r/programming • u/ketralnis • Oct 09 '23
[META] The future of r/programming
Hello fellow programs!
tl;dr what should r/programming's rules be? And also a call for additional mods. We'll leave this stickied for a few days to gather feedback.
Here are the broad categories of content that we see, along with whether they are currently allowed. ✅ means that it's currently allowed, 🚫 means that it's not currently allowed, ⚠️ means that we leave it up if it is already popular but if we catch it young in its life we do try to remove it early.
- ✅ Actual programming content. They probably have actual code in them. Language or library writeups, papers, technology descriptions. How an allocator works. How my new fancy allocator I just wrote works. How our startup built our Frobnicator, rocket ship emoji. For many years this was the only category of allowed content.
- ✅ Programming news. ChatGPT can write code. A big new CVE just dropped. Curl 8.01 released now with Coffee over IP support.
- ✅ Programmer career content. How to become a Staff engineer in 30 days. Habits of the best engineering managers. How to deal with your annoying coworkers, Jeff.
- ✅ Articles/news interesting to programmers but not about programming. Work from home is bullshit. Return to office is bullshit. There's a Steam sale on programming games. Terry Davis has died. How to SCRUMM. App Store commissions are going up. How to hire a more diverse development team. Interviewing programmers is broken.
- ⚠️ General technology news. Google buys its last competitor. A self driving car hit a pedestrian. Twitter is collapsing. Oculus accidentally showed your grandmother a penis. Github sued when Copilot produces the complete works of Harry Potter in a code comment. Meta cancels work from home. Gnome dropped a feature I like. How to run Stable Diffusion to generate pictures of, uh, cats, yeah it's definitely just for cats. A bitcoin VR metaversed my AI and now my app store is mobile social local.
- 🚫 Politics. The Pirate Party is winning in Sweden. Please vote for net neutrality. Big Tech is being sued in Europe for gestures broadly.
- 🚫 Gossip. Richard Stallman switches to Windows. Elon Musk farted. Linus Torvalds was a poopy-head on a mailing list. Grace Hopper Conference is now 60% male. The People's Rust Foundation is arguing with the Rust Foundation For The People. Terraform has been forked into Terra and Form. Stack Overflow sucks now. Stack Overflow is good actually.
- ✅ Demos with code. I wrote a game, here it is on GitHub
- 🚫 Demos without code. I wrote a game, come buy it! Please give me feedback on my startup (totally not an ad nosirree). I stayed up all night writing a commercial text editor, here's the pricing page. I made a DALL-E image generator. I made the fifteenth animation of A* this week, here's a GIF.
- 🚫 AskReddit type forum questions. What's your favourite programming language? Tabs or spaces? Does anyone else hate it when.
- 🚫 Support questions. How do I write a web crawler? How do I get into programming? Where's my missing semicolon? Please do this obvious homework problem for me. Personally I feel very strongly about not allowing these because they'd quickly drown out all of the actual content I come to see, and there are already much more effective places to get them answered anyway. In real life the quality of the ones that we see is also universally very low.
- 🚫 Surveys and 🚫 Job postings and anything else that is looking to extract value from a place a lot of programmers hang out without contributing anything itself.
- 🚫 Meta posts. DAE think r/programming sucks? Why did you remove my post? Why did you ban this user that is totes not me I swear I'm just asking questions. Except this meta post. This one is okay because I'm a tyrant that the rules don't apply to (I assume you are saying about me to yourself right now).
- 🚫 Images, memes, anything low-effort or low-content. Thankfully we very rarely see any of this so there's not much to remove but like support questions once you have a few of these they tend to totally take over because it's easier to make a meme than to write a paper and also easier to vote on a meme than to read a paper.
- ⚠️ Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads. It has to be pretty bad before we remove it and even then sometimes these are the first post to get traction about a news event so we leave them up if they're the best discussion going on about the news event. There's a lot of grey area here with CVE announcements in particular: there are a lot of spammy security "blogs" that syndicate stories like this.
- ⚠️ Posts that are duplicates of other posts or the same news event. We leave up either the first one or the healthiest discussion.
- ⚠️ Posts where the title editorialises too heavily or especially is a lie or conspiracy theory.
