/r/NotLikeTheOtherGirls
So some people are particularly special, huh? I doubt it.
I'm not saying who is right or wrong. I'm just responding to the parent comment because I think they're extrapolating too much from the statement.
"We're not going to say what, specifically, one or more Core Team members are being held unaccountable for. If the Core Team does say what, specifically, we aren't necessarily going to respond. Don't take our non-response as an endorsement that this is what it's about."
I guess you can say that their action was "semi-public". It wasn't trying to be completely private, and neither completely public, but somewhere in-between.
What would you have done in that case?
They did: What went wrong was that the mod team doesn't have the power to mod the core team.
I am not sure you can, unless you play the politician bit and lie about "wanting to spend more time with family" or "health reasons".
If they resigned without any statement, people would have noticed as well, and speculation and gossiping would be still rampant, if not more rampant, because it's not every day that the entire Rust moderation team resigns.
They are between a rock and a hard place, if their objective really was to avoid public drama. Give too little detail and you're entirely at the mercy of speculation and maybe whatever the opposing party puts out (without other people even knowing who that opposing party is). Give too much information and you may irrevocably hurt people (like victims, or even the accused when a mob comes for them) or the community as a whole.
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 definitely did happen - but you're too classy to release details - is not a insipid act.
* They actions they have taken have publicly-visible consequences, so they must publicly acknowledge it
* They want to be respectful, and so minimize the amount of information they make public
* They believe the Core team acts in bad faith. So whatever public statement they make, they must anticipate being attacked for it and pre-emptively defend themselves.
That's a difficult set of objectives to try to meet simultaneously. I'm going to choose to support they way they've handled it, even if I don't 100% agree with it, because I don't think a perfect solution is possible.
They are dragging more into the public sphere than necessary
>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.
"You don't know the story, we won't tell any of the events leading up to this point, but you better be sure that these people on the core team are wrong!"
There are some situations in life where there just aren't any good choices. It's possible that this may have been one of them.
What would you do if you felt that you had to walk away from a bad situation on a public project, and had strong reason to believe that the other party would attempt to publicly misrepresent the situation?
You could remain silent, but we're talking about the court of public opinion here and we know silence is often interpreted as guilt, or at least irresponsibility. It would also allow the other party to continue creating this "bad situation" without, at the least, giving future moderators some warning. Likely, the mod team would have faced similar criticism had they simply walked away silently.
Presumably, the members of the mod team are interested in maintaining their own reputations and would like to continue working in this field.
Nobody resigns over a theoretical flaw in the governance structure. It’s only when it starts becoming a problem that people do so.
I mean, I agree that their intentions were probably more like what you wrote, but the resulting effect is far worse than if some shitty behavior from someone in the rust core team had become public knowledge…
Why are users supposed to exercise skepticism about anything the core team says, without any information from the other side so that we may judge for ourselves where our skepticism is warranted?
I genuinely can’t think of a more dramatic way to drag this into the public sphere than saying “we all quit due to unspecified violations of the vague code of conduct - go make your best guesses what those were”
Either let the public in on the situation or don’t. Don’t badmouth someone and then refuse to explain why.
Do you need specific instances, date and timestamped?
Edit:
If it helps, imagine a time you quit your job.
Did you provide a datestamped list of incidents that lead to your decision to quit?
Or were you, by chance, slightly more vague and provide something along the lines of: "The culture/fit/hours/goals/growth do not align with mine so I am resigning."?
I'd certainly never insinuate that my employer had done something wrong but refuse to clarify.
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.
When I resign from a job, I send my resignation to my employer in private. I wouldn't put anything in it that I'm not comfortable with becoming public, and if they wish to share what I wrote that's fine, but the purpose of being discreet is to leave the level of disclosure up to the other party's discretion. You don't send a company wide email saying "management knows what they did, don't believe a word they say, I'm out, peace!"
Just because something is public does not mean the intended audience is also everyone. Something can be intended for a subset of people, but broadly published. But I think this has been hashed out somewhere else in the thread.
I think "management knows what they did, don't believe a word they say, I'm out, peace!" is a bit of a disingenuous reading of the letter, but you have a valid point about the last paragraph and I'll walk back what I said a little bit.
What I read does not seem to fit this definition, but maybe to others it does.
> To harass or punish in a manner designed to injure, grieve, or afflict
Semantics aside, the letter may not give enough information to you, but it gives enough information that anyone privy to the internal team dynamics will understand the underlying issues and the logical progression of events that lead to the resignation.
Pointing out some specific things is hard as it's most likely not one specific thing but many small things plus some "that's enough" bigger thing(s) and because it likely has various negative effects including:
-people focusing on that specific thing, instead of the general problem (unaccountability)
-people overreacting, e.g. starting a witch hunt with serve negative effects for the community
- ... (other more vague/implicit things, like leaking of private information)
That said, there is still a bit of a game left to be played. The mod team just played their trump card, by instantly making the matter super public. But by keeping the specifics close to the chest they both keep their integrity and they give the next mod team some leverage for their interaction with the core team to resolve this situation.
It's really good btw that they're keeping the specifics private. Having someone publicly lynched is never a good situation, it's probably something that's offensive to a group of people, but the person(s) who caused offence probably have no bad intentions. It's hard running an organisation with a diverse group of people. 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'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.
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).
Odd code of honour there. They've made a lot of dramatic insinuations about other Rust contributors, basically asserted that they're all bad people, and provided no detail. That's the opposite of integrity.
i've heard netflix does things a bit differently. when people are asked to leave, their manager sends an email out to everyone explaining exactly why that person was asked to leave. i assume their generous severance package contains a legal release for netflix to be able to do that.
I think this is a fairly common misconception. While you might sign an anti disparagement agreement when you were hired, those tend to be one-way and designed to protect the company. And the bar to prove a defamation case is extremely high.
AIUI, most employers simply do not disclose details on firings as a matter of policy, not law.
Note that this isn't true in much of Europe, where in many countries firing someone beyond their probationary period requires due cause. I kinda suspect this is largely a function of at-will employment?
At the same time, professional discretion is the norm and so you might not know from the written/spoken language if someone was let go because of a specific acute incident or a pattern of under-performance. (Except that people usually know who the chronic under-performers are, so when one is let go, you tend to assume it was performance-related and if someone thought to be a high-performer is let go, you tend to assume a non-performance cause.)
I wouldn't say so it basically says:
Let's keep past thinks in the past.
Through it also implies there is at least one Person on the core Team which they are afraid will abuse their "Let's keep past thinks in the past." approach to twist the truth.
I worry about whether using the language will become a political statement. I worry whether people who can't get along are making the best decisions for the language. And I worry whether a total team meltdown will cause it to become defunct or forked at some point.
It has little to do with using the language.
Also I doubt there is more drama in Rust then in Python, Ruby or similar. It's just that in recent years everything rust get always a lot of attention.
There is also not just "the rust Team" there are many independent working Teams, as well as a foundation. I don't think it becoming de-functional or fork-splintered is something you have to worry about.
I only care insofar as I have been a part of the rust community for 6 years or so, and I care about others in the community.
Seems like they and the Core Team should be accountable to the same oversight board.
I don’t know the inner workings of the organization, so apologies if I’m asking a dumb question.
The big question is whether the Moderation Team is formally appointed by the Rust Foundation. If that's the case, or if it becomes the case in the future, then it depends under which governance provisions the team's writ is created. It could be that the team is created by an act of the board of directors, and then either made accountable to the board itself, or to a specific officer or some other entity. The composition of the team could be left to an officer, or it could be that adding a member requires board action. But I'm speculating here.
