> Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.

these are levels of cognitive dissonance not previously thought possible

All this is painfully predictable if you remotely pay attention to their initial public facing culture, statements, etc lol.

Also, lots of people high up in Rust have a background in JavaScript, where drama is common, which I believe has helped normalise it as a mode of social interaction.

Not sure there's a real connection between the languages at least when it comes to "drama". Especially considering JavaScript is the most used language, or at least in the top 5 at this rate due to how low the entry barrier is for serious use. So purely from numbers, there's bound to be a bunch with a background in JavaScript, as with any other new language. You could have also said the same thing about Python for the same reasons.

IMO the root actually comes from the very heavy social signals that were utilized by the Rust team early on (you can read a lot about them through the core team's reddit posts atp, especially under threads about the code of conduct). This effectively became a beacon for many people to gravitate towards. So when you see these sort of very dramatic disagreements that's laughable to anyone outside of that bubble, it's because that's the type of people Rust was (unintentionally or intentionally) beaconing.

Wow, no kidding:

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vxgzrl/changes_in_the...

Mod response:

> For all those wondering about removed comments, there was some trolling going on which was summarily removed by the mods.

> Please avoid any trolling and/or drama seeking comments and remember our subreddit rules.

"Trolling" on display in the archives of that thread: https://www.reveddit.com/v/rust/comments/vxgzrl/changes_in_t...

And then there's Graydon's reply to the "we will exclude you," in the code of conduct, and the subsequent drama: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/6ewjt5/question_about...

Frankly, even though no one has asked for my opinion, the amount of effort people put into the code of conduct (and the discussion around it) is ridiculous; utterly ridiculous. In a time long ago, before everyone was incapable of compromising and cooperating with one another, we had two rules in an informal code of conduct for interacting with one another:

1. Be cool

2. Don't be an asshole

And then we all went back to trying to achieving the task at hand.

I've been involved with Software Development for over 20 years started with VB6 and some perl/python in 1998. I saw the "informal code of conduct" and it never worked. What really happened: many people were treating terribly and most of it was swept under the rug. CoC were created for valid and good reasons. I'm not defending the Rust community here, it seems childish to me. The past is not what you are trying to claim it was in this post. Look up the MANY Rails conference sexual harassment issues and worse.

We should not whitewash the past because the present isn't what we want.

Full disclosure, I usually do not involve myself with large groups -- so my views are likely to be a bit more innocent/naive.

The past that I lived in was comprised of people you personally knew; not anonymous membership in a large organization or group, where you could never hope to know everyone on a personal level.

There was very little opportunity for people to be unchecked dicks to one another, because you saw everyone consistently and could easily notice when something was going on.

Perhaps this is an unsolved issue about scaling human communities?

I do think this is kind of naive. If you consider something like a sexual assault, or even the more severe forms of harassment, that tends to happen among people who know each other, and people often don't talk about it after being victimized. So you not knowing those stories out of your tight knit community doesn't mean much -- if those stories exist you might need to have the parties involved trust you a lot to confide it, or you might need to really probe people about it.

And now we have a CoC and people are still mistreated. smh.

You shouldn't need a giant, complex CoC to tell people engaging in sexual harassment and creepy behavior to leave. Which is usually the type of stuff people point to for why it's so important to spend thousands of hours debating the rules.

If I've learned anything for Reddit mod culture it's that when you see super involved rules on the sidebar it's still ultimately just post-defacto justifications for whatever emotional mood the mods are in that day. The longer the rules = a good measure how aggressively the mods gatekeeps their community for things that go well beyond the scope of what the community was originally about.

This is how things like Programming becoming lower priorities in such communities than personalities/views of the people running it.

more like "and now we have a CoC, so when anyone is even slightly grievanced, multiple careers will get torched (and not even always the party you'd expect)"

Instead of a tool to be used to solve problems local to an organization or an event, it's wielded as a bludgeon in always the most public way possible (either by the org/conference or target of the CoC itself) and time and again this has shown to be bad for everyone and an endless source of drama.

