What are you saying? ”Suck it up.“?

He is saying “be an actual professional and don’t bring a vocabulary pertaining to intimate discussions to the public sphere when what’s discussed is a technical conference.”

It’s already barely acceptable in a purely American context. To me as a European, this is extremely off putting and culturally out of line which is a recurring problem with Rust.

It's a dog whistle. What the OP is actually saying is that he's extremely angry and pissed off that this was allowed to happen, and he's noping out for that eminently understandable reason. But if he said that in no uncertain terms (as a European very well might in similar circumstances!) he might fall afoul of the official Code of Conduct for being aggressive and threatening towards other contributors. Hence this weird talk about intimate "weeping" and "pain". Make no mistake, this is not some softy empath talk but quite the opposite!

> What the OP is actually saying is that he's extremely angry and pissed off that this was allowed to happen [...] But if he said that in no uncertain terms [...] he might fall afoul of the official Code of Conduct for being aggressive and threatening towards other contributors.

So they need reverse psychology to express anger at injustice because of the Code of Conduct? What is this world we're building?

You're basically correct. The frustration many of us have, largely people slightly older than the core HN crowd, is that for a brief moment in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have any of this dogma that could demand you nod along. You could be openly gay, openly Christian, conservative, leftist, or apolitical.

There were groups that still tried, but they were all too weak. The cultural conservativism of the 80s had no real hold anymore, and the political correctness of the 90s was mostly a joke. People would make fun of their opponents, but everyone openly disagreed. You wouldn't be fired from your job, or banned from otherwise unrelated communities.

We really thought that the internet was going to keep making this better. Instead we ended up with the most restrictive and widespread regime that has existed in most of our lifetimes. Luckily that seems to be losing its hold, but the specific doctrine isn't really the point. The frustration is that we had something closer to the ideal, however imperfect, and completely lost it, and have almost an entire generation that has been taught to think that that's a good thing.

I think that's mostly true. The rise of New Atheism seemed to coincide with the start of decreased tolerance. Coincidence or cause, I'm not sure.

It has nothing to do with New Atheism. You will find just as much drama - if not more - in religious communities of all kinds.

I think it has more to do with social media culture, which seems perpetually hyped emotionally.

You can't release a press release without claiming to be absolutely super excited for you guys about $mildly_interesting_new_thing. You can't run a non-trivial YouTube or TikTok channel if you don't over-emote wildly all the time. [1] IG is full of people who are incredibly #amazed and #grateful and add the hashtags to prove it.

I'm currently watching a YT series where some people visit abandoned parts of London tube stations. There's an insane level of constant emoting. It's like children's TV. Everyone is smiling and happy and just fantastic, and everything they see is awesome, amazing, incredible, and absolutely their favourite thing ever.

Which is weird when they're mostly just filming dusty old abandoned corridors, some of which have some historical interest.

If this is normal for you, you can't say "I really don't like what happened so I'm going to resign" without turning it into a widescreen tentpole weepy drama movie experience.

However or whenever this happened it's clearly normalised now. I think we're going to be stuck with it for a while.

[1] I've known people who tried to cut down on the emoting and their stats went right down.

We had a world built entirely of people who were technical for the love of it. Those who were fascinated with computers and the internet before there was real money in it as a career. When no one cared about computers and left us alone the community built by a largely neurodiverse group had rational rules that made people that would fall into the inneagram 8 category feel comfortable. Not just neurodiverse either, despite the stereotype of the neckbeard with pocket protector women were better represented in the 70s and 80s computing community than later on. We may have surpassed that mark now though, I haven't compared numbers recently.

Edit: I used the term neurodiverse and then implied we all fell into one category of personality. That seems to conflict, but what I meant was that we didn't differ much in the way that we differed. It was a gatekept community of a certain category of people where the gatekeeper was just interest in the subject absent any monetary motivation.

> for a brief moment in the 90s and early 2000s we didn't have any of this dogma that could demand you nod along. You could be openly gay, openly Christian, conservative, leftist, or apolitical.

An awful lot of people didn't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 90s and 2000s. Depending on how old you are, this is naive at best or disingenuous at worst.

