Zig is not turning a blind eye because it had no control over the subreddit nor does it the discord.
The subreddit was a community run channel that just happened to be owned by Andrew. It’s not affiliated with Zig as a whole so he could do whatever he wanted with it. No poll needed much like you can delete your personal reddit account without requiring a poll. Andrew does not control the discord so he cannot shut it down should he not agree with their practices (I have no idea his feelings on this). Zig does not have any official community channels and their policy does not restrict where the community creates channels. If you created a new Zig subreddit and it was widely successful no one would tell you to shut it down as shutting it down was not a Zig policy
I do personally believe having some permanent, official community channels may be valuable as this was a large loss of information and if channels keep disappearing people may stop participating, but I think you’re misunderstanding a bit what happened with the subreddit
Amidst the issues of hostile corporate tactics, platform preferences, and profiteering, I see an underlying issue which to me is the most important one: content preservation (especially valuable knowledge transfer). A centralized / official community would offer an increased chance of preserving its content longterm; at least for as long as the project exists (although not guaranteed).
But I believe there’s a middle ground here. You can have de-centralized communities with their respective content and an official project-owned central repository to store backups of those communities’ content. For example, in the case of Discourse, I have already reached out to Loris Cro, from the Zig core team, to see if they can provide such a central space where I can deposit backups of this forum. If for whatever reason this forum disappears, someone else could step up to the plate and with the recent backup, restore the forum and both preserve the content and keep the community alive.
But we have to be clear that that initiative to restore and prolong the community in question is not the responsibility of the Zig core team nor the Zig Software Foundation. The community must act.
I believe that with this model, we can maintain the free and organic growth of Zig communities while at the same time provide an increased level of sustainability, consistency, and content preservation.
This sentiment is probably the point of friction between my POV and others that are in support of the subreddit closure. I don’t feel like a moderator owns a community, to do with it whatever they please, but is rather responsible towards it. I feel like there is a little double think going on to say that Andrew (or anyone) is free to do with /r/zig whatever he wants, and then protest against reddit for doing what they want with the site. In both cases, I see a singular entity with power over the community (whose value was built collaboratively with said community) decide to upend that community’s norms - 3rd party API in one case, the whole existence of a subreddit in another.
/r/elixir polled the community for guidance and decided to stay open. To me, this demonstrates that the /r/elixir mods value their members and their contributions. I admit that the decision to close the zig subreddit and Andrew’s implication in this thread that nothing of value was lost by its closure has me really re-thinking my optimism toward the language, whether I will invest my time/money into it, and whether I want to contribute. A lot of redditors trust reddit less now, and for the same reason I trust Zig less now. I don’t expect to change the decision with my viewpoint but want to let the VIPs know how this decision has impacted my potential to “pick up a shovel and start digging.”
Finally, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the subreddit was not “official” and instead belonged to Andrew the person and not Andrew the zig BDFL and headperson of the ZSF. That’s de-facto official in my book, and I will view other communities that live or die at Andrew’s discretion the same way.
This will be my last post in this thread, but I do plan to read any further responses. Thanks for the consideration all 'round.
On the topic of having official communication channels:
I agree it would be nice, the problem of making it happen for real though is that it would mean having to grow the ZSF to include also moderators, which is not what we’re going for in terms of financial strategy.
The ZSF is trying really hard to stay lean and mean so that we can get Zig to v1.0 without having to agree to deals we don’t like with big tech, and that means necessarily having to make do without some things that cost head count / effort / money.
Another example of this is the fact that we’re not going to have an official package index. We could debate whether it’s a good thing to have in the first place or not (ultimately I believe it’s not), but regardless not having a package index plays into the aforementioned strategy. A package index comes with some serious costs attached to it, and in turn it would require us to smile and bend the knee to AWS or one of the other clouds in order to have free credits to run it.
I was a while ago in a discussion with somebody from the (old) Rust Core team and I was told the cost for them just to offer the compiler (so not of crates.io, just the cost generated by people downloading the rust compiler) was in the high tens of thousands of dollars every month. Just the compiler, not the packages.
Rust must receive a constant stream of free Amazon credits for this to be sustainable, and we just don’t want to do that (nor could probably).
So, to stay sustainable, we opted to not have an official package index (among other considerations), and no official communication channels that require institutional moderation.