It seems to me that a better choice than resigning would be to get that part figured out. (Maybe they did, but I couldn't tell from their post).
Either way, I wasn't there, so I probably shouldn't make too many assumptions here.
Once, in my fraternity, someone was unhappy with something. (Politics, basically.) They proposed an entirely new board to watch the existing elected executive council. Basically all of the brotherhood would have been involved in some form of administration and oversight.
At this point, one of our more politically knowledgeable brothers laughed, and said, "But who's watching the watchers." The movement quickly failed.
While one might have suspected that the Rust moderation team were people with "progressive/SJW" leanings themselves, in fact what happened is that someone on the core team with radical "progressive/SJW" leanings violated the relevant codes of conduct sufficiently that when the core team denied the moderation team their right to take action against the infringer, the moderation team were so pissed off that they resigned.
In light of that it's tempting to wonder whether it's a bit of a sign of the times -- after the last few years of increasingly absurd and ascendant progressive positioning, the adults in the world finally not being able to take the nonsense from progressives any longer and putting their feet down.
There are also core teams that are closed door. And sub committees, some of which are more welcoming of outsiders than others. In the end though, if you submit a paper the relevant committee will read it and then invite you to come talk about it (at your expense to get there, but they will find a sponsor if needed).
This is a team of human beings, who are going to have human interactions - tensions are bound to arise, and rules / traditions / taboos will develop to handle / resolve / hide them.
The Rust community seems to be having debates about those rules - not being part of the community, and not knowing anything about the situation, I have to brush it up as "someone else drama."
I suppose you can compare it to either the human interaction in the team of human beings developing `clang` (no idea how this is organized, or wether it has public politics / drama) ; and the C++ ISO community (which I'm pretty sure has loooooots of drama, but keeps it corporate and private.)
Nearly led == did not lead. So nothing happened?
As for Steve's rant [1], it was weirdly guided against the "Rustacean principles" (which are totally harmless [2]), but happened right after Ashley's interim director contract was not extended.
Actually, on the HN post back then, Steve complained more about how Amazon didn't give her the job, than anything else.
But yes, you're right, this is just speculation.
[1]: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/1437441118745071617
[2]: https://rustacean-principles.netlify.app/how_rust_empowers.h...
Where did Steve mention Ashley not getting a job at Amazon? I remember reading through that thread but I don't remember Steve mentioning that. Today is the first I'm hearing of it.
I also seem to have confused the executive director and chair positions. She was the ED.
Who do you mean? The only Mozilla CEO I can remember being involved in any controversy was Brendan Eich, and that controversy was over his funding a campaign against gay marriage. I can hardly imagine calling that 'social justice culture'. (I'm hoping this comment doesn't summon him, like the last time I mentioned him on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28789197)
This is extremely odious. HN is a public forum and everyone has the right to reply to your comments, especially if you mention them.
I was just looking at it through a slightly different frame since he's a (relatively) public figure. It's one thing to tag your Facebook acquaintance in a post and have them respond, it's another to make an offhand, slightly pejorative reference to Beyoncé and then see that Beyoncé herself sent you an angry reply. It's certainly his right, but it's a bit unexpected, and I don't think 'summon' was a particularly bad word for it.
But I suppose this is a tech forum, and Eich is not Beyoncé, so it's a bit hazy.
"We granted 33% of Mozilla Foundation funds to black-led tech and social justice initiatives. Unfortunately, we fell short of our 40% target."
The Mozilla Foundation is meant to be funding Firefox. That is its purpose. Instead it is using money raised for that purpose to perpetuate SJW culture and overt racism against white people.
The type of insidious and dishonourable mind games the Rust moderation team are playing here is exactly the sort of thing I've come to expect from Mozilla-associated projects. The apologetics for it in this thread are just wrong. My weapon of choice is Kotlin, made by Russians. Guess what: there's no moderation team, the community is fine and in the 10 years the project has existed I recall exactly zero community related dramas. None. Zero. Nada. This sort of thing isn't normal for programming languages and people trying to claim it is are wrong: it's normal for languages controlled by a very specific kind of person in a very specific region and subculture of America.
In contrast, Brendan Eich kept his politics private and actually cared about Firefox as a product and technology.
You can see this happening with browsers for instance, where the companies now are the ones who define the standards with things that are important to them, like DRM or showing ads, embellishing the pill with things nerds and hackers also like, where once this governance where in the hands of Tim-Berners-Lee et al.
And that's because we are talking about technologies that born more free of corporation oversight, which is the minority.. (Think Java first with Sun and now with Oracle for instance)
This Rust thing is just because powerful corporations are adopting it, and defining board members, so they can define more the direction of the platform and the technology.
For those corporations corrupt board members that know who owns them and what interests they should defend are more important than the personal character of that board member..
It's always like this and it will always be like this. Capitalism is a amoral system and it will turn everything it touch into its own image..
Until we don't stop and fix the root cause of the system that is corrupting everything that we value its like thinking you can stop a ocean wave by resisting it while on front of it.
Note: I'm not advocating to just destroying capitalism as a solution, but to acknowledge that this is actually systemic and happen all over and instead to try to fix the specific problem caused by it, we should get back some steps and try to fix the problem, which is systemic, for everything while preventing it from happening all over again in the future.
Consider Kotlin. It originates from one large company - JetBrains have over 1000 employees and the Kotlin team alone has over 100 people on it - and has been adopted by another much larger company (Google) as an official language. There are no dramas. Why, because the Russians are mission focused and don't feel any need to constantly virtue signal.
Consider Swift. It originates from a large company. I don't remember reading about any political dramas in the Swift world. That's because Apple are mission focused.
Now look at Node or Rust. Both have attempted to build some sort of non-corporate governance system, they're based out of the Bay Area, and all of them seem to be absolutely beset by internal conflicts and strife.
> a mess like this is easily five to ten years ahead of its time. @rustlang core team. slinging open source strategy at @pubstruct . she/they
But seems like there is a new drama every week with the core team and community.
That's what happens when you elevate micromanagement of language to a task of equal or greater importance than the creation of code.
I know nothing about this particular case, but the general idea of moderating contributors to a project is not wacky as you seem to believe and predates the existence of distributed open source development.
100%. I do the exact same thing, for the exact same reasons.
If you see a code of conduct that reads like a political manifesto, that's a red flag, regardless of the particulars of the politics expressed.
Same happened with Node as it gained popularity.
In reality, they are just free-for-all power struggles. What starts out as anarchic fun and inclusivity among ~1-100 like-minded people scales into dysfunctional sectarianism.
0: https://github.com/rust-lang/team/commit/7185102aa6261d0181f...
So unless GP is suggesting that the moderation team felt SK's post airing grievances with Amazon was against CoC/whatever standards they expected of him, not related.
(Edit: oh, perhaps tangentially related after all. See codys' comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307113)
I'd also add that making white men feel unwelcome in an open source software project is very hard work. I am a white man, and would not for a moment feel uncomfortable about trying to contribute to node or Rust because of the indelicate mode of expression of this one individual.
E.g. with respect to the wasm-pack both sides have reasonable arguments in the thread how I read it.
With respect to unsubstantiated accusation, that very post makes accusations of nepotism without any proof.
Going around saying things like "Kill all men" is just about as obvious as a CoC violation can get.
