The Rust dev team can't win!
I see all of these complaints — both the volume, and the count — as great indicators of Rust's total health.
Since it is impossible to mentally model them as the number of humans they are, I find it helpful to model them as at least a few very distinct individuals, or sometimes just as an amorphous philosophical gas that will expand to fill all available comments, where the only question is really with what distribution rather than whether a given point will be occupied.
I find Rust extremely difficult and slow to work with. It takes me a long, long time to get anything working at all. Easily 5x more than any other language I've used (and that's many, and a good handful professionally), and I've been learning Rust for over a year.
Figures are hard to come by of course, but anecdotally I'm the only person in my circle who's continued using Rust. All the others have dropped out because they just find it too hard to get anything done in. Not sure if this is true, but I heard on a podcast the other day that one of the big surveys showed Rust to have the biggest learning drop-out rate of any mainstream programming language. That wouldn't surprise me, and comports well with Rust being the 'most loved' (people tend to love skills they have gained with much effort!).
I've just scrubbed back through - the podcast was https://syntax.fm/show/571/supper-club-rust-in-action-with-t..., which follows the pleasing practise of providing chapters (yay). It was Tim McNamara speaking from about 12'40": what he actually said was that about half of Rust learners who do drop out fall away because of the purported difficulty of the language. Very different from my faux summary so apologies for the grievous misrepresentation.
I still find Rust as hard to use as others I've spoken to do though. I'm kind of keeping at it for reasons specific to projects I have in mind, as well as a certain dense stubbornness.
Is there anything there someone like me (ie. having difficulty with Rust) might usefully contribute to? I'm a little overwhelmed right now trying to keep a roof over my head, but am compiling a list of things I might like to help with when the current storm has passed.
Personally I think contributions work best when you're trying to solve a pain that you personally have or at least have some sort of connection to, so I'd encourage you to consider what/how/why you struggled to learn, and then try to fix that. I know it's vague, but it's the best I've got right now!
Part of the problem is that news aggregates reward people who comment early, and the earliest comments are the kneejerk reactions where you braindump thoughts you've had brewing but don't have anywhere to put. (Probably without actually clicking through.)
Still, I believe what makes HN unusually nice is just the stellar moderation. It is definitely imperfect, but it creates a nice atmosphere that I think ultimately does encourage people to try to be civil, even though places like these definitely have a tendency to bring out the worst in people. Having a deft touch with moderation is very hard nowadays, especially with increasingly difficult demands put against moderators and absolutely every single possible subject matter turning into a miniature culture war (how in the hell do you turn the discussion of gas ranges vs electric ranges into a culture war?!) and the unmoderated hellscapes of the Internet wrongly painting all lightweight moderation with a black mark.
I definitely fear for the future of communities like HN, because the pressure from increasingly vile malicious actors as well as the counter-active pressure from others to moderate harder, stronger, faster will eventually break the sustainability of this sort of community. When I first joined HN, a lot of communities on the Internet felt like this. Now, I know of very few.