[steveklabnik]

"promotion" doesn't appear in that post. My job was writing documentation. I did say that I was considering moving into evangelist/growth roles. My next job wasn't those two though, it was PM.

I guess you were trying to disparage Yehuda, then?

[grumblenum]

I mean that you are one of several. Hence the running joke is the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" and not "that one rust guy."

An evangelist/growth focused role is exactly what a promoter is. If you spend large numbers of typical work-hours, which I'm assuming you're paid for, on social media to promote something, like Rust, or you go to conferences and events to speak publicly in promotion of something like Rust, then a "paid promoter" seems like a pretty accurate description.

Is that disparaging? Is that not what you are doing right now?

[steveklabnik]

> An evangelist/growth focused role is exactly what a promoter is.

Right. move into. Because that was not a part of my job description at Mozilla. They didn't dislike the stuff I was doing, but it's not my work.

The disparagement is the implication of lying:

> You can judge for yourself if their promotion of rails was grounded in truth.

[grumblenum]

Given a 15 year retrospective, would you say that Rails lived up to the hype? If you think so, then there is nothing “disparaging” in that comment at all. If you don’t think so, then doesn’t that mean a reader should not regard such promotion with confidence? No need to be defensive.

[Dylan16807]

It can be disparaging to say that someone is doing a thing because they got paid to, when they were not in fact paid to. Even when that thing, by itself, is not bad.

In this case it implies dishonest astroturfing or similar, especially when you talk about whether their statements were "grounded in truth". (Which is different from whether Ruby did well years later.)