Additionally, having members of the same governance body that are romantically involved probably isn't very effective strategically.
There would seem to be a massive conflict of interest there, if true.
We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.
Remarks that violate the Rust standards of conduct, including hateful, hurtful, oppressive, or exclusionary remarks, are not allowed.
If you're a man, I don't see how it would be possible to feel safe or welcome in _any_ association with the Rust community when a prominent Core team member is advocating for you to be killed.
It's like saying that Hitler's position on Jews is just a controversial political view.
The link goes into detail about her effect on wasm-pack, the official Rust wasm project. Her personal views and behavior at npm aside, this alone should be enough to remove her from being part of Rust in any official capacity. I guess being in a relationship with Steve Klabnik has its benefits.
I guess the speculation is around whether or not she is the core member that might be causing friction with the coc.
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. In contrast, while someone certainly could release a Haskell library that made pervasive use of side-effecting functions, the resulting library would be horribly brittle and no-one would want to use it.
Evan really wants Elm to be pure. To ensure it stays that way, he's banned community packages from using the Javascript FFI. This has been unpopular, but I think he's probably right that this is the only way of keeping the language pure.
It comes back to the usual open source entitlement debate. A lot of people seem to really deeply believe that Evan owes them something, and is required to manage his project along the lines of some kind of standard 'open source' model. He doesn't see it that way.
> Of all the changes in 0.19, this is the one that most hurt my code: I have parser combinator library, and used just two custom operators, for the very reasons that Evan points out in at the top.
> Now I learn that elm/parser can, and does, define two operators for parsing, for the same reasons my library had done so. There are indeed times when custom embedded languages with custom operators are worth the mental effort on the programming staff. Parsing is one of them, which Evan acknowledges, and indeed uses in elm/parser.
> However, it is not realistic to assume that elm/parser will become the only parsing package we ever need. For one, it only works on String. Parsing over byte arrays is quite common, (and what mine did). Even if elm/parse had been parameterized on the stream type - there are still differing implementation and functionality tradeoffs in parsers (backtracking, error tracking, error recovery, etc..) that make different parser libraries useful even they support the same stream type.
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, Evan seems to have a history of changing the language in response to changes in the ecosystem that he does not like e.g. he did not like to kinds of custom infix operators people were defining so he removed the ability to define custom infix operators.
> A lot of people seem to really deeply believe that Evan owes them something, and is required to manage his project along the lines of some kind of standard 'open source' model.
I think this is slightly uncharitable. While I haven't followed his activities recently, Evan spent time trying to build community around Elm. People contributed to the ecosystem based on a combination of implicit and explicit promises that the community's needs would matter, I've chatted with a few people who say Evan gave them personal assurances about long term usability. Evan benefitted from some of these contributions, in prestige, bug reports, etc. Then Evan broke almost everyone's code and was unapologetic about it. I don't think it's unreasonable to feel like some kind of social contract was broken.
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?
Take for example OpenBSD. Theo de Raadt may be an asshole sometimes, but he knows stuff can still steer the technology. OpenBSD is extremely opinionated even technologically, but it's really good.
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 attracts younger/less mature people. The social media features might also cause people to treat it like reddit or twitter, where being an asshole for no reason is normal behavior.
I tried looking for it now, but it seems the threads got purged
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...
I doubt it, at least in my experience this has little to do with GitLab or GitHub.
> The low barrier of entry to Github
In this case no low barrier of entry is involved. There is no low barrier of entry to join the core Team. This is not drama because of a random person posting some random bs on GitHub.
That sounds like classic selection bias to me.
There are more projects on GitHub than GitLab so if the probability of any one project generating drama is the same between projects, one would expect more drama to come out of GitHub.
However, I'm concerned that recently quite some politics seem to be going on with the Rust core team. First the nebolous "I refuse to let Amazon define Rust" tweet. And now this resignment accompanied by another nebolous statement .
Rust is still very fragile and only very scarcly used in business contexts. I'm using it for APIs, love it and want it to succeed. Politics and drama does not support its adoption.
All reason needed was given:
- Unacceptability of the core Team wrt. the CoC.
- A too small (maybe not diverse enough) moderation not being able to upkeep their own standards even ignoring the issues of the core Team.
Both are structural issues. There might have been person-specific issues too, but in the grater picture they don't matter and would just diverge the attention form the structural issues which need to be solved.
Also:
I remember someone else high up in the Rust project leaving due to those reasons last month.
Also, is it common for projects to have mod teams? This is new to me.
They don't want to make the specific issues public, but take a stand against the core team being non-responsive to issues raised by the moderation team. We don't know what or why beyond the fact the moderation team feels it can't perform its job when the core team does not submit to the same rules the rest of the community does.
There are a lot of companies on the edge about investing into Rust in my opinion, there are a lot of reasons for, but it also generally just feels so unstable and easy to rock.
Being at the centre of controversies, such as the one with actix-web, gives it a bad reputation even outside Rust circles.
In my opinion these people resigning will have the effect of just making core team's life (read: Amazon's and other big corps' life) easier in doing whatever they want.
To leave an organization might be their only recourse. Sometimes doing the right thing is necessary even when the outside public is unable to independently confirm that one is doing the right thing.
We have no idea whether the mod team resigning was the best choice, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that it was. And if they are resigning due to a real problem, then that problem is much more likely to be addressed and resolved by the new moderation team now that the community knows that an issue exists.
I don't use Rust; does Rust aspire to also be a social network or something?
It seems to me, from my outsider's perspective, that Rust has a lot of bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake. The "teams" directory [0] has two pages worth of files, which I assume are sub-team membership lists? Good grief.
>I don't use Rust; does Rust aspire to also be a social network or something?
Because this development is done by people. Those people need to communicate and coordinate in an effective way, including with people outside of the immediate development effort (i.e. not just writing code).
I don't know exactly how Fortran is developed, but C++ developed at the ISO which has its own flavour of bureaucracy.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I also don't think that C++ has its own - sanctioned - community fora like Rust does.
That seems to be the rub of it, yes. Rust has aspirations of being its own social network in addition to being a programming language.
Letting political disagreements dictate what tech you choose is absolutely the silliest thing you can do (except Oracle, which can affect your bottom line). Use the best tool for the job and ignore the noise.
Some C++ committee members have expressed interest in figuring out how the borrow checker can fit in. Right now nobody as a good idea, but if you do please write a paper.
There are lots of languages to choose from. Each has pros and cons. My company has seen bad results with rust - this is a reflection on the type of programmers who got on the rust project and not rust itself.
This is similar to how some legislative / deliberative bodies administer themselves.
On the other hand, this is what happens when core developers of a previously beloved project get "contacted" by Big tech players.
As someone who's used Rust but isn't fully familiar with the community, what would the expected roles of these moderators have been? Is it just forum moderation or are there other components?
https://github.com/rust-lang/team/blob/master/teams/mods.tom...
The "description" field says "Helping uphold the code of conduct and community standards" which is why they left. My guess is people could of done literally any number of things that violated the Code of Conduct. They want to not start a witch hunt which is respectable. As someone else around this thread said though, it leaves room to interpret it as the absolute worst. I am going to assume it's not as awful as it seems and might just be something to the tune of differing opinions. Maybe another Linus Torvalds scenario, I rather not make assumptions that are really bad.
We still don't know what is going on.
If you don't want to "publicize" it, then don't make a formal, public post on Reddit Rust - handle it internally.
