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Comment by asoneth | Hacker News Reader

Is there any good way to craft a message like this?

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.

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You're right, it's walking a tightrope. But they do put this at the end (on the Reddit post[0], not GitHub):

> 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...

I think the people who can fix this - the core team - know what is going on. The ball is in their court.

> and I don't see how these can be meaningfully discussed by someone who doesn't know what went wrong.

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.

I hope it is as straightforward as that. But that's still not something that outsiders can see and help with.

> You can't diagnose and find a remedy for a problem that you can't even see

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.

At a minimum, a public resignation has to say what it's in reaction to.

So no public resignations for people who are expected to not reveal details. So I guess "the entire moderation team has resigned and nobody says anything about it" is clearly the better the option?

There's nothing stopping you from doing it that way; it's just not very effective. A public resignation is usually designed to call attention to a problem, and trigger changes. If you don't say what the problems are with any specificity, it doesn't work as well.

> If they outlined specific issues...

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.

> In this message, we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability.

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.

That just begs the question, authority to do what? If there are no specific incidents on which they disagree today, then is this just an attempt to position themselves better should any such incidents occur in the future? If there’s no problem today, why all the fireworks?

The other shoe is that if they let the core team be above the law, when an incident happens, there will be all sorts of accusations of impropriety.

> Is there any good way to craft a message like this?

"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.

They're committing to sharing these reasons with other Rust Team members, though. Just not the broader dev community.

So set `X = "other Rust team members"`. Everything else in the comment was just for drama.

I don't think it was overly dramatic, but otherwise I agree with your point about pointing out another group with whom it has been shared, specifically a neutral party, if public muck-raking must be avoided at all costs. I made a similar point below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29308197

Then don’t make a whole big public announcement about it. As someone from the outside this just reads like a post specifically to generate drama and attention but not giving details as to direct it at anyone in particular.

Not sure that I'd call a PR a "whole big public announcement". Sure, it wound up here, but I don't think you can blame that on the mod team.

They also posted the resignation on the Rust subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...

If matthieum hadn't done it, someone else would have (and has; some dupes have appeared and were subsequently removed).

There's a community of external contributors that deserve (or would appreciate) some notification about it though.

> Then don’t make a whole big public announcement about it.

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?

They could have resigned without making a post about it. Is that a good idea? Maybe, it depends on the details we don't know.

And what, leave the Rust community not knowing that there's no CoC team because they've all resigned over something, but the community wasn't informed?

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.

>leave the Rust community not knowing that there's no CoC team

They did have the option of finding replacements before leaving.

Employees have no duty to find replacements for their employer. There's especially no moral duty if your bosses are being jerks. I'd say that logic applies to this situation as well.

This isn't a post, it's a PR. If your names are listed in a public Git repository, then you need to have them removed if you resign. This means a PR and a review of that PR, which is exactly what happened here.

Alternative: They step down without an announcement, get replaced, somebody pieces it together and posts it on HN or reddit or something, and now you have all the same drama from announcing it publicly, plus all the added drama from the "secret step down".

I think that's an uncharitable interpretation. If your remit is to deal with issues like this, but you find the structure is broken enough that you can't do what you see as your job, what do you do?

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.

They should provide a timeline against which their actions will be explained.

A resignation is a public action, and as this team knows very well, such actions need to be held to account.

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