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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

I've been to plenty of conferences over the years, and I never really knew who was a "keynote speaker" or "only" a "speaker". Does anyone pay attention to this?

You give a talk. People show up. They clap at the end. Does it really matter what some title on some conference website is? The communication was perhaps a bit more confusing and hectic than it should have been, but does that really matter? Is that really a big deal?

I don't even understand why anyone would overly care about this in the first place, and now it's also an example of systemic bias against black people, "cruel", and "heartless"?

If the talk had been outright cancelled: sure, what would have been a right dick move. But from what I can see all that happened is that the "status" (that I don't think many pay attention to) got "downgraded" and (maybe) moved to a different timeslot. I'm just confused why this would spark such strong reactions.

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The people who don't think this is a big deal are either lacking some empathy or don't understand how conferences work. The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding, which you accept. The bride and groom then spend time gushing over how great it is that you'll be there, telling everyone they know, insisting that you book tickets right away. Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party.

In short, it's hard not to feel like you just got baited and switched, even if the withdrawal is for a good reason. "But you'll still be at the ceremony!" isn't a good argument because that wasn't the original invitation, and because you're putting them in a very uncomfortable position having to decide whether to continue to go or not.

For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events. There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence, at least for conferences that are larger than community events. Not all of these may not be obvious to attendees, but overall it's a fairly serious snub to pull the rug out from under someone like this.

It's up to you how you deal with stuff like this: you either turn everything in to a big drama or you just accept that these things are a part of life and can happen because the universe is a chaotic place. It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event.

If adding some perspective makes me "lacking empathy" then so be it, but I resent the accusation. We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. I bet that's fun after an honest mistake, miscommunication, or mismatch of expectations. If we want to talk empathy then no is coming off well here.

> We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence.

You're getting evidence directly from someone who is a senior member of the Rust community and who participated directly in the original decision.

Imagine you hear a series of bangs, walk into your living room, and see Alice holding a smoking gun and standing over Bob's bullet-ridden dead body, holding a note saying "I wish Bob was dead".

One response is "well, we don't know what Bob did or if Alice actually pulled the trigger". Another response is "um, Alice, can you explain why you seem to have shot Bob?", and if Alice doesn't want to explain anything, you might start to draw inferences. But either way you might not want to hang around Alice until it gets cleared up.

It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit, following which they wrote a lament about their broken heart and their copious weeping over the intolerable cruelty of a withdrawn keynote invitation. It might be worth asking for a bit of evidence of their claims, given their penchant for melodramatic overstatement.

> It's a very clearly disgruntled senior member of the community who has just ragequit

That’s leaving out the important context that it’s just the latest in a string of senior members in that community who have been disgruntled enough to quit. The entire moderation team quit all at the same time. Since then the leadership team has been “an interim leadership”.

Rust governance has been an ongoing shitshow for at least several years.

As someone who’s not directly affected since I stay well out of “the community” I’m less concerned about “community drama”, but as someone who makes (and will be held responsible for) long term strategic technical decisions for my company I can’t help but wonder if I want to hitch my company (and my reputation) to a language run by the sort of people who’ve let this drama fester for so long. Is some language feature going to be voted on, implemented, publicised, become a critical dependency in my codebase - only to get rugpulled by some anonymous core team member like this keynote speaker? I mean, probably not, but Rust leadership sure as hell haven’t done anything to earn my trust and seem to actively be working toward eroding it. In ways that I’ve never even had to question to myself about the leadership of Perl or Python, or even Java.

Well other languages are just programing languages, they are not virtuous like Rust. And I am not just overstating it. In so many contexts Rust people come swinging at whoever not using or competing with Rust, are not just making bad technical choice (still debatable) but morally lacking.

Perfect summary of what happened here. There's a million stories like this out there. Not sure why I should care about this one.

Seems a very immature way of dealing with things. Recent phenomenon or am I just becoming callous in my old age?

Just being "up close" doesn't mean your perspective is objective truth, or even reasonable. If anything, quite the opposite. The author of this post seems emotionally invested and may very well be ascribing motives to people that simply don't exist, and/or may have a coloured view of events.