I am an older geek. I never got the CoC against sexual harassments. It is f*cking illegal. Should be reported to the police and taken care of by the actual laws.

Coc seems like a law thing but who is enforcing it? Laws you have democratic elected people voting which laws, you have police checking if people follow them, courts giving out punishment. See they are 3 separate entities for a reason. Coc is written by the org, enforced by the org an punished by said org. Doesn't seem like an improvement.

If the police actually cared about sexual harassment, that might be a good idea. They've never shown any sign that they do.

Also, lots of behaviour can be pretty shitty without being illegal.

Sexual harrassment isn't necessarily illegal, it's so loosely defined.

I will be the one pointing out that you were compromising and cooperating so well because the diversity of opinions in the room was pretty limited.

It happens that not being an asshole also mean asking yourself if maybe everything was cooperative because you were excluding so much that none of the people with a different opinion could join.

As such... Making you the asshole. And not cool.

But you know, I definitely could be wrong here. But I will note that nothing you presented discredit that theory. All the arguments presented fit it as well as the theory that it was great before.

It is readers pick for what was happening here.

Fair point, and one I needed to reflect on.

I think in my past, whenever I've been in a leadership position over a group of people, we've all been there to achieve some goal. We were all cooperating to reach the same end -- and those with a different opinion of that "end" were excluded.

I have also been on the opposite side of this: I've been a member of groups whose goals I did not agree with. And no amount of civility or communication would bridge that chasm; therefore my opinions and thoughts were excluded (and I voluntarily left).

There is no right or wrong here -- if I step back and stop injecting my own feelings into the conversation: there are just differences.

I don't like theories. I don't like abstract things that try to become a source of truth, while completely ignoring and marginalizing the very real human element involved. I have no respect for them.

In my view, "don't be an asshole" is basically: you join a group of people, do not carelessly or intentionally go against the norms of that group. Do not insert yourself into a group of people that you know you will not get along with. There is no right or wrong, but there is conflict and no conflict.

But even now, as much as I have tried to take a step back with an objective lens, and disassociate from my very real thoughts, feelings, and beliefs: what is the point? I hold all of these because they are integral to who I am. As do the people of the Rust community.

Disjointed thoughts, without a goal to neatly encapsulate them all. Or perhaps my goal was to share my human experience with others? To socialize and create bonds with others? Quite a silly thing to do on the internet.

Something you may have missed here. What if the shared goal and belief of the group, was one that in practice is also exclusionary?

In that sense, even if the tone stays civil in group, the problem is still there.

Any examples of how this happens in practice with software projects? Actually curious about this.

Have you remarked how few software projects, even big and visible, handle privacy well, especially if you consider things like stalking? And then what happens to the people that come talk about it in these groups?

The people are pushed out because "their concerns are not something this project is about". Which is consensus and focused on getting results right?

That's just vague accusations/opinions, zero examples.

Perhaps you are afraid that other people might not come to the same conclusions if you let them make their own judgements?

>We were all cooperating to reach the same end -- and those with a different opinion of that "end" were excluded.

If you mean those with a different opinion about the overall "end" of the project, this would make sense.

If you mean those with different opinions about any part of it, like how the project should implement reflection for example, it makes absolutely no sense to exclude them.

This would translate into an authoritative culture, where everything is predetermined, and no dialogue is allowed, except perhaps for trivial matters.

> I have also been on the opposite side of this: I've been a member of groups whose goals I did not agree with. And no amount of civility or communication would bridge that chasm; therefore my opinions and thoughts were excluded (and I voluntarily left).

What if you couldn’t leave? Perhaps the cost of leaving is too high, or you’re required to for a job. Membership in many groups isn’t even a direct action, it’s a by product of some other action. Take functional programming, I love it, but holy fuck I should have known as soon as I saw the word “pure” there’d be fucking Nazis, xenophobes, and bigots.

> Do not insert yourself into a group of people that you know you will not get along with. There is no right or wrong, but there is conflict and no conflict.

