Gleam seems cool. In the Discord the lead guy bit off someone’s head in chat and I thumbs downed his comment, then he removed my thumbs down and messaged me to say that I was rude. Bit of a turn off tbh…
I'm actually less concerned about the follow up message in private, it's the undoing of expressions of disapproval of the admin's behavior that is most concerning regardless of what was said by the original person. A good admin can cope with disagreement about their moderation practices without having to remove the evidence that someone disagreed.
But it does seem wild to bring it up as a top level comment on another forum now. What are you hoping for? People to not use the language? An apology?
I'd definitely be interested in other people's experiences with them to see if there are contradictory anecdotes, but I don't see it as irrelevant to bring up here.
(All that said, I concur that OP could have likely behaved differently as well. But again: handling disruptive behavior effectively is part of the job of a BDFL/lead dev, and this incident was not handled well.)
We take moderation very seriously in Gleam, and I assure you this poster has omitted much of the context here. If you have any concerns please do get in touch with the moderation team either on discord or via "hello at gleam.run". Thank you.
I can tell that you take moderation very seriously, and that's part of my concern—there's a trend among a certain newer crop of FOSS projects to moderate in a way that is opaque, passive-aggressive, and somewhat self-righteous. This is usually done in the name of creating safe spaces, where "safe" means "things that make anyone uncomfortable get erased".
It starts out fine with erasing hate speech and similar. But then you get in the habit of removing things and you start removing content that isn't hateful but is uncomfortable for some other reason. I've seen projects (Forgejo) remove evidence of reasonable dissent about the appointment of a moderator (going so far as to erase that dissent from the internet archive).
One anecdote isn't enough for me to believe that you've gone that far, but it's a trend that I've seen and your rhetoric falls into that concerning pattern. I'm not interested in having a private conversation (as I said, opaque moderation practices are part of the problem I'm identifying), but I would caution you against going too far down this safe spaces route. Keep out the hate speech, but be wary of deleting things that aren't.
It's been a few years of using these policies and it's going great! The community and discord server have been consistently praised as one of the highlights of Gleam.
The main drawback is that we tend to attract a lot of criticism from right-wing social media posters as a result, bizarrely including one brief smear campaign from one of the founders of Trump's Truth Social.
It's not just the far right that's uncomfortable with this kind of policy and rhetoric—I'm glad that the relatively small subset of the population that you're interested in supporting has enjoyed the environment you've created, but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute.
There are a lot of people from every part of political manifold that are uncomfortable with the growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort, and those people aren't interested in participating in a community where everything has to have "good vibes".
For myself, I love the quote in dang's profile:
> "Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."
— Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943
Quite the opposite. By not having the usual sources of annoyance and tedium Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger than similar technologies in the same space.
Being tolerant of abrasive behaviour has a cost to the technology project, and I'm not interested in paying it, especially not for ideological "everyone is welcome" reasons.
My prediction is that you grow rapidly because of natural interest in the niche you occupy. Your community will get larger and more diverse than you expect in spite of your efforts to keep people out. Then, when you run into your first major point of conflict about language development, the community will be divided on what to do and your efforts to moderate in this way will only fan the flames. Then Gleam will go the way of Elm—it will go back to being something that a very small niche group keeps using, but the bulk of the excitement will go back to Elixir as it slowly starts to occupy your technical niche.
A community with no mechanism for dealing with conflict cannot last long. If being an Elm sounds fine to you—it's not a bad fate after all—then that's fine! Just don't expect more unless you're willing to start developing conflict tolerance in the community.
Not sure what you mean about the Elm remark. They took the approach you're advocating for and have seen less success than we have financially and in terms of community growth metrics.
And they didn't take the approach I'm advocating for (though they didn't take yours either). Their conflict management approach was "we do what Evan says". I'm not saying you're making their mistakes, I'm offering them as a cautionary tale—language success can be fleeting.
> We have very robust mechanisms for dealing with conflict and we have been successfully employing them for years.
If I'm understanding the approach correctly it's basically "we delete it". Feel free to elaborate if that's not what you meant.
[0] https://tjpalmer.github.io/languish/#y=mean&weights=issues%3...
Gleam's approach to community and maintainership has almost nothing in common with Elm's, and deliberately so.
> have seen less success than we have financially and in terms of community growth metrics.
You're barely starting to pick up speed, and there are so many ways left for you to fail. Much of your recent growth is due to Elixir starting to implement types but not having really arrived yet—sparking interest in the competitor who already has them. How long do you think you can ride that wave?
You've come off in this thread as rather arrogant and self assured, which are good traits for a lone wolf but dangerous traits for a community leader. I've been on the fence on whether to adopt Gleam, but I've honestly seen enough here to know that it's not worth investing the time right now. You may course correct and save the project, but the way you talk about your success as though it's something you achieved in the past through your own efforts doesn't make me think it's likely.
You've also likely seen enough of me to know that I'm not someone you'd want in your community, so I'm content at this point to part paths amicably.
I do agree though that we're only just picking up speed! Watch this space!
I hope I’m the anecdotal exception then! I personally watched this exchange happen and left the community within 24 hours. I respect your right to run your community how you’d like, but I unfortunately didn’t experience any “good vibes” from how you handled this situation.
To me a good moderator handles situations without patronization or condescending, is respectful but clear, and doesn’t care how people feel about them.
Keep up the excellent work on Gleam.
It really kinda is though. HN commenters generally lean a lot harder right than they are aware of and/or want to admit. This belief about a "growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort" is straightforwardly a right wing view.
That's a perception that is common among left-wing commenters who find themselves exposed here to right-wing ideas for the first time. As someone who actively seeks to represent whichever perspectives are underrepresented in a given context (down to specific threads), I can assure you that HN leans pretty firmly left. I very rarely need to take the left-wing perspective here when trying to provide balance.
(Obviously you only have my word for it, but my friends and family all think I'm a raging liberal because I represent the left to them.)
> This belief about a "growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort" is straightforwardly a right wing view.
If Jonathan Haidt is a right-wing activist from your perspective, then sure. I don't think most people see Haidt that way, and certainly don't think he sees himself that way.
Are you really going to ignore the calls of 'fire' just because some reactionaries cried 'fire' in the past?
I think the political right likes to quote Haidt slightly more than the left because the right is slightly less prone to blindness about this issue than the left—their priors line up. But that doesn't exclude willful blindness on the part of the left—sometimes the youth really are in crisis, and there's a lot of evidence that our natural antifragility is the problem.
I'm not dismissing this position because of similarity to other reactionary movements in the past, I'm rejecting it because of how this reactionary movement is using it to mobilize a revanchist assault on the rights of minorities, women, queer people. An issue that "rational centrists" like Haidt and the general consensus of HN commenters certainly seem blind to and sanguine about their part in.