If you want to publicize it, then have the courage to provide the specifics to the public.
Exactly. CoC's have become back doors to insert a specific brand of politics into the development world.
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 of their technical contributions? Just how much of a jerk were they?
Unfortunately, some snowflakes like to believe that everyone contributes equally. That is simply not the case. And, in fact, some people contribute a _negative_ amount overall. Which is to say, the project is better off without their participation.
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. That doesn't mean he is completely beyond criticism, but it does indicate to me that we need to put a significant check in place against these "feelings committees." Their sensibilities are becoming ever more delicate.
You can't have a complex technical project that is successful without some minimum level of competency. For better or worse, competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges.
Choose your tradeoff carefully.
edit: Adding an addendum here because of a lot of people seem quite triggered by the use of the word toxic and frankly, I don't have time to reply to all of you.
I used the word toxic in this post precisely once, to say that people who are toxic enough will be worked around.
Toxicity is not a yes/no question. It's a matter of degree and context. So is technical contribution.
Everyone is capable of saying things they will regret later. Some people are capable of saying things that everyone else will regret, frequently.
With regards to "competency" and "rough around the edges" -- note I used the phrase "rough around the edges" and NOT toxic. Many of you seem to be making that substitution.
Have the lot of you never worked with someone who knows their shit, is opinionated, and isn't afraid to let you know it? They're often intimidating, even if they don't mean to be. Submitting a PR for review to them can be nervewracking even if they are entirely nice about it. Sometimes a fair critique will cut a little deeper because the code is your baby, and they didn't sugarcoat it enough for your liking. And, once in a while, they're willing to get in a heated debate because they feel strongly about something.
The very nature of being critical (which is required for quality code) is enough to provoke some unwanted emotions in other people. Even if those negative emotions aren't intended. And sometimes, getting into a heated argument about something is justified if it saves a lot of pain later.
Somehow, there is a lot of triggering going on here, and not a lot of acknowledgement of nuance.
While this is generally true the workarounds can and do take time, and while all this is happening there's a lot of space for a person to do significant damage to the project in the meantime.
That's a feature, not a bug. Most big decisions can and should take time. Usually because it's not a simple matter of "this guy is a massive dick to everyone and contributes hardly anything."
More often it's "this guy carries this project, and he is an asshole when people show up and run their mouth because they think they're smarter than they are." Which is to say - it's a shade of gray, not black or white.
In the truly dire situations, movements happen quickly. See the recent collapse of FreeNode IRC.
Seems to me getting rid of those people sooner rather than later is better for the health of the project overall.
Of course, I'm sure some will argue that it's no coincidence because being effective and being toxic are inherently positively linked, but that's simply untrue in my experience, wishful thinking on the part of toxic people who want an excuse for their behaviour. Linus himself has said he was wrong to act as he did, and has worked to change that, and seen improvements for doing so.
No, but if someone is a massive dick to everyone, the quality and quantity of their contributions shouldn't matter. Being a dick is being a dick. Doesn't matter what they contribute.
This often puts a considerable drag on the whole project, one that can easily climb to way above the contributions of that person. Even worse, this is often not visible at the project level, as multiple people start independently avoiding this person, even finding technical work-arounds to avoid working with them; while their direct contributions are visible to everyone, making it seem like they are indispensable.
The situation with Linus is even more interesting: for years people have worked with him knowing that they sometimes have to endure his abrasive manners. Then, one day, enough people seem to have discussed this with him, and he decided to accept their feedback and change his ways. How much more successful could Linux have been had this discussion happened 10 years earlier? How many developers have quit or never started working on Linus out of social anxiety? Perhaps it's 0, perhaps it's not.
I was around for the infancy of Linux (I remember a friend was running ~2.1.98 because it came out before Win 98 or something like that, even though it was occasionally unstable for them), and then went in another direction, and have recently gotten back in.
Even Linux admits his behaviour was unproductive and has apologised and improved his communication.
Personally, I think an expectation of a little professionalism from people is hardly "ever more delicate". Rather, it's people who feel entitled to spout any profanity or insult they want without reaction who seem unable to deal with the consequences of their actions.
> Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around.
What you are describing is that if you are "valuable enough", you get to be toxic to people without consequence. That's a good way to breed toxicity.
There is this trope of the "genius asshole" who is too valuable to lose. I suspect that in a lot of cases these people are too valuable precisely because they drive away other contributors that would otherwise lead to a more healthy project.
> Unfortunately, some snowflakes like to believe that everyone contributes equally. That is simply not the case. And, in fact, some people contribute a _negative_ amount overall. Which is to say, the project is better off without their participation.
You intended this to support your argument, but it seems to undermine it. The odds are that one individual is going to contribute less than all the people they are likely to drive away with toxicity. Toxic developers are likely to be the net negative contributors as you describe.
It really seems like your whole argument is predicated on capability and toxicity being directly correlated, which in my experience—while something toxic people want to believe—is a nonsense excuse for enabling bad behaviour.
I have seen this many a time.
It's quite hard to watch someone tear themselves apart, even if it is just the internet. The emotional burden of it gets a bit too much, and walking away seems like the best option.
Skilled people have lots of options for volunteering and they'll just leave and volunteer somewhere else.
I think that's a pretty bad example, considering Linus took time off and reevaluated, publicly apologized and acknowledged how his behavior was harming Linux.
> competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges.
That seems pretty unsubstantiated.
Can you provide an example of something in the code of conduct that you think makes people walk on eggshells?
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 asshole.
> Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude.
> Even if you feel you were misinterpreted or unfairly accused, chances are good there was something you could’ve communicated better — remember that it’s your responsibility to make your fellow Rustaceans comfortable.
Us Norwegians are well known for coming across as rude. And especially since being mean or rude is a subjective thing, I feel it's highly likely I could come across as unintentionally rude to others. And according to that it's my fault if I do.
I definitely think twice before interacting with a community that has a CoC like that, because I don't need such drama in my life.
In the olden days of forums we had none of this nonsense. The community would agree a user was toxic and the mods would kick. It seemed like there were better controls, or that this was a better design.
Maybe because GitHub is so centralized, and every action so public it feels like there is some kind of global audience, so there are all these wasteful airs and graces? Idk
The way we used to deal with this was by divorcing communication from contribution. Someone might be banned from a mailing list or IRC channel but their contributions could still be merged (and they might even have write access to the main repo, in extremely rare cases).
I think it's still the case that a lot of the "pro vs con" debates around mod teams could be addressed by divorcing the social aspects of development from willingness to consider PRs. And I've never seen a cogent justification for not making this split.
> For better or worse, competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges.
I don't buy the causal link at all. I think it's more likely that competency in software often used to let OSS contributors get away with being assholes because there was so little free-as-in-beer competent labor available. Programmers, even ones who will work for free, aren't such hot shit anymore.
> snowflakes
I think we've gotten to the point where we can s/snowflakes/meany-face/. It's juvenile name calling that distracts from your point and makes people take you less seriously.
This is just nonsense. Plenty of intelligent and capable people are perfectly friendly and non-toxic.
Your philosophy demonstrably doesn't work. Its failures are so obvious that even Linus Torvalds, who people always seem to bring up in these conversations, has repudiated it[0].
> And, in fact, some people contribute a _negative_ amount overall. Which is to say, the project is better off without their participation.
This is true. Toxic people aren't worth the effort to keep them in, no matter how good their skilled contributions are. There can and should be a way to remove them.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...