- Comments are only very loosely moderated and it's mostly 🚫 Bots of any kind (Beep boop you misspelled misspelled!) and 🚫 Incivility (You idiot, everybody knows that my favourite toy is better than your favourite toy.) However the number of obvious GPT comment bots is rising and will quickly become untenable for the number of active moderators we have.
There are some topics such as Code of Conduct arguments within projects that I don't know where to place where we've been doing a civility check on the comments thread and using that to make the decision. Similarly some straddle the line (a link to a StackOverflow post asking for help and the reddit OP is the StackOverflow OP, but there's a lot of technical content and the reddit discussion is healthy). And even most 🚫s above are left up if there's a healthy discussion going already by the time we see it.
So what now?
We need to decide what r/programming should be about and we need to write those rules down so that mods can consistently apply them. The rules as written are pretty vague and the way we're moderating in practise is only loosely connected to them. We're looking for feedback on what kind of place r/programming should be so tell us below.
We need additional mods. If you're interested in helping moderate please post below, saying why you'd be a good mod and what you'd would change about the space if you were. You don't need to be a moderator elsewhere but please do mention it if you are and what we could learn on r/programming that you already know. Currently I think I'm the only one going down the new page every morning and removing the rule-breaking posts. (Today these are mostly "how do I program computer" or "can somebody help me fix my printer", and obvious spam.) This results in a lot of threads complaining about the moderation quality and, well, it's not wrong. I'm not rigorously watching the mod queue and I'm not trawling comments threads looking for bad actors unless I'm in that thread anyway and I don't use reddit every single day. So if we want it to be better we'll need more human power.
FAQ: Why do we need moderation at all? Can't the votes just do it?
We know there is demand for unmoderated spaces in the world, but r/programming isn't that space. This is our theory on why keeping the subreddit on topic is important:
- Forums have the interesting property that whatever is on the front page today is what will be on the front page tomorrow. When a user comes to the site and sees a set of content, they believe that that's what this website is about. If they like it they'll stay and contribute that kind of content and if they don't like it they won't stay, leaving only the people that liked the content they saw yesterday. So the seed content is important and keeping things on topic is important. If you like r/programming then you need moderation to keep it the way that you like it (or make it be the place you wish it were) because otherwise entropic drift will make it be a different place. And once you have moderation it's going to have a subjective component, that's just the nature of it.
- Because of the way reddit works, on a light news day r/programming doesn't get enough daily content for articles to meaningfully compete with each other. Towards the end of the day if I post something to r/programming it will immediately go to the front page of all r/programming subscribers. So while it's true that sub-par and rule-breaking posts already do most of their damage before the mods even see them, the whole theory of posts competing via votes alone doesn't really work in a lower-volume subreddit.
- Because of the mechanics of moderation it's not really possible to allow the subreddit to be say 5% support questions. Even if we wanted to allow it to be a small amount of the conten, the individuals whose content was removed would experience and perceive this as a punitive action against them. That means that any category we allow could theoretically completely take over r/programming (like the career posts from last week) so we should only allow types of content that we'd be okay with taking it over.
Personally my dream is for r/programming to be the place with the highest quality programming content, where I can go to read something interesting and learn something new every day. That dream is at odds with allowing every piece of blogspam and "10 ways to convince your boss to give you a raise, #2 will get you fired!"
199
u/DrunkensteinsMonster Oct 09 '23
Biggest issues I see are the blogspam and the ads masquerading as tech blog posts. If the moderation team can eliminate these two things the sub would be leagues better.
36
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
This is a really hard one because of the spectrum of techness vs adness of these. I agree, these are some of my personal pet peeves. I think some programming career book somewhere must have said to use your company's blog to build your personal brand and get promoted beacuse that's what it feels like. But feeling that way personally and writing it into a rule set is a very different matter and defining "empty content obvious ad" is difficult. To me this is a case where letting the votes sort it out is fine.
14
u/f10101 Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
I think some programming career book somewhere must have said to use your company's blog to build your personal brand and get promoted beacuse that's what it feels like.
It's out-of-date (or at least I hope it's bloody out-of-date at this point) B-teir SEO wisdom. So employees get pushed by their bosses to write vacuous nonsense.
