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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It's the opposite: it's a "we refuse to drag this drama out into the public sphere" statement.

That's a naïve reading. They are dragging more into the public sphere than necessary to raise their grievances.

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.

The mod team is in a difficult position and are trying to thread a needle.

* 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

That's a bold claim. For you to accurately make that claim, 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.

I was replying to someone who said the content of the resignation was a refusal to drag drama into the public. I did not say dragging it into public was a bad tactic for accomplishing their goals.

>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.

"I don't know the story, nor any of the events leading up to this point, but I am convinced that one side is handling it wrong!"

Ironically, that's exactly what the moderation team seems to insinuate with their "extreme skepticism" claim.

"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!"

I wholeheartedly agree that "don't trust XYZ, they'll probably lie, but I can't tell you any more about it" is... very non-ideal.

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.

> 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.

Nobody resigns over a theoretical flaw in the governance structure. It’s only when it starts becoming a problem that people do so.

It’s more of a “let’s allude to problematic behavior, without actually explaining it, so we can fuel a maximal amount of speculation, and also let’s throw in some hot-button, culture wars issues, just to spice up the discussion”

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…

It is very much in the public sphere now though.

Sure, but you can't resign and not have it be a public thing. They said as little as they could

I'm pretty sure you can resign with a lot less "drama", for the lack of a better word. Simply make the PR remove people from the moderators list and say "We don't want to be moderators anymore", but instead they give clues to what could have happen for them to take this action.

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.

But if you just say "we don't want to be moderators anymore" nothing would change would it? The whole point of the statement is that the mod-team believes something in the organisational structure needs to change.

What would you have done in that case?

I would explain what went wrong. It's clear that their organizational suggestions were prompted by a member of the core team doing something they consider terribly wrong - how can it be so bad the Rust community has to know about it yet not bad enough that the community needs to know what it was?

> I would explain what went wrong.

They did: What went wrong was that the mod team doesn't have the power to mod the core team.

>I'm pretty sure you can resign with a lot less "drama"

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.

The problem wasn't saying too much, it's saying too little. A resignation is supposed to be a message. The appropriate thing is to make that message clear and professional. It can be discrete without innuendo.

The fact that the moderation team didn't have the power to moderate the core team is public, as it needs to be if that is going to change. The actual moderation issues that arose from that have remained private, which is probably for the best, because the entire point of moderation is to not try people in the court of public opinion.

Drama has already been dragged out. Now people are left to speculate and accuse. This thing from 4 years ago has been dug up, for example: https://archive.fo/f10KK and I can see it being the basis of some of those speculations.

> we refuse to drag this drama out into the public sphere"

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”

Then why the guild-drama act?

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?

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