The Embarrassing Ruby/Rails Community Chronicles 2026-09-17

The life of a Ruby dev in 2026! I made an effort to post a recorded talk that I gave at my local Montreal Ruby meetup as a helpful gesture for the benefit of the Ruby community at large. And, I suddenly see a comment (included below) get posted in the Ruby subreddit, which reeks of hate and discrimination against me personally and has no respectful conduct of appreciation for a service done during my free time for the benefit of others. Who allows trash people like that into the Ruby subreddit?!! So, the commenter literally discriminates against me and expresses hate against me, saying he wants me to "drop out". I don't even know the commenter. I never did anything bad to hurt the commenter. Quite the contrary. I posted a helpful post for the benefit of the commenter and everyone in the Ruby community. Still, the commenter wants me to "drop out". Next, he mentions that the Montreal Ruby meetup has dwindled to a handful of people after I took over it with a very hateful negative tone, when in fact, without me, the group had ZERO attendees and was dead for years, and I revived it in 2022 with the help of another co-organizer, growing the group again to more than ZERO attendees. That's the opposite of what that commenter tried to allude to. Let alone, I am literally the most consistently present Ruby dev at those meetups, and I am the only Ruby dev from the Montreal Ruby community in the last 4 years who has presented at RubyConf multiple times and has supported many Ruby open-source projects while winning awards for 2 of them from Matz. 

Besides, even if the group had dwindled down to a few members compared to pre-Covid numbers. That is the responsibility of the attendees slacking and switching to other languages. I know a number of past attendees of the meetup who have switched professionally to Elixir, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and other programming languages. While I am disappointed in their decision, it is 100% their loss not mine if they don't use Ruby anymore and don't attend the Ruby meetup. I still believe Ruby is the most fluent, expressive, elegant, productive, and maintainable programming language for general business application development, and I think that other languages are either inferior, like JavaScript & Python, or are considered premature optimizations that aren't truly needed in 90% of business usecases, like Elixir and TypeScript. Still, if that's what other devs chose, it's their responsibility alone.

The haters in the Ruby community have shown their face very explicitly now and it's no longer a matter of pretending to be non-haters while hiding under plausible deniability. The hate is very explicit, real, and fully exposed for everyone to see.

So, who allowed the haters into the Ruby subreddit community and encouraged their hate by tolerating hateful comments that have a very negative tone like the comment shared above?

I checked the list of Moderators, and here is what I found from among older moderators that have been around for a long time (not all of them, but some of them for sure, excluding the AutoModerator).

Those moderators have allowed hate to fester in the Ruby subreddit for years while giving a group of haters a free pass to post hateful disrespectful comments with a very hateful discriminatory tone against a number of Ruby experts like me who not only have done more for the benefit of the Ruby community than all the haters combined through talks at RubyConf and RailsConf and open-source projects. I call them out for doing a very shitty job. They totally suck. 

None of the haters in the Ruby subreddit would pass the minimum criteria of respectful conduct to get hired at any of the good Ruby shops I've worked at. So, why allow any people who don't pass the minimum criteria of respectful conduct to be hired at good companies into a Ruby subreddit to begin with? Those people are no different from random hobos and drug criminals one encounters on the streets with their hateful discriminatory negative conduct. So, what on earth are they doing in a Ruby subreddit if they don't pass the minimum code of conduct needed to be hired at any respectful ethical good companies! This is either a case of double-standards, which would implicate some of the moderators above as practicing discrimination, or a case of intentionally simping to unqualified people to feel like "heroes" (the hero worship complex). It's bad in either way. Be better!!!

If the Ruby community was healthy, a Ruby dev oughta be able to share a video they recorded for the benefit of the Ruby community in peace and with complete dignity and respect. Unfortunately, that's not the case in 2026. The Ruby community has deteriorated into trash because of terrible mods like the ones above.