An awful lot of people still don't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 2020s, because they happen to live in militant theocratic states. People on the activist left often seem to conveniently forget this, in a way that can only be fairly described as "naive at best or disingenuous at worst".

>An awful lot of people still don't have the luxury of being openly gay in the 2020s, because they happen to live in militant theocratic states.

Are you talking about Iran or Florida? :)

But more seriously, your overall response is quite cryptic. I can’t answer for the ‘activist left’, whoever you take them to be.

>So they need reverse psychology to express anger at injustice because of the Code of Conduct? What is this world we're building?

All of life is change and cycles and oscillations. Not just human society but even whole ecosystems. Very likely this approach will be pushed to extremes, implode and then the cycle will swing the other way. There are valid reasons for this cultural shift and like all such shifts those supporting it need to experience the failure of going too far. Eventually some less extreme equilibrium will come about.

I'm tempted to add a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md to my main project repo with the following:

Be direct. No bullshit. Don't worry about offending anyone, including the project leader; just say what needs to be said about the technical merits of whatever is being discussed. We're all here to [insert project goal]; let's do so with a minimum of drama.

But it's probably better to continue to not have a CoC, and just quietly lead by example instead.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that adding something like that would make things worse and open the door to wasting your time on pointless issues like "Why are you using this code of conduct instead of $my_pet_code_of_conduct?", whereupon you tell them they're not working towards the project goal, which leads to even more drama. It's simply not worth it.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, open an issue about the code of conduct.

There is a writers’ Facebook group which states its moderation policy like this: “the group is moderated very lightly. We are not your parents; if you have a disagreement, work it out among yourselves.” I like this policy.

And it kinda sorta works.

That’s not saying that CoCs were not a kind of response to some pathological behaviors in online communities: you often are going to get either socially inept man-children, or people on the spectrum, and there are kindergarten-level conflicts. You get programmers who attach themselves to their work too much, have very strong opinions, and often will treat a set of rules as a puzzle you need to game, without much concern towards any consequences.

But my oh my, do lots of popular CoCs look like solution for that problem invented by the same kind of socially inept man-children who are the part of the problem. They likely have read the word “empathy” in a dictionary, but don’t understand what it means in their bones.

I have an even less charitable theory of what CoCs might be about, really, but for now I’m applying Hanlon’s razor and stick to what I’ve stated above.

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md but it's just the Marine Core code of conduct.

Maybe the one he wept at helping to create.

So why not just say that. All this dog whistle talk is extremely immature and unprofessional.

Because this is what happens when you try to restrict not only speech, but how community members even express themselves for fear someone might be hurt or offended.

That's ridiculous. I hope the community fixes that.

wat

Why would a “this is what happened and it’s the reason I’m not longer going to be involved in the Rust project going further” possibly be able to violate a Code of Conduct? Sure if you start calling people an asshole or lash out. But that’s similarly uncalled for…

Everyone is free to nope out. And people noping out is something that Rust (the community) needs to take into account. _Because_ it depends on them. But as is.. I’m unsure if this kind of emotional involvement is even something Rust (the project) _should_ want

You know, this pattern:

* Person is invited to talk

* Person asks "You know about X, right?"

* They say "sure, it's no problem"

* They talk in private and take decisions in improper venues

* The guy is slighted at the last minute, told it is because of X

... is an all too "professional" way to do it. This is how professionals will do it, when they want to let you know they don't like you. With a little deniability, but not too much. If what the complainant alleges is true, there are too much social skill at work here - skill at exquisitely snubbing someone.

I think he is saying that words such as "cruelty" and "betrayal" have a weight in them that are way out of proportion to the events that took place.

I am a bit out of the loop (I don't know who the people involved are), but I tend to agree, I think. Sounds like a mix of miscommunication and group politics. Those are things that people might get upset, but the exaggerated response sounds like a cheap appeal to raw emotions.

I believe there is a wide range of possible emotional reactions between weeping about something on one end and sucking it up on the other.

Yes, that or "man up."

>Suck it up; man up.

