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Comment by praveenperera | Hacker News Reader

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praveenperera

I love Rust. Its the language I use most these days.

But seems like there is a new drama every week with the core team and community.

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I think it's been the same drama over the core team which has been playing out over a month or two now.

What drama exactly? Sorry, I'm a bit out of the loop now, I stopped using reddit and twitter a few months ago.

I suspect any popular technology will have drama in the communities surrounding it. Anything high value will have power struggles around it.

Same happened with Node as it gained popularity.

That's frequently the nature of "community" projects. They're based in a particular idealism wherein authority is a patchable bug and direct democracy can scale infinitely.

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.

> But seems like there is a new drama every week

That's what happens when you elevate micromanagement of language to a task of equal or greater importance than the creation of code.

What a strange way of looking at it. At any functioning company, toxic employees get fired because the cost of them pushing out other employees is usually higher than the cost of firing them. Open source projects do not hire and fire people but do have the ability to censure toxic contributors.

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.

Except in those situations you never weight the amount of people you lose by adding a significant level of "cultural oversight" to a project. I actively avoid projects that spend a lot of time talking about "inclusivity" because to me it's a symptom of a (ironically) toxic environment full of people looking for drama (I am an ethnic and sexual minority myself in case someone wants to throw privilege in my face). The end result is that you replace one group of people with another group of people, you push away some to gain some. Except people like myself are rarely mentioned when there is a discussion about toxic environments.

> I actively avoid projects that spend a lot of time talking about "inclusivity" because to me it's a symptom of a (ironically) toxic environment full of people looking for drama

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.

And at many seemingly functioning companies, toxic executives keep their jobs as long as they're keeping a large enough amount of their peers happy.

I recognize the PR author as the author of some of my favourite Rust projects. He is a prolific programmer. Good software from BurntSushi, in general.

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