Take my functional programming example: I have caused and will cause conflict. Because sometimes “not being an asshole” is actually being an asshole. Life’s full of color like that, you know?

Seriously? You encountered Nazis in functional programming fora? Like, more than in your typical programming fora? (Any at all is more than I've met, but then I never socialize much.)

Maybe they meant “Functional Programming Nazis” like in “Grammar Nazis”; i.e. not actual Nazi Nazis.

Excluding someone else from a group doesn’t make someone an asshole. Every group has one or some thing(s) that separate them from the rest, otherwise they’d never have formed a group. Maybe it’s a vision, or a goal, or a belief, but there’s something that holds the group together. Contrary to what you’re saying, it’s integral to the cohesion of that group to exclude people who will not fit well.

There are countless examples of this phenomenon throughout history. Take for instance, the formation of the USA, the Catholic Church (Great Schism, Protestant Revolution, etc.), the American Civil War, etc. On a smaller scale, I know I’ve worked with people who would be a good fit on one team, but don’t match the culture of another. Or people who are very passionate about something, but wouldn’t do well in a group focused on something else. Sometimes, even, people have the same ends and such different means that they cannot coexist in the same group. You can see this with sports teams; everyone wants to win games, and some players or coaches don’t fit on certain teams because their idea of how to win doesn’t align with others’.

The reality is not everyone fits into every group. Trying to force that will yield a lot of resentment on both sides, in my experience. Much better to nip the problem in the bud.

Since micro aggressions are a thing number 2 is hardly possible.

That's not my understanding of micro-aggressions [1]. IIUC, inadvertently doing a micro-aggression isn't being an asshole, but persisting in it after it has been pointed out definitely is.

[1]: Disclosure: I'm a minority (disabled), but I'm also a white man.

The question is whether everything that is called a micro aggression is one.

Ever heard of the Law of Penetrance of Negative Residues?

Your assumptions about micro-aggressions existing are wrong. "Don't be an asshole" is (or should be) about how you act towards others not how others perceive your actions. If someone wants to be offended, that's them not being cool.

I feel offended by woke people.

State your assumptions, prepare to be boarded -9front IRC banner.

If (2) was a core piece, then having worked on enough open source projects I can assure you that informal code of conduct didn't do shit. ;P

From this “Graydon's reply” you linked:

> Some people, naturally, feel that the norms spelled out in the rust CoC makes them feel excluded. To which all I can say is, yes, it's true: the rust CoC focuses on behaviour, not people, but if there's a person who cannot give up those behaviours, then implicitly it excludes such a person. If someone just can't get their work done effectively or can't enjoy themselves without stalking or harassing someone, or cracking a sexist or racist joke, or getting into a flame war, or insulting their colleagues, I suggest they go enjoy the numerous other totally viable language communities.

Hm... So, if someone just can't get their work done effectively or can't enjoy themselves without going behind the backs of the whole ostensibly “Leadership” group, what then? Has that person been ostracized yet? Have they even been named?!? (I sure ain't seen no sign of it.) If not, why not? There seems to be a hyuuuge amount of effort being expended to spare that person's feelings...

Which seems a) misdirected AF, and b) all too typical of these “governance by namby-pambyism” CoC committee organisations that everything on the Internet appears to have turned into in the last half-decade or so.

Drama is common in human Comunnities.

Your Bayes is showing.

In high school.

Only in ones that are not based on merit and long term relationships.

Can you give an example of one that is?

* * *

Pretty much every human community has to be to some extent, with the exception of communities that face no external competition. Non-meritorious communities subject to competition quickly disappear.

“…to some extent…” is, i think, the most important piece of your reply.

sure, merit plays some kind of role, but so do many other things. what so many comments in this discussion (and every other discussion surrounding this issue over and over and over again ad nauseum) really seem to want to ignore is the many other factors that play into long term group/project success.

merit alone? hardly ever, if ever.

What? Non-meritorious communities are known to last literal millennia.

Caltech's undergraduate community was, at least in the years I attended.

