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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

From Rust team discussion at Reddit, it's not that anyone sprints away, the answer is that no one has the time to balance volunteering for Rust, working on code, reviewing, doing technical review, and then on top of that moderation and doing diplomatic stuff.

Essentially no-one wants to do diplomatic stuff, so it falls to only person that likes doing that stuff (which isn't a good thing). Which can leads to episodes like this.

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Perhaps, I've not followed closely but I know the subreddit is heavily moderated from overflow in to other media occasionally.

Here is another independent person blowing the whistle on rust culture.

https://hackmd.io/@XAMPPRocky/r1HT-Z6_t

How many times will this happen before people take it seriously?

I'm fully prepared for some horrendous revelations in the future.

And we'll all claim to have known nothing and seen no signs :)

An important distinction on their moderation style:

---

It's not censorship, it's lack of resources.

We're volunteers. When it's too much work to moderate a thread, we just nuke it from orbit.

-- matthieum @ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13tsmht/jt_why_i_left...

That's probably the worst way possible to handle it, worse than just leaving people to have their petty disagreements in the thread.

The other response, from kibwen acting with the moderator badging enabled, is more nuanced:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13tsmht/jt_why_i_left...

Do read the full thing, but it roughly boils down to "If it happens at a time/on a day of the week when we have more moderator bandwidth available, we will make use of it to be more lenient. In the worst case it escalates to targeted harassment, and I promised myself to never let another 'Actix developer harassed into hiding' incident happen. Was it heavy-handed? Yes, and I wouldn't do it lightly. Also, I expect that anyone who really wants to know what was deleted can go to Reddit mirror/archive sites and the case you're referring to was the first time I had to act since Reddit surprised them by shutting down API access for the Pushshift service they relied on."

Why? If it's petty it is by definition unimportant, so it can only cause damage by scaring people away or reinforcing an idea of a toxic community.

...vs idea of uncaring mods that don't want to do the job they signed for so they will just stifle conversation on topics that get too hot ?

Those threads don't happen everyday either

> only person that likes doing that stuff... leads to episodes like this

This reminds me of an episode in Scrubs where one of the residents volunteers to announce bad news to patients or family [1].

Several patients later, the lead doc tells them, "... if you could stop worrying so much about who does and doesn't notice... you. Even for a second... that'd be good; that'd be real good."

Their plaintive explanation previously was, "I just wanted to be colleagues."

It wouldn't surprise me volunteers pick up diplomatic work, and it just doesn't jive like a computer program at all. With humans, who knows what we are getting into?

Should we have goals up-front before we dive into open-source? Whether it's for respect and recognition, or a completely selfless quest for the good of a project we care about, or something else.

Maybe we just love to write code; the project is cool; and we just want to be involved.

I guess we have to be ready when the system does not behave like we expect, and we can't QA behavior or choices. That's the hard part of soft skills.

[1] Season 2, episode 4 (S02E04), My Big Mouth

Transcript: https://scrubs.fandom.com/wiki/My_Big_Mouth_transcript

Who is that person?

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