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Comment by chlorion | Hacker News Reader

Apparently I'm not. Directly from andrewk himself:

    If you want to comment in this thread, please either have your open source zig project(s) visible on your codeberg profile, or be Fil Pizło, otherwise zig issue tracker is not interested in what you have to say

This itself is hostility towards anyone who isn't a zig expert pretty much.

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This is the Zig repository. It is totally appropriate to expect people to be Zig experts when working on Zig itself. People should understand the repository they are talking about. If you're not even invested enough to write a project in Zig, of course your opinion is nothing but noise.

You don't need to be a Zig expert, but you do need to at least be invested in the Zig ecosystem in some way.

I think it's reasonable for any open source project to only be interested in the opinions of its actual users, especially when obvious social media brigading is taking place.

If I -- having written precisely 5 lines of Rust in my life -- showed up on the Rust issue tracker and started expressing my opinions on the future direction of the project and debating a proposed feature, I would absolutely expect people to be annoyed about the noise I'm generating.

The difference is that Rust doesn't gate comments on proof-of-use, even if core contributors might find it annoying. Honestly, this is the first I've heard of such a policy in a project (though no doubt it exists elsewhere, in the infinite span of F/OSS projects).

This isn't to say Zig's stance is unreasonable, it may even be sensible. But you cannot state that people are "welcome to engage and debate the idea on its merits" when that clearly isn't the case. Some people may be welcome to do that; even if there is a strong technical argument or important questions being posed, you are explicitly not welcome unless you meet that criteria, as evidenced by real comments being deleted from that issue.

> But you cannot state that people are "welcome to engage and debate the idea on its merits" when that clearly isn't the case.

I really didn't think that part had to be stated explicitly; I genuinely don't know why someone not invested in Zig would even feel the need to go debate on the Zig issue tracker. But even setting that aside, this is far from the first time that the core team has made it clear that we don't want the internet peanut gallery to brigade the issue tracker.

> as evidenced by real comments being deleted from that issue.

Which real comments were deleted?

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