[endothrowho333]

> “Why Reddit is like this” is a whole other essay; I think it’s built into reddit’s structure itself.

Classic Eternal September.

Around 60k subscribers, the cultural identity starts degrading, as the amount of "old guard" is outmatched by "new blood." Therefore, the old "monkey see, monkey do" phenomenon, where new users would slowly mimic the culture of the prevailing older users to "fit in," is replaced with new users mimicking other new users, and the culture shifting towards the platform's identity instead of retaining the sub's identity.

Generally, the type of person to post on Reddit frequently enough, has social cohesion problems that may preclude him from fulfilling his social needs through more healthy avenues, like real life. The same is true for the majority of people that post online frequently. Usually the pyschological profile that follows that point is one built on abrasiveness, distrust and aggression towards authority, an inability to adopt social manners and participate in social contract, low emotional intelligence, etc.

All of the aforementioned behaviors culminate into the toxicity and vitriol you usually see -- and as well why it's so prevalent.

[stanferder]

It might not be just reddit though. The author's summary points to a volatile combination of elements in Rust itself:

1) [T]he Rust project saw Rust as more than just the language...

2) unsafe... is a really important part of Rust, but also a very dangerous one, hence the name.

If a project is considered to be not just a project, but something closer to a cause, people are going to defend their understanding of that cause fervently.

And introducing the language of "safe" and "unsafe" isn't just descriptive, it's a value judgment. It has connotations of recklessness at least, and explicit threat at worst.

People who perceive themselves to be defending a cause against danger are going to react very strongly, much more so than people who are criticizing an implementation choice on purely technical grounds.

[cle]

> And introducing the language of "safe" and "unsafe" isn't just descriptive, it's a value judgment. It has connotations of recklessness at least, and explicit threat at worst.

Is it really a value judgment? Coming from a formal PL background, I had just assumed that the "unsafe" keyword was referring to the PL concept of "safety", AKA "soundness", which has a specific technical definition, and not that it was necessarily a value judgment. In that context, "unsafe" just means "the compiler can't guarantee the behavior that it can normally guarantee".

[steveklabnik]

You are correct.

That doesn't mean that people will incorrectly interpret it, though.

[henrikeh]

Ada’s language is probably clearer and less loaded: checked and unchecked.

[steveklabnik]

Yeah, and interestingly, a lot of unsafe functions use "unchecked" in their names.

The issue was that by the time this was recognized, there was too much Rust code, and there was no clear alternative that people universally liked. This kind of conversation is the definition of bikeshedding. I submitted an RFC and it... didn't go well. (I think I picked "trustme" though.)

[cle]

I don't think it's bikeshedding. It does seem to be contributing to the dogmatism I'm seeing from the Rust community here, and this community reaction is a huge problem for Rust. So it matters.

[fluffything]

Back then Rust did not have editions. I think it would be worth exploring renaming `unsafe` blocks to "sound", because when one writes `sound { ... }` what one is actually stating is that the code in the block has been proven sound.

The `unsafe` function type modifier can be left as unsafe, or renamed to unsound, since that what that is doing is stating that a particular function is not always sound to call.

[stanferder]

Points well taken, but I think "unsafe" turns it into a value judgment, especially (as samatman says adjacent) since it isn't necessarily really unsafe.

[cle]

It is unsafe. There are just multiple definitions of unsafe being used here. I agree that it's unfortunate that the meaning of the keyword is easy to misinterpret.

Given the background of the people who designed Rust, I don't think it's reasonable to just assume that the keyword "unsafe" has an implicit value judgment.

[Conan_Kudo]

It absolutely includes value judgement. You just described a form of value judgement too. You're saying that predictable generated code behavior is preferred to unpredictable generated code behavior.

[fluffything]

> And introducing the language of "safe" and "unsafe" isn't just descriptive, it's a value judgment.

`unsafe` is a PL term that refers to _soundness_. In Rust, an `unsafe { ... }` block is required to perform an `unsafe` operation, and it precisely means "The code in this block has been proven _sound_". If the code in the block turns out to be _unsound_, e.g., because the proof is incorrect, or non-existent, then the whole program is unsound, and there is nothing that can be said about the execution of such program (usually known as "the execution exhibits undefined behavior").