Just because someone doesn't deserve something based on merit, doesn't mean they won't be resentful and vindictive if they don't get it. You could even say the concept of merit and the reality of differentiation of competence and ability itself leads to drama and conflict.

The funny thing is the typical response to basic drama is aggressive moderation/oversight, which often generates as much or more drama than before.

Online communities have a natural tendency to turn inward and become disconnected from the original purpose of the community. A good measure is how much meta/political stuff comes up in every thread.

To misquote John Cleese - "This is exactly how Nazi Germany started"

Drama is actually the name of a town in Greece

Reminds me of The Tyranny of Structurelessness [0], even though there is a structure. My bet would be, no matter how smart you are, your ape genes have more to say than your brain. The rider (mind) and the elephant (emotions + brain stem)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

I don’t get the relation between structure and emotions.

110%. Any organization that lacks transparency in decision-making and accountability (that is, attribution of decisions to specific people) devolves into a shadow-hierarchy.

Which is even worse than an explicit hierarchy, because it provides more gray area for people with power to do things anonymously.

Rust insistence on obsessively fixed notions of "safety" == think of the children, everything must be "safe"

It parallels woke culture somewhat.

Wow, just think of how “woke” Ada must be!

Yeah... its community is entirely different from that of Rust. :P

I think it parallels the Christian Crusades where crusaders believed they had a moral duty to reclaim the Holy Land™ and convert people to Christianity, causing enormous damage in the process. Similarly, the Rust™ ecosystem largely believes they have a moral imperative to replace all software for the cause of memory safety.

Much like priests hidden away in their sacristies, the Rust™ community meets my criticisms with the silence of a prayerful vigil, retreating to the cowardly sanctuary of downvotes instead of engaging in the enlightening pursuit of reasoned dialogue. [1][2][3][4]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060939

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34925457

3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31779218

4: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31097928

As much as I found this funny and insightful, I think that you misrepresent the crusades (and perhaps, by extension, Rust). In my partially-informed opinion, conversion wasn't a major goal, even though people in conquered lands were given the option to convert and integrate. It was more important to claim "holy" land for Christians and make a show of owning and controlling the significant territory.

Whether or not Rustaceans want to banish C people to the desert to write printer drivers or to commit apostasy and assimilate I am not qualified to say.

>I think it parallels the Christian Crusades where crusaders believed they had a moral duty to reclaim the holy land and convert people to Christianity, causing enormous damage in the process

Perhaps those crusaders have also witnessed several centuries of islamic invasions of said lands, and countries all around the general area, and the takeover by force of the local populations...

I’m pretty sure that “think of the children” is a position taken at least as often by people who describe themselves as anti-woke, such as DeSantis and his “saying gay is illegal” idiocy.

Yeah I worry about this. There was no "C leadership", it was simple enough that dozens of people created their own compilers within a few years of C existing. this was back before the internet. they had companies sprouting up like Borland just making C compilers for personal home computers. C just ... spread. All these kids learning Arduino in school, they are learning C.

There basically is no other usable compiler than the official rust compiler. So it has this 'leadership' thing that ... C never really needed

Wouldn’t you consider the C standards committee as the leadership of C?

The C committee started after the various compiler implementations. Rust seems to have had the committee before the compiler.

Definitely not. C was born in a different context, and these days it's not common for any language to have multiple competing implementations, certainly not in its early years. C needed the standard because there were many implementations, JavaScript needed a standard because there were many implementations, but Python or C# or Rust or Java don't have a standard (although there are technical specifications of different degrees of rigor) because the standard is what the reference toolset does, modulo what are accepted as bugs by the technical team.

There was no "leadership team" for Rust at Mozilla as far as I know. It was originally a one-person side project like C++ or Python, then it was elevated to an official Mozilla internal project as its potential in the context Gecko was understood by the higher-ups. But again, as far as I know, whatever culture formed around the project did so organically, but also as a conscious attempt to avoid many cultural issues seen in other OS projects. And mark my words, the Rust community as a whole is genuinely friendly and welcoming compared to almost any other internet community of similar extent, and there's nothing sinister underlying that friendliness as far as I can see.