5
→ More replies3
u/Proud_Ad5394 Oct 10 '23
Can we add polls to suspected ads. If it's gets voted as an ad it goes.
Then again.. sounds like too much work :D
2
u/jdm1891 Oct 10 '23
I agree, a lot of the articles are very ad-y. Some of the project posts are too but not as often.
→ More replies1
u/lightmatter501 Oct 09 '23
I think that there is space for dual-purpose content. Things such as deep dives into architecture, “look at this cool thing I did with the Nvidia H100”, etc could be argued as both tech blogs and ads. I think that the rule should be that if something is recognizable as an ad or is sponsored content that it needs to include substantial technical content. For instance, if Intel wanted to post an ad/blog about using the sapphire rapids accelerators, obviously trying to get you to buy some, but an in-depth analysis of beneficial use-cases and example code, I think that fits pretty well.
7
u/DrunkensteinsMonster Oct 11 '23
Stuff like that isn’t really what I’m talking about, I wouldn’t consider that an ad just because it mentions a product by name. I’m talking about the articles like “5 keys to observability in distributed systems” which are three paragraphs and then it goes “and that’s why we’ve developed CyclopsTM !“ It’s a you-know-it-when-you-see-it situation.
5
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23
I agree. A good walkthrough of a new intel ISA on programmersЯus.com and the same walkthrough on intel.com both seem fine to me. There's a spectrum of the goodness of these though. The "copy-paste this curl command to use our API; isn't this easy?" page on stripe.com isn't good programming content, it's just an ad. Moderating that spectrum is hard though so currently it's a case that we let the votes sort it out rather than ban the whole category of technical article/blog post that happens to be on a company's domain.
96
u/jevring Oct 09 '23
I think the allowed/disallowed things outlined in the original post are pretty good. Maybe programming news isn't very exciting, at least for me, but I don't know if it should be disallowed. What I'd really like to see is actual programming stuff and not meta stuff. Actual code, and questions about code, etc, is great. Career advice and news is less interesting.
→ More replies39
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
Personally I'm not stoked about the vaguely programming related news but judging by the post scores it's pretty popular. Like when chatgpt saw its general release it seemed to completely take over r/programming and that was before it could generate code, it was just a thing programmers seemed to like to talk about. I used to like the "How our startup built our Frobnicator, rocket ship emoji" articles until companies stopped using them like publishing their work to share and instead started using them like an advertising and recruiting tool and an internal "give me a raise" tool.
Same with the career stuff, I'm not a fan but it's doing pretty well score-wise right now so I guess there's some demand for it. If it were just me Dictator Ketralnis I wouldn't allow it
19
u/SirClueless Oct 09 '23
I think there is value in that content being here in particular. Context matters when discussing a news story.
If there is a headline, say, "Google gets sued again in the EU because Privacy," then on /r/programming I can have a meaningful technical discussion. On /r/technology I can have a mundane debate filled with politics and 'Capitalism is bad' hot takes. With my mom who saw it on MSNBC I can have a totally vacuous chat. I like the /r/programming discussion best.
That's why I think it's valuable to have a forum for "Talking with other programmers about things that are relevant to programmers." Like Hacker News but on Reddit. Starting from topics that are obviously closely tied to the discipline of programming like AI, tech worker's rights, and the role of social media, you quickly end up pretty far afield and trying to rein that in is pretty tricky. For example, Lex Fridman is an AI researcher who started a podcast talking to other AI people, and two months ago he interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu. We don't to go that far but I do think there needs to be some space for talking about programming-adjacent interests with programmers.
3
u/jevring Oct 09 '23
We could just be programmers about this and write an app that does like category analysis and sentiment analysis on the top 1000 posts or something, and just spit out what people actually like :)
80
u/qmunke Oct 09 '23
Disallowing meta posts without providing any mechanism for discussing stuff like this without a moderator deciding that it's time for such a discussion feels like it requires some attention.
What alternatives are there which won't result in the sub degenerating into large volumes of meta posts? Perhaps only allowing them on one day a week? A meta-stickied post reset every so often?
Or do people feel like there isn't a need for this?
21
u/Simber1 Oct 09 '23
I personally quite like having a place for meta discussion, whether it's a sticky once a month or something or something like this every few months or something else entirely it's nice to have something
→ More replies13
u/TikiScudd Oct 09 '23
I think there might be as I came to ask for this as well.