For example, the Rust compiler has a lint that requires you to write a soundness proof on every `unsafe { ... }` block, explaining why that is sound, and all changes to the compiler are gated on that.

In your own projects, you can obviously do whatever you want, but for any non-trivial amount of unsafe code, without a proof, you are basically just building castles in the air.

[rowanG077]

That's an interesting way too look at it. But that's not how it works in practice. Almost no one in industry is going to write proofs for their unsafe code. It didn't happen for C or C++ and it won't happen for Rust.

[dthul]

In Rust you at least know where to look at, whereas in C/C++ all code can be "unsafe". With that said, writing unsafe Rust is much easier to screw up than C/C++, since you have to uphold more invariants in unsafe Rust than in C to avoid UB (like never having two mutable references to the same thing at the same time. The very issue which was raised in the actix repository)

[fluffything]

This is how it works in practice for the Rust compiler for the Rust standard library, and for a lot of foundational crates in crates.io. (Pretty much every well reviewed crate in cargo crate review either does this, or does not contain any unsafe code at all).

We also have tools that change for this for very large projects (e.g. cargo-geiger), and tools that help you test your proofs (e.g. cargo-miri). For some unsafe components, there are also proofs in Coq, and the proof systems for Rust unsafe code are making a lot of progress in both defining the rules that unsafe code must uphold in the unsafe-code-guidelines and the Rust spec, as well as in providing example proofs and a standard library of theorems that you can reuse for your own proofs.

[rowanG077]

I didn't say it no one will do it. I said almost no one. The Rust compiler is about as far from a normal project as can be. I would like to see this changed but really I have never even seen a proof requirement when looking at Rust jobs. Not even once.

[fluffything]

> I would like to see this changed but really I have never even seen a proof requirement when looking at Rust jobs. Not even once.

?

Any B.Sc. in CS can do most of the unsafe proofs in a one liner. All crates I maintain require unsafe blocks to be commented with a proof, for most of them the proofs are trivial, and for all of them that weren't, the unsafe code was correct, and the correct one had a trivial proof.

[samatman]

Rust didn’t introduce this language, they adopted it. Memory safety has been called that as long as I’ve been programming.

Using the antonym of safe was a natural move, though with the benefit of hindsight, `danger` would have been a better keyword.

After all, good unsafe code isn’t unsafe! It is dangerous though, because it forgoes guarantees of memory and resource safety provided by the compiler.

[davedx]

> Generally, the type of person to post on Reddit frequently enough, has social cohesion problems that may preclude him from fulfilling his social needs through more healthy avenues, like real life.

You mean like making sweeping generalisations about a platform with millions of users?

[adonese]

Not to compare or anything. But I’m active at r/Golang and I find that the community is comparatively better there. I was shocked as to how would someone told anyone to never write a code again!

Maybe this because some members on Rust subreddit believes that they are more intellectual than others? It seems like a cultural thing, go people don’t bother to be seemed as smart or so and that’s possibly reduce the aggressive competition that naturally arise in places where intellect, high performance etc are very important metrics?

[Youden]

A forum being large doesn't have to lead to a loss of cultural identity.

My favourite counter-example is /r/AskHistorians. Over a million members (16x larger than 60k) and it has some of the highest quality posting and discussion I've seen anywhere on the internet. I think it serves as a prime example of how a well a forum can scale, if done properly, so long as there are strict rules and moderators.

[newsgremlin]

>distrust and aggression towards authority

Not an exclusive characteristic of a reddit user, there are many different levels and types of authority. Perhaps the aggression towards all authority, or weighted to certain personalities of authority rather than the ones in the background, especially the ones that don't really matter i.e. internet forum moderators

I agree with your general point that reddit fills a social vacuum in people's lives, like most social media does for others in different ways. Validation and expression etc.

Personally I think think that's why society in general has become generally more toxic, everyone is really telling it straight to others but not being honest with themselves.

[strbean]

Psh, do you even know what time the narwhal bacons? /s

I think Reddit is interesting because its design is more resistant to Eternal September than other communities. See the trend of creating r/TrueX when r/X gets Septembered.

Unfortunately, this hits diminishing returns when more and more obscure subreddits need to be created. Tons of oddly specific niche subreddits have popped up and completely gone to shit in a flash. I think we're nearly due for the next migration (maybe a federated alternative?).