When Mozilla got rid of Rust, the leading technical contributors continued as they had always done (albeit now with considerably fewer full-time paid contributors), as an independent self-organizing entity, but now even less accountable – in regard to technical decisions – for any external stakeholders but the Rust community itself. But some organization was required to foster Rust's growth, to manage all the inconvenient legal things, the interaction with the now several large stakeholders and funders such as Google and Amazon, and so on. So the Rust Foundation was created to manage all that. But the foundation's jurisdiction ends where the technical aspect of Rust begins – all the technical teams are still exactly what they used to be, accountable only to the greater community.

At any point, anyone could have experimented with different implementations with no "committee" saying what to do, but let's face it: first, modern compilers, even simple ones, are extraordinarily complex compared to an early C compiler running on a PDP-11, and second, in light of the first, Rust didn't grow in popularity nearly fast enough for anyone else bothering to write an implementation to experiment on.

There were plenty of different FORTRAN compilers back then too.

It just was a completely different era. There was no consept of what we today call open source, no compilers freely available over the internet, no internet to speak of for that matter, no cross-platform/multi-platform compilers to speak of, more platform diversity than now, FORTRAN was also a vastly smaller language so you could have implemented a compiler in a reasonable time if you didn't want to shell out $BIGBUCKS to buy one, optimizers (which are deep magic and really hard to write from scratch) weren't yet a thing, there were no standardization bodies that worked on programming languages, everything was vastly less connected than today. That obviously leads to redundant work.

No matter, the point is that nothing has ever stopped anyone from writing a competing Rust compiler, certainly not any imaginary "committee." Nothing except the fact that, besides mrustc, nobody has bothered because why would you do that?

Note that the "C committee" was actually the X3J11 committee of ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. In other words, it was just one committee within an organization with a long history of developing cross-industry standards. As such, their job in theory wasn't to invent new technology, but rather to adjudicate between technologies proposed and demonstrated by competing industry vendors.

Like many other modern languages, Rust is a mono-implementation, where the same organization is both developer and standards committee, while at the same time trying to fund itself (without revenue from either standards docs or the compiler) and balance external commercial and non-commercial interests.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach, but they are very, very different. (and in a world of cutting edge open-source compiler technology, I'm not sure the approach which resulted in ANSI C is even viable today)

Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction. It couldn’t have made much progress by taking similar hands off approach as C, because C is already more than good enough C.

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

Hmm, not sure about that one. Rust has an enormous hype component to it, more than any other language I'm aware of.

It may have strong technical leadership, but saying it's gaining market share "precisely" because of it is precisely misleading.

The hype around Julia definitely gives Rust a run for it's money.

"in Julia" yields 25 pages of results on HN, while "in Rust" has >100 pages alongside other popular langs.

What's your point? The target market of Julia is mostly scientific, not general purpose computing. That market is almost certain to have a smaller representation on HN. I'd actually contend that for a language with such a targeted to have 25 pages of results HN supports my point rather than debunks it.

Julia doesn't even operate in the same space as rust... Julia is closer to go lang than it is to rust and I wouldn't say those two languages are similar at all. Also if I were picking a language on community alone, I'd pick rust. The issues going on here are not reminiscent of the community at all. Julia also had drama over conferences and allowing members to speak...

So what? Nothing you have said has anything to whatsoever to do with hype.

> Rust is winning market from C and C++ precisely because of strong technical leadership and direction.

No, Rust is winning because it is 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++. Rust incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility. Rust is winning despite its leadership rather than because of it.

EDIT: elaborated a bit more.

In fairness, this reasoning would suggest that any new language developed 40 years younger than C and 30 years younger than C++, that incorporates advances in computer language design that C/C++ cannot adopt without breaking backwards compatibility would enjoy the same success, if not more, than Rust.

It seems likely that there are other important factors. It's debatable what they are, but clearly there is a difference of opinion about how much Rust's leadership accounts for why Rust is succeeding more than most.

