Hacker News Reader

Comment by _eojb | Hacker News Reader

This is a very brave post to write given how incendiary responses to rust criticism can be, but this matches my experience entirely.

View on HN

I think I just read about 10 versions of this comment on this page, and definitely not a single response to the criticism that could be described as incendiary. I don't think I even saw a single comment just now that fundamentally pushed back on the premise of this article, let alone in an incendiary way. It's early yet, and maybe this thread will look very different in a few hours though?

The author maybe somewhat hit on the reason for this in the article, where they mentioned that they're already seeing some of the rabid, toxic, Rust proponents already moving onto the next "hot" thing and doing their thing there. So maybe after a few years of Rust we've arrived at the turning point now where enough of those types of people have finally moved on and the Rust community has significantly changed.

I don't think that's the case. N=1, but I'm usually a quite staunch, and occasionally incendiary, proponent of Rust, because the arguments against it / criticisms of it I usually see seem fundamentally misguided or even disingenuous to me — whereas in this thread, I've been only agreeing, because the criticisms are fair (I agree Rust isn't built for, and is quite bad at, prototyping, fast iteration, flexible code, etc), if I think a bit overblown (I think many of the patterns the author complains about being forced to use like command lists and generational arenas are very good). That could be the difference you're seeing, IMO.

Perhaps because the article is about how Rust isn't the magic bullet to everything, and a few people have commented agreeing with the article, others feel more willing to comment their own Rust isn't perfect opinion as well.

If you go into the comment section of a pro-Rust article, where the first few top-level comments are also pro-Rust, the responses to people expressing a negative attitude about Rust tend to (in my experience) be different.

This phenomenon certainly isn't exclusive to Rust (or HN). It happens all the time, especially when a prolific commenter is among the first few comments. It can set the tone for the entire comment section.

Sounds like a forum that scrambles comments could be interesting.

I assure you it happens, but the people targetted this way usually quickly learn what is ok and what isn't to say, especially on rust's reddit. If you wanna see examples, look at my reddit profile (same username). I dared to say bevy was full of hype and false promises and tat the money they get would be better spent elsewhere. And look at the hate i received.

One way i've seen to reduce this is prefixing any posts with "I am not criticizing any engine in particular" even if it's blatantly obvious because the criticism only applies to one.

I guess I interpreted the comment as meaning that the incendiary responses were going to be seen here. I would expect incendiary responses to anything I post on reddit...

> incendiary responses to rust criticism can be

I've not experienced this. Do you have examples of the rust community flaming someone for having negative opinions about the language?

[flagged]

You were flagged for no such thing.

You were flagged for a pointless quip about "woke"ness. Other people repeated more civil and reasonably argued forms of your same point about the language and its community and received no such downvotes.

No need to play martyr.

I'd go read their mailing list and Reddit forms; especially when people run into issues doing stuff that's very simple in other languages. Never seen a more toxic programming community.

Hopefully they calm down, or really get drown out, once there are a real number of jobs for people using Rust. Right now the evangelists outnumber the rank and file who are just using a language to get work done.

That does not mirror my experience.

Rust hasn't had a mailing list for roughly a decade now...

If it helps, they can't possibly be as toxic as Lisp programmers used to be, where more or less any online conversation would start with someone new asking a question and Erik Naggum replying that they were a moron who should die.

Lol, I had a similar example with perl as a young teen programmer.

They've gotten way nicer.

Why is it that, say, C programmers, as such, don't get painted according to what has historically gone on in the comp.lang.c newsgroup?

Probably because there's so many more of them. Maybe because being called not a real UNIX programmer feels different from being called a Blub programmer.

Maybe I should ask: why should someone interested about Lisp today have to hear stories about some Erik Naggum who posted to a Usenet newsgroup, and died 15 years ago?

Let's assume that the newsgroup is important. Legendary Lisp hacker Alan Bawden posted there just last week or so. Nobody ever mentions him.

Every other one I've met in my life was nearly as unpleasant. Fewer death threats but they clearly all thought they had 200 more IQ points than you because they could write a macro. Thus the term "Lisp weenie".