This is your utopian ideal - it is NOT indicative of the real world. Sometimes, there are horribly toxic people who are so competent and requisite to a project that their removal would cause immediate and irrecoverable failure.
You made your statement as matter of fact - it is absolutely wrong. There may be times, perhaps even a majority of times that you can simply remove a toxic person - but to state it as the hard rule without exceptions is wrong.
I think those exceptions are very limited, though. There seems to be an implicit judgment here that the success of the project is usually more valuable than the well-being of the people who are helping to complete it, and in the vast majority cases of I disagree. Unless literal life and death are on the line, it's hard for me to see it as worth it.
As an individual, my rule is pretty hard and fast and that's why I phrased it so definitively. I don't really care how much money is being offered to me or how cool or important the project is, and I don't really care how critical the person is to the project. If the choice is "allow the toxic person to be toxic or allow the project to fail," I'll vote with my feet and I'll leave.
I assume in the open source world the latter is easier to ignore, but in business it can take years to get rid of an incompetent, and the longer they're there, the greater the drag on the team and the harder it is to hang on to talented people. By contrast, letting a talented and productive asshat go is much easier; just introduce them to HR!
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.
No. If a person is toxic enough, people will leave until that person has total power or that person is removed.
This is what I have seen happen at companies over and over again.
It can be a painful process because that person may not be actively mean or bad. The way I have seen it happen most often is that the person talks endlessly, and are control freaks that do not allow anyone else to make decisions about any project they are involved in. They don't mind arguing for hours, so the team quits trying to communicate with them over time and ends up leaving.
Also, you act as if toxic == productive, which is absolutely not the case. Smart people tend to be T shaped, which means they also have good social skills. The myth of the "toxic genius" is just that: a myth. Most of the best developers I have met are extremely nice people.
Modern FOSS projects such as Linux or Rust are more than something for geeks. Lot of people gets paid to work on it. For many, being an expert in an important project is a career, not just a job. People are "forced" to spend a lot of time working with the community. And modern open source projects just have far more people than they used to. I guess that the standards have been raised.
That said, I think you are completely right on this point:
> some snowflakes like to believe that everyone contributes equally
This is absolutely right. The people who are being accused of being nasty are the _core_ team. Rust just can not exist without them. Unfortunately, they seem to be abusing their power.
If a project can't survive without its toxic people, then perhaps it shouldn't survive.
As I read it, the people who are being accused of being nasty are, for all we know, perhaps just one of the core team.
The rest of the core team are being accused of, at most, not being willing (and/or able?) to do, or let the mod team do, something about that.
> It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce—even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of.
> It helps more people, too.
One can be proud of their children and what they accomplish, but having them?
Happy would be more appropriate IMO.
I think this is the bigger problem.
There is a real danger of the line between "socially acceptable" and "strongly disagree" or "strongly dislike" being blurred by these groups... it needs to be ok to have people disagree with each other, or not like each other, or not like their opinion, or not like their personality in these open source projects without that leading to being ejected or punished for it.
Yes, they will. For 25 or so years, the workaround has been others leaving and the project/site dies. There's nothing original about your argument, and it's been proven to be a destructive strategy. (Ironically, you are posting your comment on HN, which is heavily moderated.)
Outing toxic contributors so they don't actively corrupt and corrode the project is tantamount to the long-term success of a project. And you don't need to break the law to be deemed too negative to be necessary.
> Choose your tradeoff carefully.
What an unsettling comment.
Are the group that you are calling "snowflakes" people who want there to be a system in place to remove people from a project, or is it the opposite?
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...
----
> 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.
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.
I do not recognize most of the core team these days, but Steve Klabnik and Ashley Williams stand out as likely culprits. I have personally submitted an email with the Rust moderation team to complain about Klabnik (and also mod-team member Andrew Gallant) and their abrasive behavior on reddit. Several months later I received a response stating they agreed that Klabnik went over the line and that they would warn him. Meanwhile Ashley "kill all men" Williams has an extremely lengthy reputation for her behavior in open source[1]. When it was announced she was joining the rust community team, there was a large push back from the community but the reddit/discourse mods censored everything[2][3] and the core team chose to let Williams join despite the complaints about her history of racism, sexism, and antagonism.
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7nx3cm/announcement_a... (https://archive.fo/ISXJF)
[3]: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/announcement-ashley-willia... (https://archive.fo/9yW9I)
This is a rampant tactic on Wikipedia usually employed by experienced gatekeepers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CRUSH and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SQS
Archive.org version for good measure: https://web.archive.org/web/20170828212225/https://www.reddi...
All that to say: this message came from Andrew, and I believe it without question.
This blog post is a great testament to his human skills: https://blog.burntsushi.net/foss/
My interpretation is that the drama happening around the core team (like the things you've mentioned) gets increasingly overwhelming for the mod team to handle, leading to complaints against the core team for causing such drama (which they do not have the sufficient resources nor actual power to handle). This further escalates and devolves into a worse relationship between the two, leading to the resignation.
From the thread on /r/rust one of the mods (different from the Rust's mods) talked about the relationship between the Core and the Mod team:
Bans. We do not directly enforce bans, instead we ask Core to enforce them for us, and Core will double-check our work (though without access to the case, unless complainants are OK with that) -- essentially ensuring that we've done our due diligence, given a fair chance to the person, and that we're following the "escalation" procedure.
Bans (bis). Core may enforce bans by themselves, then let us know.
Involvement. When a Core Team Member is involved in a complaint, or a difficult relationship, we play our mediator/arbitrator role, stepping in and attempting to figure out the bottom of the issue and resolve it peacefully -- much like we do with any other Rust Team Member, really.
I thought same as well, but seems reddit mods are different:
> Please note that the official Rust moderation team is not the same organization as the team that moderates the subreddit here on /r/rust. The subreddit is an unofficial space, and though it is frequented by many who are affiliated with the project, it remains independent from the Rust project. The /r/rust mod team is not resigning from moderating the subreddit.
> In the interest of disclosure, two of the moderators who are resigning from the official mod team are moderators here on this subreddit (matthieum and llogiq). They appear to have not resigned their position here, which I appreciate, since they're rather excellent moderators. However, in the interest of impartiality I am asking them to recuse themselves from taking moderator action in this thread (they may still comment as usual if they wish, of course).
https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...
But AFAICS the core team being involved in moderation activities has nothing to do with Reddit. That quote above on how the teams were supposed to cooperate was about moderation of the official Rust forums, wasn't it? Reddit isn't one of those.
So if you're seeing your interpretation confirmed, that's just... Wrong. It doesn't confirm anything of the kind.
I lost touch (the last video I watched which might be the one that give me the feels for it was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9OFQm8Qf1I, I do recall Ashley Williams & her ideas were a big part of why the community looked so good from outside; contrasted with the "do-ocracy" one I'm in) so I don't know what happened - but it's sad it's become like other projects now.
The sort of people who try to intentionally "plan" (I.e. socially engineer) community dynamics do not have a great historical record of actually creating good communities. History is littered with failed inorganic communities - from cults and communes to web forums with overzealous mods.
Not saying that's necessarily what happened here, just that people putting a lot of thought into how to control/manage a community might be more of a negative sign than a positive one.
A counterexample is Hacker News itself. We all like Hacker News (presumably, otherwise we wouldn't be here) and it wouldn't be what it is without the intentions of the original creator and the current moderation team.