Rust is winning marketshare because it was built ground-up to take advantage of the massive progression of Moore's Law at compile time. Compiling programs written in Rust would have been completely infeasible 20 years ago, it would have simply been too slow.

C++ doesn't compile that much faster than Rust.

Modern C++, I agree. C++98 is a lot faster to compile though, even the same code using the same standard library calls.

Having worked on a modestly sized C++98 codebase in the recent past, I don't think I agree. But of course it would need proper benchmarks.

These things can be true simultaneously. The Rust team can have extremely strong technical leadership and direction while also being incredibly immature when it comes to conflict resolution.

Conflict resolution is hard! I struggle with it as an engineer who wants to please everyone, but I also recognize that it isn't possible to.

Whoever had objections to the talk and was not able to express those objections to their teammates in the proper forum before taking action without their approval is just... immature. It violated trust amongst the Rust leadership team, and trust is everything.

It’s actually even worse, because this person also wielded enough power to represent Rust to RustConf, and did so incorrectly. They seem problematic.

Leading people is always messy and requires the maturity to deal with failures gracefully, and a catastrophic failure from a simple task is not confidence-inspiring. I love Rust, so I hope they get their shit together.

Nope. Most languages have strong leadership and zero chance of taking anything from C/C++. And it will takes a very long time for Rust to get even 5% of the C/C++ market. There are more than 6 million C++ programmers out there. And new C++ projects are started every day.

> Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.

Really? Nothing against a thing that leads to hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies!?

They said "in theory", which is a contrast to "in practice".

Yes. Nothing against it in theory, but it leads to stuff they don't like. Did you read the whole comment?

I did. I don’t get why they wouldn’t be against the theory of something so obviously flawed that leads to exactly what they are describing. It’s like saying you have nothing against eugenics in theory, but the leap to how that can go wrong in practice is painfully obvious.

Marxism works great, in theory.

well its a difficult terminology to use because the right/conservative people are of course also against sjw/woke ideology. The distinction is that I'm criticizing very specific tendencies of some people whom could be best described as woke, not the underlying ideology. Such as when they weaponize privilege, language, race or sexuality in order to achieve some secondary unrelated or overarching goal. It's "the ends justify all means" mentality, if by democratic process you won't achieve consensus that agrees with your personal particular set of beliefs, then the rejection, destruction and undermining of collective decision making processes is justified. Which ignores the original reasons for why democratic structures exist in the first place (such as term limits and adversarial structures vs. corruption and abuse of power). This is essentially my criticism of some woke people.

It is very difficult to use the terminology even though it is the most accurate, because conservatives are the most loud adversaries of it, but they are just hateful racists, bigots, ableists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, islamophobes, xenophobes, etc. Which of course invalidates everything they ever say.

> It is very difficult to use the terminology even though it is the most accurate, because conservatives are the most loud adversaries of it, but they are just hateful racists, bigots, ableists, sexists, transphobes, homophobes, islamophobes, xenophobes, etc. Which of course invalidates everything they ever say.

Perhaps you should re-evaluate these assumptions and actually listen to people before you dismiss them.

> I just hope it's already too big to fail at this point,

Too big to fail can easily also mean too big to fix.

Failure is often not the worst outcome -- at least failure creates space for a fixed alternative to arise in the space left open.

“SJW/woke” as an epithet is a right wing trope. Can we not do this please?

It's also a relatively apt description of a small subset of left-wing groups. My assumption is that the parent comment is explicitly referring to this small subset.

Similarly "white supremacist" is often used as an insult on the inverse side, even for groups that don't believe in or desire white dominance. If someone actually does believe in those things, though, it's still a totally fine term to describe them.

Not really, you see the same term used in left wing circles to refer to liberals/synthetic left types.

A decade ago - until the term was appropriated by the reactionary right as an insult!

> I thought "rust culture" came out of this sort of super SJW/woke culture of mozilla? Nothing against that sort of mindset in theory, but it sometimes leads to a certain irrational hypersensitive intolerant mob behavior and authoritarian/anti democratic tendencies.

