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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

These types of messages carry more weight when they're not too frequent; in the history of Rust we've posted three such messages. If we posted them too frequently they would lose impact. So we draw attention to things that have had recent developments/events, and where fresh attention seems like it may prove helpful. (See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33453262)

If we started posting about every terrible wrong in the world, we'd have multiple announcements per day, and they'd have zero impact.

Rust is an international project with participation from all over the world. Whether any particular country is allied with another has zero impact on the discussions that lead to these announcements.

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Drawing attention has zero impact no matter how often or how rarely you do it. Unless the Rust team has privileged knowledge that they're releasing, or are directly acting in the interests of known individual contributors, donating any amount of money to a cause is worth far more than tens of thousands of people becoming informed that the world is slightly worse than it was yesterday.

Even if drawing attention was worth anything, I think you are assuming the wrong frequency - the Rust technical release notes may contain few calls to political action, but everyone reading them spends enough time online to be constantly bombarded with them.

This is quite the way to discredit the whole business of marketing and advertising, and its core goal of informing people about things no matter what.

Activism is marketing. Unfortunately, marketing is not my field of expertise, so I won't make any hypothesis on its impact.

No, it is not. Marketing is about making you want to buy something, and appeals to your materialism. Raising awareness is about making you Aware that something is happening, and appeals to your altruism. There is a heck of a lot more of the former, and the latter doesn't actually make you want to perform any specific action (if it results in action at all, frequently, the action is just sharing it again).

No one is going to donate to something unless they're aware of it, so spreading awareness does help increase the potential pool of donors.

In other words, we bang our drum when we feel like it and really have no meaningful metrics or A/B measurements to gauge whether or not our announcement has made any actionable positive impact vs just irritating people who are solely interested in the technical release topic.

Some colleagues in Toronto were telling me about how there was a demonstration there last Saturday morning pertaining to this situation.

The demonstrators lined up along the sidewalk of one of the main streets, and were loudly chanting and screaming for a few hours. Others drove by and honked their vehicles' horns.

This was apparently done along stretches of the street with large residential complexes nearby, too.

Based on the bystanders, residents, and other people that my colleagues talked to, they seemed to think that this disruption likely alienated far more people than it attracted to support this particular cause.

> Based on the bystanders, residents, and other people that my colleagues talked to, they seemed to think that this disruption likely alienated far more people than it attracted to support this particular cause.

Same rhetoric used during the civil rights movement.

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