Open source maintainers have a hard time - especially when they're under criticism and receive zero positive vibes. Author mentions it, here's the excerpt:
Be a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You alway face with rude and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do home work and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help.
This a big problem with open source - I, as a programmer, like when someone commends me. It might be childish, but if I invest a few days into code and someone finds it useful - I would love to hear it, it would make the day for me. Instead, I had similar experience like the author of actix - hatred, rudeness and a lot of people who don't read the docs, they merely expect everything to work if they drop the library into their project.
Sadly, we're way too negative and don't appreciate OSS maintainers. This trend should change. It's sad to see yet another project go because author was mentally drained due to negativity. We should take care of our own "brothers in arms" (we all write code or deal with tech, don't we?).
I haven't used Actix-web, but I can sympathize with the author. Keep your head up, recharge your batteries and remain creative. Good luck with your future products!
A data point: I've been involved in Open Source for 10+ years, developing projects myself, helping to maintain very popular projects, contributing, and I don't see a trend like this. I've interacted with hundreds of people over the years, and the vibes are overwhelmingly positive; I haven't noticed any hatred or rudeness towards myself. I can't think of a single time interaction with OSS people afected me negatively, but there were a lot of positive (or neutral) interactions.
Over time projects I'm contributing to were changing, and so I was exposed to several different communities (Python web development, data science, web scraping), and all of them turn out to be awesome. Maybe that's just luck, but not all OSS maintainers have it hard - no idea why :)
Yep this is why, more and more, developers are simply doing private repositories. They might exist on GitHub. Or a torrent or something. Rachel goes into more detail about them here.
Basically people fix things and don't commit them back upstream because doing so is too much of a political headache.
> While it's probably true that the dictator does suck at design, the talented user wants no part of the drama which would follow such a report. There is absolutely no benefit to lighting that particular fuse. And so, the problem is never reported, and the patch is never conveyed upstream. It effectively becomes a private fork limited to the talented user's systems.
I've been thinking for a long time that one of the problems with these online shitstorms is that the adults in the room are silent. It would have been so much better if the senior people in the Rust community stepped in to actually say "Hey, we're all using it, yes it's got issues, but thanks for your contribution and don't worry about the idiots". Instead we've got senior people in the Rust community waiting until the damage is done and then hand-wringing about it afterwards.
It's a tricky balance. This is also sort of where I was getting at in my post with the "unofficial" bit; because /r/rust is not official, we do not look into it. And because this happened on Reddit, there was no real opportunity to actually step in. It's quite possible this is simply a failure on our part.
Today is the first time that I've heard that /r/rust is apparently regarded that little from the Rust team. To me it's the most important online gateway to the Rust community, and also the best resource to stay up to date with the ecosystem.
I knew that it was an "unofficial" channel, but given that it's most likely the single biggest aggregation of people in the Rust community, I always assumed that the Rust team would consider it of close to equal importance to users.rust-lang.org.
> And because this happened on Reddit, there was no real opportunity to actually step in. It's quite possible this is simply a failure on our part.
I don't think that much could've been done to prevent that. It also happened on such a quick timescale that one could've completely slept through the whole situation (from the initial Reddit comment to the post-mortem).
Unofficial subreddits are hard to reason about. Within the context of reddit, they are still the most official place to talk about a thing they like. And even worse, those are the people likely to only interact with the "community" on reddit, forming an echochamber where they think the unofficial subreddit's opinion is some sort of majority.
In rust's case, it probably is worth diverting some of the existing manpower for moderating online discussion to reddit. I think that the harsher this moderation is, the less attractive the subreddit will be to the reddit-only echochamber, as an added bonus. But this is only possible because you already have people involved with online discussion on other sites. In most cases, if reddit or twitter keeps talking about you and keeps saying dumb stuff, you just have to ignore it. This is how r/competitiveoverwatch is treated; everyone knows that the stuff they say there doesn't matter, and that they don't represent more than a tiny fraction of the people watching the OWL matches. Even some of the people posting there know it. The players and casters still seem to read it, but for the most part just laugh about how dumb their opinions are.
In this case, I don't know why the maintainer took some redditor's comment so seriously, when they said that they should not write rust anymore. This is just a separate issue that anyone with "fame" has to deal with, ignoring critics who are idiots, nothing to do with reddit really.
I don’t want to come across as toxic myself, but I think that the toxicity that Evan sometimes has to endure from people in the community is somewhat self-inflicted.
Last year I wrote a web application in Elm. Even though I really liked the language and had lots of fun writing code, I noticed that the users effectively have to rely on Evan to make any meaningful progress. The ‘forkability’ of the project is very poor.
To give you a couple examples of that:
- Elm has a centralized package repository: https://package.elm-lang.org/. There is, however, no functionality in Elm to host your own registry, whether it is public or internal to your organisation. The monolithic compiler/build tool hardcodes the URL of this registry.
- Relatedly, there is no way you can easily fork a package and apply some changes, especially if you have no intent to host it through the official package collection. There is no way to say: “I want to use elm/http with this tiny local patch applied that I have sitting in my tree.”
- Some parts of Elm’s grammar/intrinsics are only permitted to be used by packages with author “elm” (i.e., the official core packages). This means that you cannot fork, say, elm/bytes to yourname/bytes and make local changes, as it can no longer be built.
Because of this, the maintainers of Elm don’t just decide what goes into the tree, they effectively also decide what users may do on their end. They are the folks sitting behind the master control panel and people filing issues/pull requests rely on them to push the buttons for them. I can understand why this causes friction within the community.
Note that this was my experience using Elm early 2019 (January-April). It may well be that Elm improved in these areas since.
Be a maintainer of large open source project is not a fun task. You alway face with rude and hate, everyone knows better how to build software, nobody wants to do home work and read docs and think a bit and very few provide any help.
This a big problem with open source - I, as a programmer, like when someone commends me. It might be childish, but if I invest a few days into code and someone finds it useful - I would love to hear it, it would make the day for me. Instead, I had similar experience like the author of actix - hatred, rudeness and a lot of people who don't read the docs, they merely expect everything to work if they drop the library into their project.
Sadly, we're way too negative and don't appreciate OSS maintainers. This trend should change. It's sad to see yet another project go because author was mentally drained due to negativity. We should take care of our own "brothers in arms" (we all write code or deal with tech, don't we?).
I haven't used Actix-web, but I can sympathize with the author. Keep your head up, recharge your batteries and remain creative. Good luck with your future products!