Where should the compiler team (and perhaps working groups) chat?

[Soni]

As an autistic person, reactions are very very very bad due to their potential for misinterpretation (on both ends).

Stack Overflow Chat has likes, but not reactions. It gets used like Twitter likes: you use it whenever you want to nonverbally communicate being interested in something, thinking something is important, or just conveying sympathy. The ambiguity makes this inherently much less dangerous than emoji reactions.

[nikomatsakis]

Everybody knows I’m a fan of Zulip. I do have a few concerns though:

• Will everybody use it? @eddyb for example tends not to check it that often and seems more responsive on Discord.
• Moderation: It seems like Zulip’s made good progress on making moderation tools available, but we need to be sure we have a reliable setup so that if people need to find a moderator, they can. The more platforms we use, the harder this becomes.
  • I’m not sure entirely what is needed here. It’d be good if people from the moderation team (e.g., @Manishearth, @pnkfelix, …) wanted to share any thoughts.

[gbutler]

much less dangerous than emoji reactions

LMAO! I have visions of Emojis flying through the air like Ninja-Stars and splitting open the eyeballs of the audience. Yikes!

[nikomatsakis]

As an autistic person, reactions are very very very bad due to their potential for misinterpretation (on both ends).

That’s good to be aware of. Interestingly, I really strongly dislike reactions in many other settings — such as GitHub. I’ve found that on Discord they tend to be mostly used in playful ways, and so I enjoy them. If, however, people were using them to express negative sentiments (e.g., ) I would be pretty upset.

[Soni]

If you have emoji reactions, it’s a lot more difficult to show sympathy than simply sending a heart emoji. Because heart reactions usually mean “love this” or something (I don’t understand the full semantics of emoji reactions), and you’re supposed to use something else for sympathy.

I’m not sure how to explain this better, but the discords I do visit have a long list/dictionary of emoji reactions and what they’re used to mean. There are only a few discords like that, tho. (More specifically, I only know of exactly one.)

Generally speaking, a system with fewer reactions (twitter, github) is better than one with many (proprietary chat apps etc).

[davidtwco]

As an autistic person, reactions are very very very bad due to their potential for misinterpretation (on both ends).

Thanks for sharing this. It is a perspective that I hadn’t considered before.

[wesleywiser]

I was initially kind of skeptical about Zulip and really liked Discord but now, I’d have to say that I really prefer Zulip to Discord. Topic-branched discussion is so much easier to follow asynchronously and I don’t feel awkward continuing a conversation even when there’s been other activity in other conversations since the last post.

[rpjohnst]

I prefer places internals or GitHub for things I feel the need to “keep up” with. The purpose of chat, to me, is for ephemeral stuff that would otherwise happen as in-person walk-over-to-your-desk type of conversations, where trying to keep up with it doesn’t make sense anyway.

Which means I don’t really get much value from Zulip threads, especially not at the cost of an unfamiliar UI.

[pnkfelix]

I suppose gbutlers response proves a point that its not just emojis that can be subject to wildly different interpretations.

[Dylan-DPC]

I like zulip as well. The UI feels more discussion friendly especially when multiple issues are being discussed in parallel.

Also with discord being linked to the gaming community, some companies prohibit it’s usage which could be a chokepoint at some time.

[arielb1]

I just really don’t like the Zulip Web UI (my preferences are IRC > Discord >> Zulip). Maybe I’ll just have to get used to it.

[nikomatsakis]

I prefer places internals or GitHub for things I feel the need to “keep up” with. The purpose of chat, to me, is for ephemeral stuff that would otherwise happen as in-person walk-over-to-your-desk type of conversations, where trying to keep up with it doesn’t make sense anyway.

I feel this way too…in theory. But in practice, a lot of discussion does happen on Discord, and the details don’t always make their way out. This may be something we should work on addressing: using Discord or other “synchronous” clients less. (e.g., for the unsafe-code-guidelines effort, I’ve been trying hard to ensure that all design work is happening on the Github repository).

That said, a lot of the conversations I have on Zulip (and Discord) are really focused on mentoring and working through PRs and things. For this, I find Zulip to be a pretty nice fit — it often suffices to throw a link to the conversation into the GH issue, so that I can find it later if I have to. If the PR winds up being completed, it kind of doesn’t matter most of the time. If the PR gets abandoned, then I will try to summarize the final conclusions.

[ZerothLaw]

Hey, what are the names of the channels/threads/topics/w/e people are using on Zulip?

[nikomatsakis]

Hey, what are the names of the channels/threads/topics/w/e people are using on Zulip?

On the rust-lang.zulipchat.com server, you can look for the various streams (e.g., t-compiler, wg-nll, wg-unsafe-code-guidelines)

[gnzlbg]

FWIW over the last couple of months I feel that more and more conversations are getting lost, because people will be logged in everywhere, but will only check one of these places. So for example, I would ping X over a couple of days on IRC, without answer, and then decide to ping X on discord, and realize X hasn’t checked IRC in a while even though it appears as logged in.

I’m basically back at just only using IRC, and github issues or internals for the rest. Tracking discord, gitter, and all other systems simultaneously is a huge pain.

[Centril]

I’m basically back at just only using IRC, and github issues or internals for the rest. Tracking discord, gitter, and all other systems simultaneously is a huge pain.

I think most discussion is happening over at Discord nowadays; at least that’s where the lang team hangs out.

[nikomatsakis]

I’ve been thinking about this.

Maybe we could take a first step, before settling on Discord vs Zulip, and delete the #rustc IRC channel?

It’d be one less plan to monitor.

[Centril]

Maybe we could take a first step, before settling on Discord vs Zulip, and delete the #rustc IRC channel?

While we’re at it, can we also delete #rust-lang ?

[varkor]

I’m finally getting around to making a comment. Here are my feelings:

• Zulip and Discord are both significantly superior to IRC (though it would be nice to be able to view a conversation without signing up, like on IRLO or GitHub).
• Zulip is the better platform: you can’t beat threads and it’s open source.
• Despite this, I still prefer using Discord. Zulip has several interface quirks (*bugs) that are annoying, it doesn’t feel as intuitive to use casually and it doesn’t look good.

(I haven’t yet got around to using Zulip’s mobile app, but Discord’s is good.)

I think we definitely need to promote a single platform. My tentative feeling is that we should be promoting Zulip (with all the associated corollaries, such as closing the channels elsewhere), but not yet. I think we should focus (in whatever form that takes — probably fixing them ourselves) on addressing the main problems with Zulip before making the move.

I think that the problems with Zulip are composed of lots of small irks, rather than any fundamental problems and that tackling them (ourselves) would not be a mammoth effort. I’m going to split off a new topic to discuss this and see how much work it would take to convert those of us for whom the usability and interface of Zulip is the main sticking point.

[nikomatsakis]

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