Can we avoid using a gun analogy here?

Nobody involved has died.

It’s just an expansion of the “smoking gun” idiom.

On an object level it's not a big deal, but you're not thinking about it with the correct framing.

Being invited as a keynote speaker lends you credibility and status. It means you have been acknowledged as someone worthy of giving a keynote. You may not care about this, but other people do.

To downgrade someone from a keynote speaker to regular speaker is extremely disrespectful. Especially someone that you invited.

It makes it seem like you are toying with this person, and based on JT's account someone on the Rust team was toying with JeanHeyd because they went behind the rest of the team's back to downgrade his talk.

It's like giving a child a toy then snatching it back. It's just cruel. Whether it was a mistake or not doesn't change that.

> It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event.

One wrinkle I haven't seen called out is whether this was a paid speaking event (I assume it was) and if the demotion came with a part cut. If there was a pay cut that pretty shitty IMO, and does get a bit closer to losing ones job.

This goes both ways though? The organizers also turned this into a big drama and could have instead chosen to just chill and accept there was going to be a keynote some of them didn't love.

I mean, they haven’t re-invited him to the event have they? Kind of hard to see how it could be anything like a mistake.

Of course you can just not care and let people walk all over you every single time, but that’s not a healthy strategy either.

> The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding > ... > Later, you're told you can only come to the ceremony and not the reception or party For context, I've spoken at over 100 conference events.

Is it though? I can tell you from an audience point of view it almost certainly isn't. Nobody cares very much what "status, time, and prominence" your talk has. Which leads me to ...

> There are very significant differences in terms of the keynote speakers and regular speakers — generally in compensation, status, time, and prominence

So it's an ego thing?

Just give the talk, forego whatever glory you get from it.

> So it's an ego thing?

It's a respect thing. It costs time and money to produce and give a talk.

That very often isn't visible to the audience. It takes weeks of dedicated preparation to deliver a high-quality keynote talk, and people have day jobs and other obligations. If they're going to travel hundreds or thousands of miles and now have to pay for the privilege, they might want to not be treated as disposable.

That doesn't seem like too much to ask.

People often get time off of work or school to be honored with formal talking gigs. IE your boss will let you off the hook to prepare for it because it makes your company/school look good. It'd be pretty embarrassing to have to explain to your boss or your PI that "oops I'm no longer a key note speaker"

Why not just make all talks keynotes then. Change the label and everyone gets respect.

> Is it though?

It’s like being center stage on the PR poster for the movie and then only being an extra.

Like, being invited to perform on the main stage of the concert with your band, and then later being told you’ll have to perform from side stage 3 instead.

The audience is confused, and the whole thing is just disrespectful, yeah.

The thing itself is not the problem, performing on stage 3 by itself would be fine. It’s the disrespect and incompetence implied by the switch from one to the other.

Man, you really don't understand social dynamics do you?

Status, credibility and respect are real and tend to matter a lot.

It's not "an ego thing".

I understand social dynamics, I just don't respect them.

You can count all the "social dynamics" points you like, but it won't change how I treat what you've said, or how I push what I'm saying. Your statements will be judged on merit.

I haven't been to a conference in years because of COVID, but I've been to plenty mainly web and Python related before.

Almost all of them had keynote speakers, who received a prominent spot, usually in the morning and on multi-tier conferences the only talk scheduled at that time slot. Based on content of most of those talks the expectation was to take a wider or deeper or just different look at our fields and not mainly present a smaller idea or solution.

But it also doesn't matter if you or I personally do or don't care about distinction. There is one made clearly and as soon as it is made, there is an implicit promotion or demotion depending on which way a person is being moved and one should have very good reasons to demote anyone publicly as they did here.

I'm not saying the process was brilliant, but there's a difference between "the organizers were chaotic, didn't have their shit together, and need to do better" and "the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice".

That's really my main objection to this post; and in the context of the accusations it makes the change of title is not really a big deal, or so it seems to me anyway.

Or to put it this way: if it was me I probably would have been a bit disappointed, but I would also assume that's just the chaos of things.