One crazy thought here, given Zig’s (and the ZFS’s) inclinations, would be to leverage some sort of peer to peer network and push the decentralization even further. As long as you can bootstrap a minimal thing, you could “ask around” your peers for current versions of the tooling and download those from the peers to your machine. Something similar might work for packages, and even a package index that “emerges” from your peers.
Is it possible to export r/Zig in some form, even if as PDF file(s)?
I mean, free of charge, just to have a read-only snapshot, not to migrate it somewhere else.
I also don’t think /r/zig should be closed. We can close it temporarily to show solidarity with what’s going on.
I don’t think just because reddit is for-profit that it’s inherently evil.
I don’t want to get into ideological argument but it’s important for many normal people looking for zig answers to have access to the information on reddit. In any case, we allow people to log in using github, which is owned by microsoft, and if there is an archetype of for-profit software company, microsoft is up there.
I’m all for decentralization (those of you who met me know what I’m building) but I do wish the “core” team of Zig, which is a programming language would be more open to people who have different opinions because a programming langauge is a tool that’s open for everyone.
Also, Tiger Beetle and Bun both are well-loved of this community are for profit as well.
Nobody has said this. If anything most of the the complaints related to reddit are about it not being good at the business it’s supposed to be in. I think everybody would be happy if reddit made sure to be a sustainable image and discussion board, but instead it’s playing some other kind of game at the expense of its customer base. This was my latest comment on HN on the topic, some replies are also interesting:
Also the people running the company have been lying about the entire process:
I’m not a native speaker but, according to the dictionary, “to profiteer” means seeking profit past what’s considered reasonable and that does align with my description.
Also, look, I don’t use reddit enough to be a huge reddit supporter but maybe I can come from a slightly balanced perspective because I’ve worked in large corporations and VC-backed startups and also currently working on a startup. So if I’m using inappropriate example below it’s because I want to get people to think about it. And Andrew knows how much I admire him when we talked in Vacouver so don’t take anything personally.
Reddit CEO (trust me, CEO is a really hard job), thinking what’s best for Reddit going forward (not saying he’s right or wrong just saying in his opinion), decided to charge for API calls.
Zig Founder (Andrew, sorry, but you are in that leader position so have to use you as example), decided to shut down /r/reddit thinking it’s best for Zig.
Btw, I’m NOT equating Andrew with Steve Huffman but you can see that any decision you make is not necessarily going to be approved by everyone. The sad part is that in anyone’s mind, he/she is doing the best thing for the employee/people/world/company.
Also I’m fully aware that it’s never one person’s decision except one person will have to stand out and be the public face in any organization.
In this case, I think it’s the regular people like me (not app creators, not reddit itself) that suffers the most as they lost a good subreddit.
I’ve personally google’d for Zig answers in the last several days but the answer is not viewable because they are on reddit.
Reddit is NOT profitable hence they need to make money to make IPO more appealing. A company that doesn’t make enough money to cover the expense is not profiteering…
I sincerely doubt this about the Reddit leadership.
Debt is one of the greatest inventions of humankind but VC capital does have some easily recognizable issues that come with it when the people involved can’t find a sound business model and / or the company plays the “grow forever” game instead of at some point settling down and actually trying to become good at what it does.
That’s because you’re using the search engine of an ad company that is playing the “grow forever” game, and it’s starting to lose :^)
This is just somebody’s theory so it shouldn’t be taken as a gospel, but I think it’s clear that bumping up like crazy the API cost is not going to make them sustainable.
Considering the ties between YC, Reddit and OpenAI, it does make some sense. I personally also find interesting how Musk did the same with Twitter right away (lock down the APIs), considering he too is involved with OpenAI.
The problem is that newcomers need somewhere to be pointed to. And search engines need somewhere to be pointed to.
Yeah, “being decentralized” is nice for the Zig leadership monetary outlays, but not so much for the Zig hoi polloi. Newbies are going to gravitate where it is convenient–a de facto consensus will form without external direction. In this case, Discord is probably going to win–which has several downsides (the lack of searchability being what I would regard as the big one).
I am NOT suggesting to reopen the Reddit. However, if we want a Zig “community” to form that lands somewhere that SYCL would approve (as opposed to something like Discord which is clearly NOT SYCL), it needs to be given a place to land and possibly a bit of help.
