In my experience the Rust community exhibits a cloaked form of tyranny.
On the surface they are very vocal about supporting 'inclusiveness' and 'non-discrimination' and 'tolerance'.
Yet they use a rather harsh and subjective code of conduct to control and police the members of their community.
Last I knew they even had a moderation team who doled out punishment without any due process nor any oversight of significance.
It's also quite common to see any comment here (and at certain other discussion forums) that doesn't paint Rust in a glowing light to get modded down, even when the observations made are completely correct, valid and legitimate.
As long as what you believe fits within the scope of what they believe, or corresponds to their narrative, then things are fine.
But beware if you happen to hold a differing opinion!
In fact I'm posting this using a throwaway account because I anticipate that members of the Rust community won't react well to my observations, and will respond with downmods.
> It's also quite common to see any comment here (and at certain other discussion forums) that doesn't paint Rust in a glowing light to get modded down, even when the observations made are completely correct, valid and legitimate.
The moderation team isn't responsible for downvotes, so we should be careful to separate the issue of community moderation from downvotes on hacker forums. With that said, I should note:
• I rarely see comments critical of Rust downvoted on HN. I do reply to them if I disagree, but I never downvote them.
• On Reddit /r/rust, I rarely see comments downvoted ever—there's even a prominent warning not to use the downvote button for disagreements.
• I'm rarely ever on Reddit /r/programming at all, but my impression is that the moderation is all over the place no matter what the topic, so I don't see Rust as particularly special one way or another.
The Rust community is firm about technical correctness, like any good systems programming project. And, like any good and ambitious systems programming project, technical correctness is nonobvious and no one person is going to be right about everything all the time, because there's entirely too much to know and too much to keep track of.
Unlike many systems programming projects out there, the Rust community has an aversion to screaming matches, personality cults, and other attempts to enforce technical correctness via dominance tactics (not only because they're awful, but also because they don't work - see the things Ulrich Drepper got wrong in glibc, and Linus Torvalds got wrong in Linux, because people could not tell them that they were wrong). Responses to technically incorrect claims are usually firm but gentle, technically straightforward and non-insulting. If someone persists in those claims, they will not find a constant willingness to argue.
It is entirely possible that you have seen observations that were not correct, valid, and legitimate, made by people who are expecting to be told they are wrong in the ways that the old glibc community or the Linux community would tell them that they are wrong, and never took a quiet and friendly correction seriously.
As a member of the Rust community, I value your opinion, however I am not at all sure where you've observed the above described behaviour.
The Rust community is the first one I joined without fears of being put down by the community because of my lack of experience.
The IRC channel is among the most helpful of any programming language I've seen so far, users.rust-lang.org gets multiple helpful responses to practically any question and the subreddit is very helpful for keeping up with the latest projects and take in community input.
I also observed that the Rust core team and community are very aware of its current shortcomings and are working on them with the community via the RFC process.
It's also very easy to contribute, you don't have to sign any CLA etc., and a member of the core team will even mentor you if you wish.
It would be helpful if you offered some concrete examples instead of being this generic.
I think I was being unclear since I think you're agreeing with me. As long as you're not insisting that you're right and everyone else is wrong, you will see a friendly and patient and helpful and vocal community. And, fortunately, most people are like that.
There are a few people who think they need to argue loudly and harshly to be listened to (possibly because they've learned that that works in other projects). Those are the folks who are likely to see little patience but also little argument; they'll get downvoted on Reddit and ignored on IRC. Which is good for the community, since any effort spent arguing with them can be spent working with people who are actually there to learn.
The easiest example to see might be when people show up on IRC picking a fight (whether against something Rust does, or technically in favor and deriding some other language). They'll get one reply saying "Yes, but there are always tradeoffs and other languages are great too", one reply saying they're off-topic, and no more engagement. Which is not to say you can't show up on IRC asking for a language feature! As long as you don't say that anyone who leaves the feature out is stupid -- and again, most people don't say that -- you'll get a helpful response.
Yes, the code of conduct is a bit subjective. That is why there is an entire moderation team, as well as core team oversight. I don't find anything harsh in the code of conduct, though. Anything specific you'd like to point out?
Enforcement will mostly be done only in blatantly obvious cases anyway.
I'm not very involved in the community, and I have little experience with the language, but my impression with the rust community so far has been very positive. It's one of the few places I've been where unproductive conversation is moderated gently but firmly. The only squashing of opinions I've seen has generally been for pretty trolling or very rude (from beyond normal bluntness) behavior. Maybe I've not seen the same things as you but my experience has been overwhelmingly positive.
What sorts of subjective control and policing have you seen in the Rust community, exactly? It's certainly stricter about enforcing things that HN or Reddit would let slide, but I don't see that as a bad thing, necessarily.
For that matter, what sorts of valid criticism do you see get downvoted? In my experience the Rust community is relatively honest about the language and ecosystem's shortcomings.
The problem is that you believe that your opinion is the politically neutral one, and it isn't. It's just that the Rust community aren't a bunch of libertarians, which stands out considering how much of the tech community are, and how wildly that skews their perspective.
From a point of view outside of the tech industry, the Rust community don't do anything remotely unusual. Even much of the tech industry, outside of the SV reality distortion field, do much the same thing. They just try to keep garbage from the outside world from infesting the community and interfering with the work. Everyone else does that - it's really the only way to get anything done, short of having a totally homogeneous work environment.
Of course, a lot of you guys would prefer a totally homogeneous community. If Mozilla or the Rust community put you off... no big deal. It's not like there aren't plenty of others around who are quite happy to work with the Rust community because of their policies.
> But beware if you happen to hold a differing opinion!
If you hold a "differing opinion", and choose to take that into the Rust community with you... what do you expect? Keep your rubbish to yourself, and there won't be a problem.
FWIW holding differing opinions is fine. We try to keep discussions technical -- and differences in technical opinion are entertained. If a discussion does go into the social or political sphere (e.g. a discussion about the community itself, or the code or conduct), differences in the other opinions are entertained as long as the discussion is civil.
(Well, really, differences in any kind of opinion are entertained as long as the discussion is civil and your opinion isn't actively alienating someone else. "Difference of opinion" isn't something that affects your membership in the community at all, civility is)
I don't know the first thing about the Rust community and have no intention of ever writing a line of code in the language, but reading your post I'm reasonably sure you're in the wrong, whatever the situation was.