I'm not sure what SJW or "woke" means in this context. They cancelled a black man because they felt "discomfort" over him being the keynote speaker.

But the fact that he was black is a non-factor here, and shouldn't even be mentioned.

TFA seems to think it was important. The Rust conference needs to have a black friend to prove it isn't racist.

Why? Am I to believe the Rust leadership is so enlightened they're incapable of racial discrimination?

There's a reason people don't want to talk about racism, and it's not because it doesn't exist anymore...

I mean...it's not like Rust leadership didn't have a prominent member who loudly advocated ideas like "kill all men", right?

Anyone using the term woke in 2023 in my experience tends to be over forty and racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc. It is a term used as a placeholder for wanting to say they hate that those groups are fighting discrimination and often times are upset they are losing power from the discrimination.

It's like the opposite of how the N word became used by black people.

If you actually aren't any of those things you should adjust your language to be more specific to what you dislike.

Is there a similarly succinct but inoffensive word or phrase you would recommend instead?

The term at this point is so twisted that your question is like asking if there a similarly succinct word one can use for the N word. Looking for an alternative that means the same thing is incompatible with it being inoffensive

It looks like your comment may have been removed(?), but I thought its last sentence or two was recommending that the parent poster search their vocabulary for something less laden with negative connotation. Based on this, I was hoping you'd have a suggestion.

I think your analogy to the "N word" makes it difficult to assume good faith, but if it were possible to do so regarding "woke," is there a way to refer to that idea without being offensive?

Perhaps just "progressive" or "left-leaning" would suffice, but my impression is that "woke" usually refers to a more extreme form that is focused on social issues. "SJW" also seems to have a negative connotation.

> It looks like your comment may have been removed(?)

You can enable showdead in your profile settings (click on your username) to view [dead] comments. With enough karma you can also vouch for them which might result in the comment being revived.

While terse, “woke” is not succinct, in its current negative external use, because it doesn’t clearly communicate anything about what it describes other than that it is disliked by the speaker. It communicates more about the speaker and the identity group they affiliate with than its notional referent; its a kind of right wing virtue signalling. (The older positive use at least had something like a coherent meaning, so arguably was succinct as well as terse.)

I hadn't realized there was a meaningful difference between "terse" and "succinct" except for the negative connotation of the first. A few dictionaries and thesauruses seem to suggest I'm not too far off, and hopefully you'd agree that one wouldn't ask for a negatively laden replacement for a word that was being discussed as being negatively laden.

It sounds like you don't think "woke" means anything and is therefore not worth replacing. Is that more or less correct?

My recollection was that the parent comment I was responding to recommended that its parent replace the word to avoid immediately having the appearance of bad faith, which is why I was asking about their suggestion for a replacement. It seemed like they might have something in mind.

Once you understand that "woke" is basically a kind of white internecine competition then it stops being surprising that the "woke" movement doesn't really care about non-white persons except as pieces in that game. These events are of course entirely consistent with that interpretation, and so far I've never seen it falsified.

this whole "woke" mentality is going out of hand too fast...

I mean, someone bullying some veterans/old men because they're "woke and feminist" isn't going to earn any sympathy from me.

nowadays... "woke" just means "I'm better than you (so I can/will do things that are otherwise unacceptable to you)"

...I think we chose the wrong word. Rather than "woke", it should have been "NO BULLYING" -- which includes all things the real "woke" people tried to do, and forbids all things the wrong "woke" people are trying to do

Generally, these days "woke" is a word that regressive bullying assholes use to insult people.

It definitely strikes me as thought-terminating cliche. If people were calling themselves woke maybe, but I've only seen it as pejorative for several years.

I don't think it's fair to entirely dismiss either, there really is a lot of incredibly toxic behaviour in communities labelled "woke" (and agreeing with further up the chain, I can't help but feel being a bit less "inclusive" and demanding some commitment to the product might help, gatekeeping be damned). But we should strive to accurately describe what those behaviours are.

Except if you actually look as things it's usually the "woke" elements that best fit the definition of bullying.