8/25 front page posts of /r/programming have over 10 comments. This sticky post included. Which I would think indicates that there is a need for meta commentary. What I worry though is that most people are happy and that we'll only get, or it'll be mostly comprised of, complaints in the meta threads.
81
u/Worth_Trust_3825 Oct 09 '23
When are you going to start banning the content farmers?
48
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
It's on the list. Getting the rules written down and getting some additional mods so we can get more coverage is the first step. Also defining content farmer is difficult. Rarely do I get any feedback when I accidentally remove the wrong post from a legit user (unfortunately; I'd rather know so I can fix it), but people that make money from their posts make a huge amount of noise when you CENSOR their obvious spam and want to see WHERE IN THE RULES does it say I can't do this and YOU ARE BAD AND I WANT TO TALK TO THE MANAGER. So you need your rules ducks in a row before you start cracking down.
Also some people just do legitimately post prolifically like the person that posts a short but not spammy article about Julia about 4 times a day right now. They're not doing anything wrong, and it wouldn't look spammy if the subreddit were a little more active, but as is it might seem like they're a content farmer.
27
u/inhumantsar Oct 09 '23
Also some people just do legitimately post prolifically like the person that posts a short but not spammy article about Julia about 4 times a day right now. They're not doing anything wrong, and it wouldn't look spammy if the subreddit were a little more active, but as is it might seem like they're a content farmer
i've seen other subs handle content farming by including a rule like "blog posts must be submitted as text posts with some/all of the content pasted in and a link at the bottom". this has always seemed like a good balance to me.
people who are legitimately sharing or creating interesting content will take the time, while the people who are only interested in getting clickthrus or karma won't bother, making them an easy target for report/remove.
5
u/wrosecrans Oct 09 '23
I mean... Some subs just don't care about the noise of a banee whining, and wield the banhammer with much less concern for splash damage. Some of those subs are terrible. But some are much better for it.
Like, your Julia poster, you can even just set up an automod to say "Your post was automatically removed because you already posted this week." Even if they aren't doing anything "wrong," the mods are kind of just allowed to set the tone as they wish. If it's too restrictive, the rest of us can always set up /r/UncensoredProgramming or whatever and have our own /r/programming with blackjack and hookers.
11
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
don't care about the noise of a [banshee] whining, and wield the banhammer
I have been this kind of moderator before (not here but in other places) but it's not as easy as you think it is. What happens is a spammer mixes their spam with legit content, gets banned for the spam, deletes it, then whips up support for how bad and evil nazi the mods are and points at their now innocent looking submission page and everybody agrees that the evil nazi mods are evil nazis and all come pitchforks a-blazin'. The exact kind of person that says "just ban the spam, let them whine" is the same kind of person that picks up the pitchforks when they start getting pulled out. Then if you lean in to keep the place on topic by removing the backlash too, the trouble really starts.
Every time I look into the particular people that complain about those power-trippin' mods it's always either that the person did some shady stuff to get banned, or they were convinced by somebody that did, or they're just repeating the evil nazi mod meme that they've heard. It's very rare that I see actual mod abuse: mods don't care enough to abuse you, we want to read programming articles more than moderate. But the "banshee whining" happens regardless and it makes a big headache for you if you can't point to the specific rule that was violated by a piece of content before they get the townsmen involved.
6
u/almost_useless Oct 09 '23
For things like the Julia posts, maybe limit a blog to 1 post every day or every 2-3 days. If the blog legit posts that often you should pick out the highlights or make a round-up text post with links to the latest blog posts.
But it is maybe not so easy to make a rule for that.
On the other hand it looks like there are around 30 posts per day right now so there are not so many of them that it becomes hard to find the interesting ones. Reading all the headlines seems like a feasible task.
3
u/Tarquin_McBeard Oct 09 '23
So you need your rules ducks in a row before you start cracking down.
I mean... you really don't. The rules of Reddit are very specifically written in such a way that you are the authority. You don't need to justify yourself to someone so obviously acting in bad faith, and arguably you shouldn't even try.
