Just as I started to dive into Rust and start using it on a new project, I hear the entire moderation team (of three people) resigned recently.
From a pull request to the “team” Rust repo:
The entire moderation team resigns, effective immediately. This resignation is done in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves.
As a result of such structural unaccountability, we have been unable to enforce the Rust Code of Conduct to the standards the community expects of us and to the standards we hold ourselves to. To leave under these circumstances deeply pains us, and we apologize to all of those that we have let down. In recognition that we are out of options from the perspective of Rust Governance, we feel as though we have no course remaining to us but to step down and make this statement.
The team declined to actually say what happened though:
In this message, we have avoided airing specific grievances beyond unaccountability. We’ve chosen to maintain discretion and confidentiality. We recommend that the broader Rust community and the future Mod Team exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team (or members thereof) claiming to illuminate the situation.
As someone evaluating languages/frameworks for use on new project, it’s a little weird to hear that the core team of one of the options has done something bad enough to cause an entire group of moderators to resign, but there’s no information other than that team shouldn’t be trusted.
I respect not wanting to cause unnecessary drama, but keeping everyone in the dark like this doesn’t really seem like the best way to handle it either.
One of the members of the moderation team (burntsushi) writing on a reddit thread:
TIL about the term “vaguebooking.” Yes, we were vague. But on the flip side, we weren’t as vague as we could have been. Anyone who has read any amount of my writing knows that I’m all about balance. To say too much would be terrible folly. But to say too little would not make effective use of the last tool we had in our disposal: resignation. We resigned because we think some kind of change would be a good idea, and we suggested some ideas to the rest of the Rust Team Members.
It’s obvious why saying something is useful. But why not just let it all out? No. That’s irresponsible. Deeply deeply irresponsible. People who think we should just be completely and 100% transparent about literally everything that comes to us have not given any kind of serious thought to what it means to be a moderator. I’ve talked about moderation in the past, and how people tend to assume things are easier than they are.
There’s further discussion on Hacker News, but not much information on what actually happened. Anyone have any insight?