[giraffe_lady]

I don't think either of you come off either great or horribly here. That is kind of a rude action (esp I mean, were you just a lurker at this point?) but also he didn't handle it very tactfully.

But it does seem wild to bring it up as a top level comment on another forum now. What are you hoping for? People to not use the language? An apology?

[lolinder]

Lead dev behavior is highly relevant to programming language discussions because the lead dev has a massive role in shaping everything about the ecosystem. This is just one anecdote, but it suggests that the lead dev is still pretty young and immature and has a fairly fragile ego, which could have a major impact on the development of the ecosystem.

I'd definitely be interested in other people's experiences with them to see if there are contradictory anecdotes, but I don't see it as irrelevant to bring up here.

(All that said, I concur that OP could have likely behaved differently as well. But again: handling disruptive behavior effectively is part of the job of a BDFL/lead dev, and this incident was not handled well.)

[lpil]

I'm glad you think I'm young!

We take moderation very seriously in Gleam, and I assure you this poster has omitted much of the context here. If you have any concerns please do get in touch with the moderation team either on discord or via "hello at gleam.run". Thank you.

[lolinder]

Hey, glad to see you here! I've been following Gleam from the sidelines for a while and I'm really excited to see where it ends up.

I can tell that you take moderation very seriously, and that's part of my concern—there's a trend among a certain newer crop of FOSS projects to moderate in a way that is opaque, passive-aggressive, and somewhat self-righteous. This is usually done in the name of creating safe spaces, where "safe" means "things that make anyone uncomfortable get erased".

It starts out fine with erasing hate speech and similar. But then you get in the habit of removing things and you start removing content that isn't hateful but is uncomfortable for some other reason. I've seen projects (Forgejo) remove evidence of reasonable dissent about the appointment of a moderator (going so far as to erase that dissent from the internet archive).

One anecdote isn't enough for me to believe that you've gone that far, but it's a trend that I've seen and your rhetoric falls into that concerning pattern. I'm not interested in having a private conversation (as I said, opaque moderation practices are part of the problem I'm identifying), but I would caution you against going too far down this safe spaces route. Keep out the hate speech, but be wary of deleting things that aren't.

[lpil]

We go quite a bit further than keeping out hate speech. For example, we have a policy of "good vibes" in the chat so we don't permit bashing other languages and will publicly ask folks to take it elsewhere if they start.

It's been a few years of using these policies and it's going great! The community and discord server have been consistently praised as one of the highlights of Gleam.

The main drawback is that we tend to attract a lot of criticism from right-wing social media posters as a result, bizarrely including one brief smear campaign from one of the founders of Trump's Truth Social.

[lolinder]

Well, thanks for being up front about it I guess!

It's not just the far right that's uncomfortable with this kind of policy and rhetoric—I'm glad that the relatively small subset of the population that you're interested in supporting has enjoyed the environment you've created, but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute.

There are a lot of people from every part of political manifold that are uncomfortable with the growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort, and those people aren't interested in participating in a community where everything has to have "good vibes".

For myself, I love the quote in dang's profile:

> "Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups. It follows that the aim of healthy living is not the direct elimination of conflict, which is possible only by forcible suppression of one or other of its antagonistic components, but the toleration of it—the capacity to bear the tensions of doubt and of unsatisfied need and the willingness to hold judgement in suspense until finer and finer solutions can be discovered which integrate more and more the claims of both sides. It is the psychologist's job to make possible the acceptance of such an idea so that the richness of the varieties of experience, whether within the unit of the single personality or in the wider unit of the group, can come to expression."

— Marion Milner, 'The Toleration of Conflict', Occupational Psychology, 17, 1, January 1943

[lpil]

> but know that you're severely limiting the growth of your community and excluding people who could really contribute.

Quite the opposite. By not having the usual sources of annoyance and tedium Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger than similar technologies in the same space.

Being tolerant of abrasive behaviour has a cost to the technology project, and I'm not interested in paying it, especially not for ideological "everyone is welcome" reasons.

[giraffe_lady]

> It's not just the far right that's uncomfortable with this kind of policy and rhetoric

It really kinda is though. HN commenters generally lean a lot harder right than they are aware of and/or want to admit. This belief about a "growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort" is straightforwardly a right wing view.

[clarkmcc]

Not looking for anything. This post was titled “My first experience with the Gleam language”, I also think the language was pretty great but I am sharing my poor first experience with the language and the community. I don’t even fault the guy for not wanting to answer questions, but it was in the #off-topic channel and the response was just abrasive. I hope people use the language, I think it has huge potential and honestly it looks beautiful. I thought sharing ‘my first experience’ was pretty on topic.