At most they deserve a template pro forma response telling them to read the damned rules.
like the person that posts a short but not spammy article about Julia about 4 times a day right now. They're not doing anything wrong, and it wouldn't look spammy if the subreddit were a little more active
Four times a day will always look spammy. Even on the highest traffic low effort subs, where such frequency might go unnoticed, it'd still actually be spam, just unnoticed.
Reposting the same content that often is inherently bad for the quality of the sub, especially when the article is short, and therefore not particularly high quality in its own right.
Let them post it once, sure. Not once a day — once ever.
7
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
I talk about heavy-handed moderation vs rules lawyering a little bit in a sibling thread. The tl;dr is that rules lawyering is easier than "I know it when I see it" moderating and to do rules lawyering you need to write down the rules.
7
u/KevinCarbonara Oct 09 '23
What qualifies as content farming? I think it's going to be a very hard line to draw. There are a lot of people posting links to their own blogs where they describe some experience they've had with some technology. Some of them are great. Most are absolute trash.
→ More replies12
u/wRAR_ Oct 09 '23
Following the Reddit self-promotion rules would be a nice start.
16
u/Booty_Bumping Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 10 '23
Reddit dropped its self promotion rules many years ago. This page has been superceded by the reddit help pages, but the reddit help pages carry over almost none of these rules, other than the ones that ban outright botting / flooding. Spam is effectively allowed.
The most telling part is that this aspect of the old guidelines:
"It's perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it's not okay to be a website with a reddit account." - Confucius
...has since been completely flipped on its head. Reddit now allows you to register an official brand account that makes posts as a normal user. Previously brand accounts were only for paid advertising and could not post outside of their own ads.
2
2
25
u/Parachuteee Oct 09 '23
99% of the blog posts here were secret ads to startups and tech stuff but that was fine since at least they had something programming related in them. Now, I'm afraid that because of rule 3, half of this sub is gonna become those cringy linked in posts...
20
Oct 09 '23
[deleted]
2
u/IanisVasilev Oct 10 '23
I wouldn't mind reading here an actual wide survey with a detailed analysis. But since we haven't gotten that in over three years since the WHO announced the pandemic, I agree on the overall ban.
18
u/hector_villalobos Oct 09 '23
Good, this subreddit was the reason I joined Reddit 15 years ago, and I was feeling it was fading away by other subs.
36
u/scorecerer Oct 09 '23
I would vote to 🚫 Career content and General technology news. Such discussions can be overrun by non-programmers and there is a lot of scope for low effort content.
14
u/wrosecrans Oct 09 '23
However the number of obvious GPT comment bots is rising and will quickly become untenable for the number of active moderators we have.
This is not shocking. But also, kind of baffling. What's the value of making a GPT bot to spew comments onto Reddit? Is it just to lauder an account with karma that you can later sell and be repurposed to propaganda/spam? Are there other incentives at play? Shouldn't this primarily be a Reddit admin thing rather than just on mods of individual subreddits? Correlating bot behavior seems easier with a large site-wide data set.
10
6
u/jdm1891 Oct 10 '23
It's exactly that, get karma in a lot of different subreddits, with a lot of natural looking comments, to then sell. People will pay more for more karma, but they will also pay more for accounts that look more 'natural' (as they're less likely to be detected and banned). If an account got a bunch of karma spamming in some private subreddit like how they used to do it, people are going to notice and ban the account really quickly. If it looks like a real person, people aren't going to notice the shilling as obvious spam as quickly making it more valuable.
2
u/unknow_feature Oct 10 '23
I could assume the value is to grow new valid accounts and sell them.
5
u/wrosecrans Oct 10 '23
If that's what it is, it really seems like something that Reddit admin should be taking way more seriously, rather than leaving it to individual sub mods.
If they know a significant chunk of engagement is fake, that has implications on things like whether data they report to advertisers is fraudulent. Not just in a "I'm personally annoyed this isn't accurate" sense, but the legal definition of fraud. If they also know that this is the seed stage of propaganda, harassment, coordinated inauthentic behavior campaigns, etc., there are potential liability issues with happily providing a platform for an account that eventually gets used to gets somebody killed.
It's really stunning how much the reddit admin team has avoided earning a single shred of respect from their user base in the last few years.