That can't be true, right? Everyone shits so hard on HN all the time. Personally I only post here because it's "the place" for people in my field, but HN has given me a more negative view of my field than positive.
Do they? Or is it just some minority of shit stirrers? Or is it that HN is more likely to have people that can healthily laugh at themselves - a la Monty Python? I mean you can love HN and n-gate.com at the same time right?
Back on topic: The very public “we quit” message seems like a very clear message to try and effect change for a cause they deeply care about.
I presume the mod team had multiple other options on how to deal with the core issue. For example, they could have internally suggested a quiet rollover to a new mod team over a few months. Say modelled on how CEO leadership is changed, avoiding public drama, when a CEO is rolled by their board.
Deciding on a very public option just causes all the drama to play out with every Internet and Hackernews (including me) adding their own spit into the mix.
Edit: added colour.
Both kinds of thinking are natural. Defense mechanisms are always present in the process of making up our minds. But if defense mechanisms are allowed to dominate our thought process-- to kill feelings before they can provoke new thoughts-- the result will be indecisive, ambiguous writing that implicitly dumps the burden of resolving the anxiety, resentments and other dark feelings, onto the author's audience.
An elite who publishes their overthinking signals their inability to resolve their feelings or the feelings of the people they have power over.
Some might attempt to explain it away as Twitter's model and ecosystem encouraging ill considered statements, but the adult response to that is to take more care in what you say or stop using the medium that encourages you to say horrible things you regret.
Edit: I will acknowledge the data I was looking at is a few years old, and I don't know if the person in question has since recanted on those views. I believe people change and should be given the chance to leave their past misdeeds behind, and I have no knowledge one way or the other if that happened here, and that would be important to know to have an informed opinion.
“My assessment of the claim that I am a hindrance to inclusivity efforts is that it hinges on the singular matter of moderation and control of discourse that occurs amongst the technical team. From the beginning I have strongly maintained that the technical team should retain authority over its own space. That its independence also involves its ability to enforce the rules of social interaction and discussion as it sees fit. This has lead to disagreements with individuals that would rather insert external arbiters into the moderation process; arbiters who have not earned the right to stand in judgement of technical team members, and have not been held to the same standards by which technical team members are judged to earn their place in the project. On this matter I remain staunchly opposed to the dilution of independence of the technical team and will continue to advocate for its ability to make such critical decisions for itself. This is not only a question of moral (earned) authority, but of the risk of subversion of our organisational structures by individuals who are attracted to the project by the possibility of pursuing a personal agenda, regardless of the impact this has on the project itself. I see current moves in this direction, as in this week’s moderation policy proposal at nodejs/TSC#276, as presenting such a risk. I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this, but I have just as much right as everyone else to make my case and not be vilified in my attempts to convince enough of the TSC to prevent such changes.”
Does Rust really have a community if noone but a few select member have access to the information regarding why things are changing and the community members can't even discuss the forbidden topics in "unofficial spaces" either. How do I decide if I an getting involved with a community or just an elite club.
Quoting from the stickied comment from r/rust moderator.
> In the interest of not hastily jumping to conclusions, we will be removing speculation that alleges that this is due to any particular individual(s). The moderation team appears to have gone to great lengths to avoid naming names, ostensibly in the service of focusing a spotlight on the core team as a whole rather than any of its members. If they had wanted to name names, they could have. I understand that it is difficult to discuss a topic without firm details, but please refrain from engaging in speculation. I have confirmation that the core team will be making a statement about this at some point, which will hopefully shed more light on the situation.
As a first order approximation, the word "community" is so overused as to mean nothing. It's often used to obscure a power structure, or pretend a mass of people are more cohesive than they are. Sometimes both. Don't go into any software project expecting more.
Rust is a big club and you ain't in it. You can still use it, submit patches, maybe even work towards a position in their project hierarchy. The important thing is you got your first strong sniff of knowing where you stand in relation to the club.
Because that's the appropriate scope to discuss what the moderation team wanted to start a discussion about: Processes and structures.
> They want to use public opinion to bring reforms to the Rust governance but not divulge any details?
What they said was basically "Someone did something shitty, we wanted to clean up the discussion, but couldn't because of the current structure where the core team isn't | doesn't see itself as being under any obligation to listen to the moderation team".
Those are all the "details" needed for the subject of the discussion, namely processes and structures. The details of the original "shitty thing" are irrelevant; the same (lack of appropriate) processes and structures applies to any such incident involving the core team.
This all seems pretty self-evident to me; I'm dumbfounded by how many commenters here on HN can't seem to grasp this fundamental but utterly simple difference.
Your quote from the subreddit only shows that the moderators there do get it (no wonder, being partly the same people), and are therefore (quite properly IMO) trying to quell speculation about the (irrelevant!) "original shitty thing".
It shouldn't be so hard to see that there's absolutely nothing wrong with that either.
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 about it. To be clear (if only so people know what they're downvoting!), I'm an avid Go enthusiast--the language is great and the maintainers are generally good at designing a language; however, I sharply disagree with their approach to managing the community.
But whatever it is and whatever your opinion of it, it's hard to make a cogent argument that it belongs as a banner on the front page of a programming language website.
I did not realize that providing counsel to inmates was a partisan issue.
> But whatever it is and whatever your opinion of it, it's hard to make a cogent argument that it belongs as a banner on the front page of a programming language website.
This is unrelated to my comment.
I'm clearly not referring to "providing counsel" and it takes only 10-15 seconds of reading their homepage to see policy positions that any reasonable person could consider partisan. But nice straw man. Let me know when you're interested in an actual discussion and not this nonsense.
This is partisan?
Of course, virtually everyone understands that blacks are killed disproportionately by police, but that doesn't imply a racial motive when we know for fact that there are disparities in the commission of violent crime, rates of police interaction, etc which could also explain the disparity in shootings.
And of course, the particular remedial policies depend significantly on the answers to these questions. In particular, people who identify strongly with BLM are much more likely to advocate defunding or abolishing the police (but are also the least happy that inadequate policing led citizens to defend themselves during various BLM riots in 2020, including the Rittenhouse case).
Further still, there's a lot of controversy over whether violence or non-violence are the appropriate way to seek the reforms one desires, with virtually the whole of the media downplaying or actively justifying political violence (even invoking MLK's "riots are the language of the oppressed" out of context[1]) right up until January 6th, 2021 when political violence abruptly and rightly regained its "reprehensible" designation.
Further still, contrary to the media portrait, a majority of black Americans don't support violent protest or the abolition or defunding of police--like most other Americans, they want sensible police reform[0].
So yes, BLM is quite controversial in American politics for reasons which have little to do with clear cut advocacy for human rights.
[0]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-n... [1]: One of the more memorable examples was CNN adding the "fiery but mostly peaceful" caption as a journalist sporting a gas mask reported against a backdrop of a dozen burning vehicles.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the US also involved violent riots by some actors, and there was public debate between sides on whether segregation was intrinsically a cause of inequality, similar to how there is debate today between sides on whether our criminal justice system is intrinsically a cause of racial inequality. If one didn't view segregation as intrinsically unequal, they might claim that the Civil Rights Movement (though focused on many other issues as is BLM) had "little to do with human rights." Supporting the Civil Rights Movement, a movement that contained numerous groups, goals, and actors (both violent and non-violent), was still a position that doesn't seem to have harmed organizations of the day, and may have even benefitted them.