In our paroxysm of righteous correctionism, we've lost track that that is really good advice, even though crudely phrased.

Pretty sure they’re just using poetic license.

Also, this is definitely not true—-a spouse cheating on you would be a “betrayal” but I wouldn’t fault anyone for weeping over it.

Are you really comparing this little spat to marital infidelity?

This further emphasizes OP's point—nothing the Rust team can do to you should approach the emotional impact of marital betrayal.

rust needs it's empaths, too. if we can all figure out how to adult, be decent, work together, and understand the strengths/weaknesses of our very different personalities and skills, hopefully we can all continue building cool stuff together without alienating important voices.

> if we can all figure out how to adult

Part of adulting is responding proportionally to childish behavior in others. Events like this feel like my toddlers fighting—he takes her pencil so she tears his paper so he hits her so she comes crying to mommy.

The adult in the room deescalates, they don't write an emotional blog about how betrayed they feel on behalf of someone else.

That depends on the power balance. Adults have power over children. The author does not have power over the people involved. Deescalating when you lack power is often little different from not saying anything at all. This is why most non-generational change to existing power structures involves large groups of very angry people. Same reason complaining about your Google Account getting locked on social media is more effective than spending the rest of your life going through their process.

The real question is if the Rust project has an equitable governance structure that minimizes imbalances of power or if it doesn't. If it does then the author should follow that instead of a large angry blog post. If it doesn't then he may as well go with the large angry blog post.

You don't have to have power to deescalate.

We're teaching our children to respond appropriately to conflict—in the situation above, either one of them can deescalate by approaching the conflict reasonably. He could have avoided it altogether by asking nicely for her pencil. She could deescalate by recognizing that he really wanted her pencil and making a trade that they both are happy with. It's hard for them to do because their escalatory actions feel more immediately effective at bringing "justice", but they don't work out in the long run.

The cycle of childishness isn't going to be solved by a post that triggers an internet mob, that's just another childish response in the cycle.

>We're teaching our children to respond appropriately to conflict—in the situation above, either one of them can deescalate by approaching the conflict reasonably. He could have avoided it altogether by asking nicely for her pencil. She could deescalate by recognizing that he really wanted her pencil and making a trade that they both are happy with. It's hard for them to do because their escalatory actions feel more immediately effective at bringing "justice", but they don't work out in the long run.

Again you're using an example of two children who are equal in power dynamics. Now try having a child deescalate an angry adult. Most people would not find that a reasonable request.

The author isn't a child to the core team's adult, they were one of four members of the core team [0]. They're not an individual contributor who feels incapable of effecting change in the wider org, they were mad at the way one of their peers handled the situation.

[0] Still listed as such here: https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core

No power over anyone is required. Reasonable and well-grounded arguments seeking to resolve conflict will do.

That requires either both sides to be equal in power or both sides to be willing to stick to the process. From the blog the author believes neither is the case.

The author was one of four members of the core team [0], "which is which is ultimately responsible for all decision-making in the project."[1] If there was a power imbalance it's because they were ineffective in their position.

[0] https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/core

[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/1068-rust-governance.html

Yes, agreed. My objection is to their dramatic language and seeming over-reaction. There were much better ways to express disagreement and protest.

> if you have lived a very protected life.

You just summarised 98% of all current cultural problem in Silicon Valley.

To me it looks like both sides are acting very emotional over the situation and using very loaded language to push their agendas forward. I almost feel the author is using discomfort even more as a weapon than the person who originally complained.

Which appears to be one of the underlying cultural flaws in the community to begin with. "Everyone sucks here" is a common situation because bad behavior is often a product of bad project culture.

> you can only cry over this “betrayal”, “mistreatment” and “cruelty” if you have lived a very protected life.

For some people, crying is just a way to deal with emotions. So please don’t judge.

I’ve been a professional software developer for more than 20 years. I still find myself weeping at work once in a while, especially when overwhelmed with hardship and negative feelings. I don’t see how this would be a sign of living “a very protected life.”

If your workplace is regularly bringing you to tears, you should start looking for a new position. No one needs a job with that level of emotional overhead.