[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.

[clarkmcc]

> Gleam's community has grown much faster and larger

I hope I’m the anecdotal exception then! I personally watched this exchange happen and left the community within 24 hours. I respect your right to run your community how you’d like, but I unfortunately didn’t experience any “good vibes” from how you handled this situation.

To me a good moderator handles situations without patronization or condescending, is respectful but clear, and doesn’t care how people feel about them.

Keep up the excellent work on Gleam.

[lolinder]

You're occupying a very special niche (typed BEAM language), so if I were you I'd be wary of attributing your growth to your moderation practices. Correlation and causation and all that.

My prediction is that you grow rapidly because of natural interest in the niche you occupy. Your community will get larger and more diverse than you expect in spite of your efforts to keep people out. Then, when you run into your first major point of conflict about language development, the community will be divided on what to do and your efforts to moderate in this way will only fan the flames. Then Gleam will go the way of Elm—it will go back to being something that a very small niche group keeps using, but the bulk of the excitement will go back to Elixir as it slowly starts to occupy your technical niche.

A community with no mechanism for dealing with conflict cannot last long. If being an Elm sounds fine to you—it's not a bad fate after all—then that's fine! Just don't expect more unless you're willing to start developing conflict tolerance in the community.

[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.

[lolinder]

> HN commenters generally lean a lot harder right than they are aware of and/or want to admit.

That's a perception that is common among left-wing commenters who find themselves exposed here to right-wing ideas for the first time. As someone who actively seeks to represent whichever perspectives are underrepresented in a given context (down to specific threads), I can assure you that HN leans pretty firmly left. I very rarely need to take the left-wing perspective here when trying to provide balance.

(Obviously you only have my word for it, but my friends and family all think I'm a raging liberal because I represent the left to them.)

> This belief about a "growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort" is straightforwardly a right wing view.

If Jonathan Haidt is a right-wing activist from your perspective, then sure. I don't think most people see Haidt that way, and certainly don't think he sees himself that way.