If we can agree that this slogan is controversial, then it seems like we should be able to agree that the Go project could make its points better by avoiding a controversial slogan and instead using an unambiguous statement. Certainly this should be open for discussion.
Moreover, I could make a similar statement about "All Lives Matter", which is necessarily focused on human rights, but most people steer clear of the slogan because the media has worked to associate it with right-wing groups and now it is only used by right-wing groups--good faith people strive to make their points in ways which are unambiguously good faith; bad faith people use motte and bailey rhetoric which is what the Go team appears to be doing (they are certainly aware of the controversial nature of the slogan and refuse to discuss it).
> The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the US also involved violent riots by some actors
Right, and we collectively rebuked those actors and raised up non-violent actors as exemplars for social change.
> there was public debate between sides on whether segregation was intrinsically a cause of inequality, similar to how there is debate today between sides on whether our criminal justice system is intrinsically a cause of racial inequality.
Public debate is fine. Burning and looting neighborhoods, attacking innocent people, etc is not.
> If one didn't view segregation as intrinsically unequal, they might claim that the Civil Rights Movement (though focused on many other issues as is BLM) had "little to do with human rights."
Right, but through public debate and other non-violent means, we made the case that segregation is intrinsically unequal. With respect to BLM, note that there was an enormous effort to punish people for criticizing BLM.
> Supporting the Civil Rights Movement, a movement that contained numerous groups, goals, and actors (both violent and non-violent), was still a position that doesn't seem to have harmed organizations of the day, and may have even benefitted them.
We supported the Civil Rights Movement because it largely emphasized non-violence. We supported the movement in spite of its violent elements, and the violent and nationalist figures remained controversial right up until BLM folks made them popular.
1. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/heres-h...
2. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/12/joe-biden-america-ne...
For more details, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29308714
How a particular slogan like "defund the police" polls is not relevant to the impact of moving $193 billion annual local dollars of police funding to better structured, community-centered alternatives.
Conflating evidence-based policy goals and research with how people feel about them in the current present moment is classic misdirection.
Your first article (from Buzzfeed of all places) didn't demonstrate a white nationalist agenda, and if you think the second article supports your point (that Biden is content with whatever white nationalism exists within the Republican party) then I'm not sure we read the same article. The article I read clearly depicts Joe Biden's views that America needs two political parties, that American politics should revert back to the more functional pre-Trump years (and presumably before the alleged mainstreaming of white nationalism that you purport), and that Republicans who want to stay Republicans should do so while voting for Biden. None of that seems controversial at all.
> How a particular slogan like "defund the police" polls is not relevant to the impact of moving $193 billion annual local dollars of police funding to better structured, community-centered alternatives.
You don't think it's a problem that Black Americans overwhelmingly reject policies (as well as rhetoric and ideology) that are purportedly in their interest?
> Conflating evidence-based policy goals and research with how people feel about them in the current present moment is classic misdirection.
"Defund/abolish the police" policy goals aren't evidence based. If you'd like to retreat to the moderate position that we should increase social services while reforming policing, then welcome to the moderate club.
This is absolutely false. Community groups have been putting together actionable, concrete and evidence-based abolition-centered strategies since the first slave-catchers were paid by the state. Educate yourself.
I've invested in Rust and don't regret it so far. I love the language and the tooling.
However, I'm not sure if I'd choose Rust again.
Those politics are really disturbing, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515306.
Show me the transgressions that would require CoC to be enforced and then I'd be more sympathetic. As presented, this seems like political bullshit, and their efforts would be better spent overhauling Rust's unergonomic error handling.
If you're going to resign, it helps to clearly explain why with sufficient detail. Maybe they did this elsewhere?
The usual CoC violation: probably someone in the Core Team made a statement (outside the Rust community and not speaking officially) that does not align with the progressive political thinking.
You say that the larger number of men in tech with respect to women might be due to biological reasons? CoC violation, fire the enemy of the people!
You say you voted for Trump? CoC violation, fire the enemy of the people!
You say only biological women are actual women? CoC violation, fire the enemy of the people!
When there was a huge push to adopt CoCs I warned everyone I knew about the clear potential for abuse by the leftist (who also incidentally happen to be the ones to back CoCs). In particular a CoC should cover only actions performed in a community, no-one should be banned to contributing to a project because of what they write on Twitter, for instance!
Power extends from whoever has the authority to hold others to account. So this just reads like a power-grab from the moderation team. What would it mean for them to have the power to hold the core team to account? That they could sack people from it?
The goals of the project are set by the core team; not by a moderation team enforcing some abitrary CoC. Suppose a member who contributes 90% of new features to the project is "sacked" for an otherwise trivial CoC violation. This subsumes the project into an ideological purity-testing game.
Accountability here is just that the wider community has visibility on the actions of the core team, and will be up-in-arms if they are seriously unethical.
This is, in my reading, deeply bad press for the moderation team. The innuendo and insistence on their own power above that of the people leading the project... this "is a bad look".
EDIT: the immediate number of downvotes on this comment is interesting. I'd be interested in hearing from a down-voter on what their objection is.
Second, the CoC is not arbitrary, there's a link to it merged into the repository which means the core team (or at least a majority of it) agreed to it. Their resigning is just a signal that the CoC that they publicly announce is not actually being followed. It's nothing more than that.
For a leadership to be accountable means that they follow the rules of the system, and should they not follow them they are ejected from it. It's as simple as that, no need for democracy, the system is clearly defined and agreed upon.
I don't really get what you mean with "a bad look" for the moderation team. It's a bad look in the sense that it shows they actually had no power all along. But I don't think they were in it for the glory. A worse look is that of the core team, who have publicly stated their support of a CoC, and now when shit hit the fan show they won't actually abide by their own rules.
Though I don't really expect those individuals to comeback, this may well just be a move to subsume the projects "technical goals" (ie., those of the core team) under the "ethical goals" of the moderation team. As a technical project, to me, this isnt that sensible.
> leadership to be accountable means that they follow the rules of the system
This misunderstands power. There are no (enforced) rules prior to power. Power is the mechanism by which there are rules. This resignation isn't to establish rules in the abstract -- the CoC exists. Its for a team to have the power to enforce them.
And "Rules" here arent rules at all. They are principals. And pricipals trade-off against each other, and against other goals. When we say the core team has "agreed" that does not imply theyve agreed to all views the moderation team takes.
I have no idea who is in the "right", to be clear, on the ethical issue. Perhaps a member of the core team has done something severely unethical (in which case, presumably the ethical thing to do is tell people...). However the phrasing of this as an explicit demand for power... to me reads a little off.
It reads like they wish to be part of a project where an ethical ideology reins decisively above the technical goals.
Eg., consider the core team will give a member "more latitude" to, say, rehabilitate if they've done something wrong. You might say they shouldnt. But it this a technical project, or a political-ethical one? Are its leaders meant to be morally excellent or excellent software developers?
The reality is that technical projects require technical excellence, not moral excellence. A "moderation team" set-up to demand moral excellence can easily go too far and ruin a project. Of course, if a core member is deeply unethical one hopes the community & core-team will do something about it.
My sense here is that if someone was "deeply unethical" they can be held to account by telling people about it. And if they weren't, then I imagine the core team have made the right decision for the project.
That may be so, but these people are no longer playing the game.
Relinquished what power? If they had said power, surely they would have gotten their way yes? Perhaps this is just an incremental iteration of the ongoing fight for power, a last ditch effort to get public sentiment behind them.