But like I said in my other comment: I suspect this is really about general dissatisfaction with the Rust team, and that this is merely the final straw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36102292

> “the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice“

The characterisation of those actions as vindictive seems accurate, but I don’t think the blog post is stating that the actions were racist, rather that it was a missed opportunity to represent the wider population at rustconf.

Whether you think that’s good or tokenisation is a separate matter, the point is that the article is not claiming that downgrading the speaker was racism.

The sentence "Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated" in particular came off as more than merely "missed opportunity", although "racism" is probably too strong of a word too, but I don't know of anything else that fits better.

Either way, I don't really see why it would be vindictive either? Maybe I missed some information somewhere, but I've seen nothing that would indicate anything other than the most likely explanation: they rescheduled because they assumed JeanHeyd just didn't care as he indicated he didn't want to do a keynote at first, some petty infighting, and all of this communicated this in a bad and chaotic way.

Yep I think we see it pretty similarly regarding the first paragraph.

Re the vindictive part: I read it as someone having a personal issue with JeanHeyd and downgrading him as punishment.

It is funny because at least for me personally, it is the other way around.

I am most interested in deeper technical talks (or cool lightning talks that broaden my horizons) and keynotes often feel like highlevel generic talks that are very skippable - often aimed at CTOs and not engineers. Also, "prominent spot in the morning" is exactly the opposite for me as well, because conferences are all about networking and evening networking means hangover ...

In that sense I loved the Ruby conferences where the keynote was commonly matz or tenderlove talking about some crazy deep problem ruby was tackling about memory, jit, or speed tradeoffs.

Sadly haven't been to one in years since they haven't come back to SG

I feel like this post misses the point.

Do most people care if someone was a keynote speaker? No(Outside of academia). Is it a big deal if your talk was selected as a speaker or keynote speaker? No. But should you care if your talk is demoted from Keynote to non-keynote without following due process(and possibly because of personal biases)? Yes.

I don't know anything about any of the parties involved, but I feel like declining the talk was the correct thing to do and raising the lack of due process is also the correct thing to do.

Its a CV brag. It means you're a big shot if you're giving the keynote at a top conference. Most people never do that so it's a big deal.

It grants high credibility in the outside world which gets you invited to additional opportunities.

Nobody cares but the speaker themselves.

There is obviously some legit cred here, and it's a definite downgrade - but it's not being sent to the woods either. G

Given that 'nobody else cares at all, whatsoever' - that adds context to this which we should include in our understanding. Nobody is missing grant money, or getting a stain on their resume, not getting a job, publicly dragged, meaning the slight is ultimately very personal.

There is a legit grievance here, but it's overstated.

Most gripes have a kernel of truth, the issue is to match up the size of the truth, with the size of the kernel.

If nobody cared then why did someone make such a big deal out of the talk making them uncomfortable and therefore needing to downgrade it. It obviously did matter to more than just the speaker.

> Nobody cares but the speaker themselves.

You're not speaking for everyone. I care about the Rust leadership behaving properly for example, because issues like this may be a sign of other problems with respecting the community. And I would like to trust them to resolve issues fairly and quickly since I will rely on the project's progress in the future and don't want people leaving because of mishandling social issues.

Yes, we care that people behave themselves, we're referring to 'who cares' about whether the nature of a talk being 'keynote speaker or not'.

If Jim Smith is keynote, great, if they're in a conference talk, great, nobody is going to fathom one way or another but the speaker themselves.

You get an invite to a conference as a keynote speaker, which is then rescinded, for no good reason even? That's a big deal. I don't know about "heartless" and all that emotional stuff, it's just plain disrespectful.

You make up your mind about that kind of stuff BEFORE the invitation.

Usually a keynote speaker is invited, and gets his travel and hotel costs reimbursed. Without reimbursement you usually think twice if you visit a conference or not. And I never heard of downgrading a speaker before, even if I heard of plenty of conference drama before.

I haven't and I've followed various academic fields for 10 yrs or so.

A regular slap in the face is not doing you any physical harm. If anything, it may even improve your blood circulation. So, if you saw someone slapped in the face, would you be confused "why this would spark such strong reactions"?..

