Comment by toyg
5 years ago
I'll save this link for the next time someone tries to argue that the Rust community is somehow "more welcoming" than some other X community.
All internet-based communities contain some assholes. All of them. Sadly some maintainers don't seem to have the werewithal to tell them to go away. I mean, when you get "asked to change coding style", it's the time to put the banhammer down, because there is no way to please these people without humiliating yourself.
> I'll save this link for the next time someone tries to argue that the Rust community is somehow "more welcoming" than some other X community.
It's deeply disappointing to see this outcome (and r/rust is literally divided into two halves on this drama at least for now, ugh), but I believe it is the statement about the average atmosphere. Not that I have an argument for or against the refined statement, but it doesn't automatically get rejected with a single counterexample.
Nah, it's just the usual delusion of small-but-growing communities. The Python community was great in 2001, a bit less so these days. The Lisp community was probably great at some point in the '70s too. It's just that, with size, the likelihood of attracting undesirable elements inevitably grows until their presence simply cannot be denied. At that point, you either deploy heavy-handed moderation and get branded "unwelcoming" by the assholes, or leave it free for all and get branded "unwelcoming" by the most sensitive not-assholes. Then someone or something will spawn a new community, and the cycle will repeat itself.
This process is basically inevitable, and it has been observed in internet communities for so long that it's basically a science by now. It's just the nature of the (human) beast.
Of course I don't disagree to you, I too think that that reputation is extremely hard to retain. However:
1. It seems that there are/were some language communities noted for their relatively more welcoming atmosphere. If small communities are usually great until it aren't, why don't we see many such communities? There seems to be some truth in this (albeit ultimately fragile) reputation.
2. For this reason, in order to claim that some community is no longer what it used to be, you need multiple anecdotes at the very least.
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I’d argue any community that crosses Reddit and Open Source would cross this issue eventually - it’s not necessarily a Rust issue.