>agreed to it
This could have been a tactical choice to avoid fighting head on in that battle, waging the larger war against the CoC by simply ignoring it over time. It is just as likely to assume many who "agreed" to it didn't really agree with it, evidenced by them not following it. And here we are, it seems these people have "won" as they didn't follow it and the the team pushing it/enforcing it lost. So perhaps this strategy was the optimal one. "Agree" to a thing to move on with more important matters and ignore those who nominally are tasked with enforcing it but have no real power, if ignored.
Of course what you inevitably get isn't an internet shitstorm at all, but a bunch of rubberneckers gleefully gawking at the high school drama publicly unfolding in your organization.
People don’t distinguish between earned power(authority ) and unearned power anymore.
Did you edit your comment at some point after publishing to be a little more mild (e.g. remove the word "childish" or something)? I apparently downvoted you at some point, although I don't see anything currently in your comment that would have caused me to do that.
I'm not sure where I land on COC-style stuff myself, but I have zero patience for people who are insulting to those in favor of them with words like "childish." If you had something like that in your comment at one point, I would have downvoted it. (TBH your comment is borderline with claiming COCs are "arbitrary," but I wouldn't have downvoted just for that.)
Note that I often downvote any mention of the word “downvote”: I am sure you asked in good faith, but as a sweeping generalisation, commenting on voting doesn’t improve conversation. Not knowing why you get downvotes is a “make you think” feature IMHO. I also believe excessively caring about votes is a red flag: some of the best commenters seem to be fairly neutral about caring what the HN voters think.
Not trying to start a conversation about voting and maybe my comment deserves downvotes. I am answering your implied question about why you might get a downvote even after your corrections to “tone”.
While the core team could modify the CoC to make their non-compliant behaviour compliant, that would require them to effectively admit to engaging in behaviour that violates the CoC. The rest of the community can vote with their feet on if they believe the CoC is fair, and equally if they believe modifications are fair. But importantly all of these changes happen out in open where they can be scrutinised.
> Suppose a member who contributes 90% of new features to the project is "sacked" for an otherwise trivial CoC violation. This subsumes the project into an ideological purity-testing game.
Punishment doesn’t have to be all or nothing. A CoC can provide guidance on how moderation is performed, and how punishment is meted out. The CoC should be equally binding on the mod team, as it is anyone else, and the mod team should seek to ensure due process or face replacement.
> Accountability here is just that the wider community has visibility on the actions of the core team, and will be up-in-arms if they are seriously unethical.
We don’t know the nature of the offence. It quite possible that the victim or victims have requested that the nature of the offence is kept private to prevent retaliation from others. For the mod team to publicly list the offence might cause more injury to the already injured parties.
> The innuendo and insistence on their own power above that of the people leading the project... this "is a bad look".
If the CoC delegates power of enforcement to them, and CoC has been agreed to by the core team, then the mod team does have power over the core team. But importantly, only in matters covered by the CoC. Just like how members of congress are still subject to law enforcement by the police (or should be).
I can see how this can be extremely complicated, depending on the type of CoC violation people tend to be extremists, forget about being constructive (to assume good intentions) and immediately grab the pitchforks.
Firstly, you alleged the mod team was engaging in a "power grab" by resigning immediately. Others have pointed out that is illogical. At best a resignation could earn them some level of sympathy, but it eliminates their current power along with any potential for them to acquire power in the future. If there is any way for the mod team's resignation to increase there power, you have not shared it.
Secondly, your claim seems to be baseless. Nobody in this HN thread has shared any details beyond what is in the resignation PR - much less enough to suggest a power grab. I consider baseless allegations like that to be harmful to the overall discussion. Until additional details regarding the conflict are made public, we should not encourage people to form character judgements on either party.
It's dishonest to publish a CoC that -- silently -- doesn't apply to those with power. Why does that matter?
Don't forget that a language with a strong core team but no community of users, contributors, documenters, enthusiasts, etc., is hardly more than nothing -- people making specifications that aren't implemented and if implemented, not used.
The purpose of a CoC is to set ground rules to allow the community around the language -- the community that must exist for the language to have any real value or purpose -- to grow as strong as possible.
You're granting the core team all the power in rust, but they are kings of very little if people don't chose to adopt rust.
Some people or companies may choose to invest -- or not invest -- in rust based at least partially on the code of conduct.
Other people may choose to invest -- or not invest -- in rust based at least partially on their confidence in the long-term capability of the core team. Does "accountable to no one" instill that confidence?
Also: you really are misunderstanding what the mod team did here. Resigning is a single-shot ploy. There's literally nothing left that they can do. Whether this is a "bad look" for them is entirely irrelevant.
At this point the rust core team has to decide if they would prefer to more forward with or without a code of conduct, and whether they will be honest about it or not.
The rest of us can watch and decide if/how we'd like to continue to participate with rust. Those making long term plans should watch especially carefully.
So? Are you going to blame them for seeing the reality as it truly is?
> Managing the overall direction of Rust, subteam leadership, and any cross-cutting issues
This sounds to be more of an "executive team", but I am also unfamiliar with Rust development, so I don't know how accurate that is in practice.
"Language Design Team"
"Compiler/Roslyn Team(?)"
"CLR Team(?)" yada yada
so more product/role-driven naming schema
The social fix would be to change the name "Core" to "Base Language" or some such. Perhaps fork off a separate "Ecosystem" committee with broader representation.
Bona fide: Was once myself on the other side of a "Core" team boundary.
You are saying it like as if it were something bad.
How to promote on merit and not nepotism or corruption is the hard problem.
That's the question our society is facing.
First, competence itself is subjective and hard to measure, especially for the very broad task of language design and stewardship. Which skills and credentials are considered most relevant and who's judging them is already "political" (e.g. do "hackers" get stuff done, or are winging it? Is someone with a PhD in PLT the most qualified, or an ivory-tower academic?)
Then there are human factors. Programmers aren't deterministic stateless coffee2code transformers.
Some people will dislike other people, for a broad range of reasons that may be valid or not, and that will affect their judgement. Also many projects and companies have to deal with "asshole geniuses". It's very "political" to decide whether you kick out someone who writes good code, but scares away other contributors.
"Corporate politics" is not thing set up on purpose, but it's a meta-game that emerges even in organizations that are supposed to be purely meritocratic. There are people who will consciously play this game, and have an advantage over people who naively think the game doesn't exist (I'm not endorsing it, but saying it's a phenomenon that orgs need to be aware of and actively deal with instead of declaring they're apolitical).
Since so many blockchain projects are using Rust and the community is struggling perhaps moving it to a DAO is the way to reboot things and create a more democratic and transparent experience for all.
LMK.
This is what you can expect when you put people with a questionable history of adhering to CoCs or are activists rather than developers in critical leadership positions.
BurntSushi (who made the PR) while also being a moderate is more widely known of his technical excellence and grate contributions, like the regex crate and ripgrep.
Developer do resign over non technical topics, no one wants to contribute to a project where they don't feel welcome.
Toxicity in the internet is getting out of hand, CoCs are just a consequence of this.
It's basically impossible to run a larger community without a CoC (weather or not it's written down or implied). I have yet to see any larger community which doesn't have a CoC and doesn't has problems with toxicity, sexism and/or discrimination.
I have seen more then one or two highly talented people leaving the tech sector because of them encountering too much toxicity, sexism and/or discrimination on their first contacts with the sector (both open source and in companies).