I did that would have to depend on what the strong reactions were in that case. There are reactions to someone getting slapped in the face that I would consider to be overreactions.

Giving a keynote is being honoured by the event organisers. You've been specifically invited to talk. You're the headliner of the event. It may not matter to you as a listener, but I expect it would matter to you if you were asked to give such a talk.

To have that taken away because you voiced a technical opinion some people didn't agree with is petty and childish. It wasn't even a political opinion, and it was public before he was voted on and invited.

This reasoning makes no sense. If keynote and a regular talk are not meaningfully different why did Rust leadership switch it?

If it's purely ego then there are even more serious concerns if ego dominants an entire conference organising committee then withdrawal was the only reasonable option.

For the uninitiated, a keynote sets a theme and tone for a series of talks.

Usually it's less technical and more personal than later talks. Explaining the significance of the topic that will be discussed in upcoming talks.

You've been to more than me then so what am I talking about, but I always understood it to be the one talk given to kick things off or maybe conclude, i.e. nothing else is going on at the same time, 'everyone' is listening (or else skipping it).

Maybe it's just been watered down to 'featured'/'sponsored'/'recommended' talk? I haven't been aware of that.

It depends on the conference; sometimes it's something like "creator of the language shares their vision for the next five years", other times it's "talk from the most famous person we could book", and sometimes just "the talk we liked best from a relatively unknown person". If there are multiple tracks then sometimes the keynote will be the only talk for the timeslot, other times it's not.

Looking at the schedule for this conference, it seems that there's just a single track and all talks are 30 minutes. I wouldn't expect any substantial changes beyond a different timeslot and title.

In academia, yes. To some people these details are important and matter. They have professional and sometimes even personal impacts.

At the very least I would expect a keynote to be more inspiring, interesting, groundbreaking and possibly a little less technical/routine. It would be a different speech with a different preparation. So there is that. Plus bragging rights on CV and what people think of you and how many people turn up, how big the hall is etc. I think I would be annoyed to be downgraded.

I'd love to hear from someone who could outline the distinction between the two.

I could certainly believe that it means the difference between the amount of attendees, length of presentation, venue, etc etc. In those cases, it's quite a big deal and quite the dick move, especially given the seemingly unilateral process to "downgrade" the presentation.

It's possible, but those weren't mentioned unless I missed something. The keynote was "start of the day, shared slot with somebody else, 30 minutes".[1] No mention of different length after the change, but I would assume it will mean a different timeslot.

I think what happened is just the regular chaos, hub-hub, and disagreements that's involved with organising these things; since JeanHeyd himself already indicated he wasn't sure he wanted to give keynote the organisers probably figured it didn't matter much to him. Classic expectation mismatch. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me JeanHeyd assumed "somebody is pulling very weird strings behind the scenes", "shadowy decisions that are non-transparent", and "vindictive behavior". The best explanation I can come up with for that is that this is not so much about this talk, but rather expressing general unhappiness with the Rust leadership, and this is merely the "the final straw". But who knows...

[1]: https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023

> just the regular chaos, hub-hub, and disagreements that's involved with organising these things

I dunno about you, but when I’m organizing these things the subject matter experts that you invite to take part are more important than the paying guests.

I would absolutely not invite them until I was 100% certain they’d have a spot. If something goes wrong there, it’d be either an extensive excuse or simply 3 keynotes.

It depends from conference to conference, but generally speaking "keynote" means:

  - The very first or very last talk of the day.
  - A larger time slot, looking at the Rustconf 2022 schedule, keynotes are 45 minutes long, regular talks 30 minutes. https://2022.rustconf.com/schedule
  - The speaker is featured much more prominently in the promotional materials.
  - If the conference has multiple tracks, no other talk are scheduled at the same time than keynotes. It's assumed all conference attendees will hear the keynote.

Headliner Vs support band

I suspect it's a big deal to people who speak at conferences, and not a big deal to people who don't. Court intrigue, essentially.

It's funny, I have this same "who cares?" prior about it being a keynote, but draw the opposite conclusion. A simple disclaimer that the idea's appearance in a keynote doesn't imply that it will land in the language would have sufficed. It's just a talk, it's fine.

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