In this case I think people should learn from history and that specific examples are the best way to do that. It's, like, effective pedagogy or whatever.

Supposedly Clojure people are nice though.

On the flip side, if you reveal to people that you are involved in Lisp, the experiences are varied.

All too often you get ignorant remarks, jokes about parentheses or "contents of address register", or outright ridicule.

If you say anything frank at that point, chances are good you might come off as an asshole.

Just smile, nod your head, change the subject, and never return to it.

"toxic" is also to generalize from one person / one forum, to an extremely diverse group, many which never used Usenet

I'm active on both and have not seen this behavior.

In fact, my experience has been the polar opposite, the rust community has been very friendly and accepting of critique.

So again, I'm going to ask for an example of rust language fanatics frothing at a criticism. If it's such a community problem this should be easy to find correct?

Here's the OPs article on /r/rust and it's both got a fair number of up votes and the top comments are all really positive towards this article. That's what I've seen at typical in the rust community.

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1cdqdsi/lessons_learn...

It may not be flaming, but the author brings up a particular quote repeatedly. "You just don't get it/have enough experience with it yet."

I've seen this everywhere. This is an obnoxious, lazy thing to say to someone. It's a go to for many "enlightened" languages that have small ecosystems and something to prove. The only response is to ignore it entirely or, like the author did, dedicate years of your life just to see if there's something to it. This is not okay. Life is short, and we lean on other developers experience to keep us from wasting our time.

If someone posts a topic wondering if X language is bad for something, it's an earnest question. Not a time to flex your dedication to the cause.

Based on what I've seen, various forms of censorship and suppression are often employed in such cases, rather than outright "flaming" or other discussion-based approaches.

It really depends on where and how the discussion is taking place, and what censorship methods the website/platform/medium involved offers.

Sometimes users are just outright banned or shadow-banned, if those happen to be options.

Sometimes forum threads, bug reports, or comments are deleted.

Sometimes the discussion remains accessible, but is stifled in some way. This includes closing/locking forum threads or bug reports, or otherwise severely limiting participation in such discussions to a very small and isolated group of people. If down-voting/reporting systems are present, sometimes they're used to limit the visibility or prominence of such discussion.

Ok, do you have a concrete example of this?

I haven't rigorously tracked all of the instances I've seen of this happening over the years, but I've tried to quickly find some more prominent examples for you.

This bug report, for example, has various "This comment has been minimized.", "rust-lang deleted a comment from ...", "rust-lang locked and limited conversation to collaborators" interference:

https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671

A Reddit thread discussing the situation from that bug report mentioned above has numerous "[removed]" comments and down-voted comments:

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...

When Rust is discussed here, it's common enough for reasonable and relevant Rust-related comments to be voted down, sometimes severely. These threads have some examples I quickly found via a search of high-activity Rust submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24334731&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24343867

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802674

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26812047&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29488336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340100

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24337001

Here's an example of a recent submission on this site for an article very reasonably and thoroughly questioning Rust. It got some attention, and now it's currently marked as "[flagged]":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40091427

Keep in mind that strict "moderating" (ie, censoring) has been an integral part of the Rust community's identity for many years now via its Code of Conduct and Moderation Team -

https://www.rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct

https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/moderation

Thank you very much for digging these up. I don't have anything more to add these are good examples of bad behavior.

Not parent, but take a look at these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32117148

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39641552

These threads are absolutely painful to read. The Rust community/leadership would not do anything about it because Rust thrives on such "devotion".

Damn, that second one is excruciating to read. I wonder if they're aware of how they put people off the Rust ecosystem with their rabid defensiveness.

Check this response to the article within these HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40177534

Not actually flaming but quite condescending towards the article writer. Not even properly reading the article and coming to conclusions.

This is on HN which is generally more neutral towards Rust. I imagine in Rust circles these types of responses would come out a lot more.

This is a textbook example of poisoning the well. [0] We see it used in every discussion about pros and cons of a language on HN.

It's some variation of "People who like this language can't handle criticism/are part of a cult/etc." The idea being that this will preclude anyone from responding to a criticism, because that would confirm the comment.

[0] https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Poisoni...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com