github.comPosted Jan 20, 2015, 11:58 PM UTC
Shutting down the mailing list without telling the folks using it isn't very nice.
I'm also not a fan of shutting it down at all, esp. given the outcry on the ml when people found out someone was considering shutting it down. Of course, they only found out about this because someone happened to notice a discuss post :(
Edit: and we're shutting down r/rust too?
Can also work with the reddit mods to help them move people to discuss
Good point, thanks. I'll send a message to the mailing list tomorrow.
Sorry that I'm reposting this from another top comment, but I replied to the wrong person, and I think it applies to both:
r/python doesn't have official support, but it's still the largest programming language subreddit! I'd say the sub is for news, and discuss topics. Discuss is the Same I'd argue, but there is more moderation power, so they want that instead.
The sub may lose official support but I guarantee it will not lose momentum.
Shutting down the mailing list without telling the folks using it isn't very nice
There's a discussion on the list about it shutting down. And r/rust isn't getting 'shut down,' it's just about who should help moderate.
There was a discussion with quite a few people saying shutting it down would be a bad idea.
No official notice that someone would actually go through with it was posted (which is what my "not telling folks" referred to)
I'm not sure how I can read "move people to discuss" and not think that implies leaving r/rust, could you elaborate?
I'm still on my phone, but remember that these are notes taken from a conversation.
That was referring to threads on here, that may or may not get seen. That comment was with regards to mods reminding people who have discussions about RFCs and pre RFCS that get cross-posted here to be reminded of that fact, and to nudge those conversations there where appropriate.
I would love to be a moderator of one or both of the discourse forums, I constantly check it, so I think I could do the job well!
/promotion.
And yay no more mailing list!
I like the mailing list, even though I've only been lurking. Oh well.
If it's not already dead, I'd suggest at least sending a shutdown message to the list though...
[deleted]
u/steveklabnik1 could you expand this quote? I'd be interested in understanding the clash in values here.
FWIW I really enjoy following this sub. It's been my main source of information and food for thought about all things Rust for many months. And since I'm not an IRC person (my English is not fluent enough, so I get lost pretty easily on the multiple simultaneous conversations), maybe I wouldn't be around anymore if this sub didn't exist/was abandoned.
I can see the concerns with endorsing reddit by mozilla (for all the various reasons), however, I'm kind of puzzled:
I mean... what's the story for using discuss.rust-lang.org going to be?
Got a question? Head over to stackoverflow/questions/tagged/rust
Internal rust disucssions / rfcs chat? internals.rust-lang.org! bam~
Got some news or some interesting thing someone is doing with rust? r/rust!
Want to hangout with the community? Hit #rust or #rust-offtopic
Want to share a snippet for someone to look at and comment on? play.rust-lang.org is the place. (I wish it had disqus comments, but still)
discuss.rust-lang.org? What's this actually for...?
Seems to me like the use case for it isn't really very well thought out.
A new discuss.rust-lang.org will be for any user-level discussion about rust, that can include questions and answers, like stack overflow, and 'hanging out', like on IRC, and also discussing snippets (which I don't see how play.rust-lang.org is sufficient for because it has no comment system), project ideas, project coordination, and anything else somebody might think of.
With a forum with its own extensible tagging system and a growing number of users, we'll have room to expand to many purposes.
By way of example, on the r/rust front page right now there are topics that are more suitable to a forum than reddit:
That's not even from looking at the entire page. These kind of topics will only increase the bigger Rust gets.
I might even say that 'most' of what is on r/rust is not that well-suited to reddit's strengths (ephemeral news aggregation) and belongs somewhere else.
I would disagree that forums are better than reddit for some questions. Forums are linear while reddit is threaded, and voted. If you're looking at an older discussion/question (like "What's the best way to ...") it's much easier to find the good responses on reddit than trolling through pages of responses on a forum. Reddit discussions simply scale better.
Also remember that reddit was started as a news aggregator, and I personally think it's great for it. News discussion is great because the threaded comments keep different discussions compartmentalized - perhaps it's not better for participating, but it's excellent for reading the discussion.
The threaded comments do have a lot going for them, but to be fair, finding old questions in reddit is far, far harder than in discourse or SO. It's one of reddit's severe weaknesses.
...but like you say, once you have found the thread, navigating the content and finding the best replies is much easier.
It seems like there is some kind of reply mechanism but they're hidden by default.
I feel like if these comments were in a Discourse thread rather than reddit it would be a lot more difficult to read.
hm.
There's a reason no one uses community portals any more and uses dedicated Q&A, chat, news, etc. sites instead; it's much easier and better to be good at one thing, than it is to be 'sort of not too terrible' at everything.
Q&A on discourse is a mixed bag. You can find questions, but trawling through the answers can be deeply tedious.
Social hangout on discourse is likewise weird and awkward, trying to use a forum as a chat channel.
Pick something. Do it really well.
I'm not sure I'm really on board with a discourse instance for just 'hanging out or whatever, we'll figure it out as we go.'
Is there a burning need for this?
If so, what is it?
Right, let's address that and do it really well, even if discourse isn't the tool for it.
