D mentioned on Rust discussions site

Joseph Rushton Wakeling joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net
Thu May 21 20:10:06 UTC 2020


On Thursday, 21 May 2020 at 15:58:58 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> My expectation would be that technical points are ignored or 
> deleted if someone feels they are are phrased the wrong way.

Is that based on actual experience of this happening?  Best not 
to assume without evidence.

> I might be wrong, but currently I have no desire to post on the 
> Rust forums as it does not appear to be welcoming to all 
> perspectives.

It's worth pointing out that their forum FAQ explicitly 
discourages responding to a post's tone rather than to its 
content.  Which does rather suggest that actually they want 
people to _overlook_ phrasing and focus on the technical points.

> There is a difference between a rule being something to strive 
> for and being something that makes sense to enforce formally, 
> especially based on a very vague formalization that everyone 
> agrees with (but nobody agrees with anyone else on what it 
> means).

Where's the formal enforcement in this case?  Unless I missed 
something, a moderator merely offered advice as to how to achieve 
a more constructive discussion.

>> At the end of the day we're in a lucky position, because our 
>> community is smaller and closer-knit, that we can get away 
>> without much moderation.
>
> I.e., we respect each other more, therefore we don't get 
> offended so easily.

Rather, that we _know_ each other better, and so are less likely 
to misinterpret each other or assume bad faith.  People seem to 
get offended here reasonably often, even so :-)

> The enforcement is necessarily superficial, inconsistent, 
> biased and will tend to be overzealous. Anyway, I don't claim 
> my opinion on this is universal or shared by the majority. It's 
> possible that this is a contributor to Rust's popularity. Maybe 
> upvoting generic moderation comments feels nice to some people. 
> (It's the comment with the largest number of hearts in the 
> thread even though it is essentially without merit and 
> completely off-topic.)

I'm not sure I see what was superficial, inconsistent, or biased 
about this particular intervention: unsubstantiated accusations 
of bad faith are generally toxic to good discussion and I don't 
see the problem in reminding people of that.

Odds are that would happen in this community too, it's just more 
likely to be a regular member of the community that does the 
reminding, rather than someone with formal moderator 
responsibilities.

No community scales without having some measure of enforcement of 
expected standards of behaviour.  And while I might not 
necessarily draw the line where the Rust forums do, it doesn't 
seem like a particularly egregious line, all things considered, 
to step in to remind people to be constructive, assume good 
faith, and keep on topic.


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