Comment by steveklabnik
5 years ago
It's a tricky balance. This is also sort of where I was getting at in my post with the "unofficial" bit; because /r/rust is not official, we do not look into it. And because this happened on Reddit, there was no real opportunity to actually step in. It's quite possible this is simply a failure on our part.
Today is the first time that I've heard that /r/rust is apparently regarded that little from the Rust team. To me it's the most important online gateway to the Rust community, and also the best resource to stay up to date with the ecosystem.
I knew that it was an "unofficial" channel, but given that it's most likely the single biggest aggregation of people in the Rust community, I always assumed that the Rust team would consider it of close to equal importance to users.rust-lang.org.
> And because this happened on Reddit, there was no real opportunity to actually step in. It's quite possible this is simply a failure on our part.
I don't think that much could've been done to prevent that. It also happened on such a quick timescale that one could've completely slept through the whole situation (from the initial Reddit comment to the post-mortem).
Unofficial subreddits are hard to reason about. Within the context of reddit, they are still the most official place to talk about a thing they like. And even worse, those are the people likely to only interact with the "community" on reddit, forming an echochamber where they think the unofficial subreddit's opinion is some sort of majority.
In rust's case, it probably is worth diverting some of the existing manpower for moderating online discussion to reddit. I think that the harsher this moderation is, the less attractive the subreddit will be to the reddit-only echochamber, as an added bonus. But this is only possible because you already have people involved with online discussion on other sites. In most cases, if reddit or twitter keeps talking about you and keeps saying dumb stuff, you just have to ignore it. This is how r/competitiveoverwatch is treated; everyone knows that the stuff they say there doesn't matter, and that they don't represent more than a tiny fraction of the people watching the OWL matches. Even some of the people posting there know it. The players and casters still seem to read it, but for the most part just laugh about how dumb their opinions are.
In this case, I don't know why the maintainer took some redditor's comment so seriously, when they said that they should not write rust anymore. This is just a separate issue that anyone with "fame" has to deal with, ignoring critics who are idiots, nothing to do with reddit really.