I believe that in the long term perspective discuss's destiny is what is planned for internals.rust-lang.org
Since language is going to be stable soon and more people investing time into learning, most of questions will move out:
r/python doesn't have official support, but it's still the largest programming language subreddit! I'd say the sub is for news, and discuss topics. Discuss is the Same I'd argue, but there is more moderation power, so they want that instead.
I'm on mobile, but I'll just say I mean 'Reddit' not r/rust. This place is mostly pretty okay, because it's not like the rest of Reddit. That said, many people don't know that, and I'm not interested in promoting Reddit as a whole.
And if this didn't exist, I'd hope you would have joined us in the Discuss instance.
I'm with riccieri on this one. I dont see reddit as reddit.com I see it as a bunch of /r/'s that happen to share an interface. The technical subs are all fairly decent, if you excuse the penchant for drama on the largest/least technical ones (/r/linux i'm looking at you).
I also feel the threaded discussion model suits casual discussion well (although I believe discourse can be configured this way?) and you cant forget about the free awareness you get from people who have casually subscribed to r/rust but only really see it on their front page. Thats how i got interested in the first place.
Personally I think the benefits outweigh the negatives of using reddit as a platform, especially when you have a well moderated and dedicated sub. Actively discouraging the subreddit's use in favour of another platform is a bad idea in my opinion.
80% of the time I spend on Reddit I'm on r/rust (the rest would be mostly r/science, r/netsec and r/linux), so maybe I'm seeing Reddit on a better light than it deserves. I think I see what you mean though.
And sometimes even then it leaks http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/2t3q75/crazy_replace_most_of_the_collections_api_with/cnvo0sz
It's possible for the mods to ban that bot, which would be nice.
Discourse is very slow on my phone and keeps loading only a few comments at a time, while reddit serves very fast static pages. In addition there is the annoying bar at the top that takes up space on my tiny screen without contributing anything of value. Reddit is very user-friendly compared to discourse. I usually check r/rust a couple of times per day, but I only look at discuss.rust-lang every few days.
I joined Reddit just for r/rust, and have it hooked into my RSS reader. The layout is very dense which is excellent, and it is fast. Whatever is intended to replace it needs to be (more or less) as good or else it will discourage discussion.
Reddit has a few isolated islands of niceness. Like this subreddit, for example. I'd be upset to see it gone.
And reddit is a place I visit quite often. I don't even know the URL to the supposed replacement of this sub. Do I need another account as well?
Edit: I found the link and read a bit. It seems more like a place for the people who make rust itself rather than for users of rust. IMHO.
it currently is. This is about a different instance, which would be for general user discussion.
Do you know why discuss.rust-lang.org isn't linked at rust-lang.org?
Check out the closed PRs on rust/rust-www. TL;DR is that it's for core language dev, not for general usage. This second instance will absolutely be linked.
And once this is implemented, we will have a clearer story about venues for discussion and so it will make more sense to actually link the language dev one too.
Well, today, some random person wandered into the code of conduct thread to tell us we need to allow obscene nicknames because it's traditional on Reddit. (Funny, because the defense for the awful subreddits is always that they're separate self-governing communities.)
That's just one person; nobody really agreed, and they got downvoted. But this is a problem if it keeps happening. It's not the only instance lately of the wider Reddit-verse leaking in.
Disclaimer: not an IRC person too
Subreddit will die anyway [1] as stability of language will decrease number of questions and most of discussions regarding "how do I do xxx in Rust" will move to SO.
The only kind of questions to "survive" is about internals - lang, std lib - and it will definitely move to internals.rust-lang.org - as it is there core members are going to discuss them. Therefore I believe internals.rust-lang.org is destined to be discuss.rust-lang.org.
[1] well, will die in the current form and move to more news-like.
r/haskell is alive and kicking. As is r/python.
Rust is amenable to a lot of researchy activity into safe systems programming, and gamedev and whatnot. It's a big, relatively unexplored space.
I don't see the subreddit dieing any time soon.
Over 8100 people are subscribed to this sub. That's people that probably are interested in programming and are potential future users of rust. Are they supposed to only get rust-weekly-news in the future?
I don't see more than single-digit percent of them register on discuss or github just to ask a question. Or are we counting on stackoverflow for questions? I find stackoverflow a tad hostile/arrogant sometimes.
If the rust developers want to abandon this sub, fine, but at least hand over the control to a couple enthusiasts.
Ohh, come on, can we do it without a drama? :-)
CORE developers weren't pretty active here (at least last year) and moderation team are actually enthusiasts (except huon) so de facto nothing changes.
Research activity happens where core developers are and they're almost unpresented here. When they need feedback - there's usually link to discussion somewhere else (RFC, discuss.rust-lang.org).
Not to the exclusion of other locations. r/haskell has plenty of very interesting stuff going on that pushes the limits of what the language and library ecosystem can do without very many (any?) haskell commitee members posting regularly.
Research can be as simple as trying to maximise the safety of a common api implementation (libc springs to mind) or a malloc or a GC or whatever other things are traditionally reserved for C/C++.
I don't see any justification for a claim that research activity requires the core devs to be around.
What? There are devs from the core team on this subreddit, and they're pretty active too.