[toyg]

Person posting on online forum says people posting on online forums have social problems.

If that statement is true, you (and me, and everyone else here) have those same issues, surely?

[einpoklum]

> the [psychological] profile ... is one built on abrasiveness, distrust and aggression towards authority,

Hey hey hey, "aggression towards authority" is not a psychological trait, but at most and pattern of action. Also, I disagree with your implicit maligning distrust of authority without generally distrust of others.

> ... and participate in social contract,

The claim of the existence of a "social contract" is part of the self-justification of authoritarian aspects of social structures in capitalist democracies.

[disintegore]

A community grows and eventually reaches the point where users cannot recognize who they're interacting with nearly every time, where the submission queue is trailing down too fast for any single reader to process. When that happens, it can no longer function as a cohesive community. It becomes about as personal as a magazine about the very same topic. Furthermore, the incentives to post change due to the higher potential for "karma" (and posts therefore become more like clickbait), and the barrier for the admissibility of submissions becomes lower as a result of the "expert" or "enthusiast" segment of the population becoming a tiny minority.

In my experience, these larger communities typically grow less tolerant of antisocial behavior, most likely due to acceleration of the process known as "dogpiling". Trolls get more exposure, and better reactions, in small-to-medium communities.

It's still conjecture, but I think I prefer my hypothesis.

[dang]

> Armchair psychology, coupled with pure distilled condescension.

Please edit out name-calling from your comments on HN, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your comment would be fine without the first sentence.

[disintegore]

The edit window for that post is sadly over, but I'll be more careful in the future.

[dang]

If you want to edit it out, I've reopened the comment for editing.

[endothrowho333]

The above was from personal experience and observation from having been a part of many online communities -- pre-dating reddit -- in all ways including: here-and-there member, first-hand maintainer and manager, and antisocial member causing a ruckus.

Armchair psychology? No, I've made many friends and acquaintances, both online and in real life. The ones that bubble around posting online heavily, have developed antisocial tendencies that were reinforced through social exclusion. A self-fulfilling prophecy. I know this, because I know those people well and because I was there at one point in my life as well.

Neither is it condescension. Perhaps I may have been in-exact and may have offended some that do post online very regularly, but there must be a distinction between what they consider "regularly" and what I consider "heavily." Heavily, in my observation, is someone that puts aside a significant amount of time, usually involuntarily, to do nothing but interact with online communities for the sole purpose of social interaction. No value judgements were made either, but those characteristics are common among the aforementioned group.

I won't address your hypothesis, because I'm not here to argue.

[SkyBelow]

>Armchair psychology? No, I've made many friends and acquaintances, both online and in real life. The ones that bubble around posting online heavily, have developed antisocial tendencies that were reinforced through social exclusion. A self-fulfilling prophecy. I know this, because I know those people well and because I was there at one point in my life as well.

This would still qualify as anecdotal data, and thus armchair psychology. Now, it works perfectly valid as a hypothesis and can be rigorously tested and determined if data reject or supports (fails to reject) it. But without peer reviewed research, that last step hasn't happened.

It also sounds good. Makes sense. Fits our notion of common sense of how humans works. The problem is that psychology is filled with examples of where these kinds of intuitions are wrong.

[endothrowho333]

You got me there.

My connotation of armchair psychology is more informal and doesn't match the more rigorous, APA definition.

I'll make one note: the psychological profile I wrote of, is based on first-hand experience, as well as pieces of mental notes recovered from internet-addiction and FBI profiling papers.

[disintegore]

If I understand correctly, your anecdotal evidence is what makes this not "armchair psychology"?

[krn]

What's wrong with simply sharing personal observations based on the decades of related personal experience? Anyone who has some training in science has learned to always be looking for patterns.

[rakasaurus]

Theres nothing wrong with it. Calling someone an armchair psychologist is an anti social behavior.

[disintegore]

Nothing. I simply don't value this kind of loaded and facile analysis very much.

[gameswithgo]

that is armchair psychology.

[nkkollaw]

A lot of guesswork and generalization, right there.

[rusttoxic]

Well said- sometimes i feel that HN is basically a practice for people on how to reply to toxic emails from coworker. "I should have framed it like this"