The Rust Core Team has announced that members Aidan Hobson Sayers and Ashley Williams will be retiring from the Core Team.
We would like to say goodbye and thank a few people who have stepped down from the core team:
Aidan Hobson Sayers will be leaving the core team and other roles. He joined the core team in 2018 and initially worked on CI issues in the project and has been a member of the infrastructure team since its inception (leader and co-leader). Aidan wants to spend more time working with the Rust community and growing the use of Rust in his company, and looks forward to doing it from a different angle.
Ashley Williams will be stepping down from the core team and other roles. She became a member of the core team in 2018 and has influenced many parts of the project. From leading community teams, to building PagerDuty for infrastructure and Crates.io ; to Wasm working groups, to increasing Rust's influence and Rustbridge. Thank her for her important work in founding the Rust Foundation and serving as its first executive director. Ashley will be stepping away from her role on the project to focus on her new company.
Many thanks to both of them for their contributions, and we look forward to seeing what they do with Rust in the future!
It is worth mentioning that the Rust Moderation Team announced its collective resignation in November last year ; team member Andrew Gallant pointed out that this move was to protest that the Rust core team was not responsible to anyone other than themselves.
The incident sparked widespread discussion on Reddit when a popular comment pointed out that the moderation team opted out because the core team did not follow the same Code of Conduct (CoC) as the rest of the team; in particular one of the core team members Female member Ashley Williams used the CoC as a "weapon" against male contributors, but did not follow it herself. So, when Rust leadership has clearly been infiltrated and corrupted by men who hate men, coveting power without improving the language and ecology, the three white male members of the Rust review team (all of whom are very dedicated Rust programmers, with the Rust core Team members instead) decided to quit.
The change of the core team has also sparked discussions on Reddit, but the relevant comments of netizens in Rust Sub have been deleted, and the post has also been locked by the moderator. In response to the public's doubts about the deletion of comments, a member of the MOD team explained that because there were some "mockery" words, they were deleted by the moderator; "Please avoid any mockery and/or seek dramatic comments, and remember our subreddit rules. "
As an admin who locked this thread and cleaned up all child comments after root comments were deleted, I wouldn't classify all comments as "mocking". Of course, one of them is. Others are caused by a group of people who have a strong attachment to certain members of the core team. In the past, I've been disappointed (to put it mildly) by the level of discussion that has resulted when I've tried to allow this topic to be discussed on r/rust. I no longer feel any desire to host such discussions in the future. Especially after seeing the results of the Actix incident many years ago, where moderators (including myself) catastrophically failed to intervene in the naive belief in the ability of free discussion to self-regulate; I am now more proactive in taking steps to ensure r/rust cannot be used as a turret for personal attacks. At the end of the day, a forum of hundreds of thousands of anonymous people is pretty much the least effective place in the world to vent grievances. Take it elsewhere; we will not be responsible for a brigade.
Regarding this move to lock posts and delete comments, some netizens also said , "For the Rust project, it's really not a good image to delete all comments and lock the topic. Especially because they refuse to clarify anything. All this is Very opaque. But Ashley Williams is gone anyway, so we can forget about that."