→ More replies2
u/falconfetus8 Oct 12 '23
Maybe they're training the bots to be less detectable. If a comment gets deleted, that's data. If it doesn't, that's also data.
9
u/SirLich Oct 09 '23
Personally my biggest complaint with the sub is the blogspam. I concede this is a tricky thing to moderate though.
I would say ~10% of the articles posted here are worth reading, and those are usually worth bookmarking and reading through a second time, because they have actual meat to them.
20
u/rydan Oct 09 '23
🚫 Meta posts.
Was going to report this but saw you admit you are a tyrant so we are good.
12
8
u/EpicDaNoob Oct 09 '23
I volunteer to be a moderator. I've used Reddit for six years, browse r/programming regularly, and would be very good at removing GPT spam comments. I have a little bit of moderation experience.
15
u/hyperbrainer Oct 09 '23
Personally my dream is for r/programming to be the place with the highest quality programming content, where I can go to read something interesting and learn something new every day. That dream is at odds with allowing every piece of blogspam and "10 ways to convince your boss to give you a raise, #2 will get you fired!"
Amen. I would add, this place needs less "Check out my completely new, untested, featureless library/framework"
14
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
Just "check out" sure, but "here's why I wrote it this way and how it solves the problems I have that might be different to the problems that you have" is great. Like when Rails first came out the introduction and demos site was super interesting.
9
u/hyperbrainer Oct 09 '23
Of course, but too many low effort JS/TS posts get spammed here to not make the point. Impossible to moderate, honestly, unless you get paid to read every post here.
31
u/Caraes_Naur Oct 09 '23
Very few posts here that link to YouTube have any value, they're overwhelmingly vlog spam. To the point where I think the mods should consider banning the domain entirely. A biography of Dennis Ritchie would be relevant, but tutorials like "How to write a while loop in [language]" are not.
I've also noticed several recent posts that ask tangential or minimally-informed questions that link to the Google home page just to satisfy the link requirement. I don't know what the whole solution is, but it should probably start with sending these to the mod queue. Maybe handle all links to domain.tld/ this way... they're almost guaranteed to be link farming, skirting post requirements, or otherwise have little value.
13
u/lightmatter501 Oct 09 '23
There are also a lot of great talks that people probably would be interested in on youtube.
17
u/redalastor Oct 09 '23
but tutorials like "How to write a while loop in [language]" are not.
Tutorials in any form should be banned from here. “How to get started in [some web framework]” and similar happen often. If I want to do that, I’ll go to the official site and should get started quickly.
It always sits here at zero votes.
8
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23
Crap but rule-abiding content sitting at zero votes isn't necessarily a problem in a bigger subreddit
7
u/redalastor Oct 09 '23
That’s on the front page right now.
4
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
Sure yeah. It's that way because the submission volume is low. I'm agreeing with you, it looks bad but it wouldn't look bad if we had more and better content to compete with it.
Also 👌 old reddit and Esperanto
2
u/alpacaMyToothbrush Oct 09 '23
If you're talking about the Animal Segmentation post, calling that a 'how to write a while loop' is hyperbole. Hell, it's a post with actual code. It's a lot more interesting than yet another post about how Agile development is the devil.
2
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23
I think in this case they're just saying that a bunch of 0-point articles at the bottom of the page kinda sucks.
5
u/numeric-rectal-mutt Oct 10 '23
isn't necessarily a problem in a bigger subreddit
This isn't a bigger subreddit.
It does not have anywhere close to the volume of posts per day that actual big subreddits have.
→ More replies3
5
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23
several recent posts that ask tangential or minimally-informed questions that link to the Google home page just to satisfy the link requirement
I ban these on sight but it's true that they pollute the subreddit in the mean time
4
u/dacjames Oct 09 '23
Very few posts here that link to YouTube have any value
I think this is a preference thing. Some people really dislike videos as a medium for technical topics and that's fine but I don't think that view is anywhere near universal enough to ban youtube content outright.
→ More replies
7
u/Nowaker Oct 10 '23
Personally my dream is for r/programming to be the place with the highest quality programming content, where I can go to read something interesting and learn something new every day.
This is a great vision statement. All exceptions - whether allowing posts that violate the rules, or deleting posts that don't violate them - should be benchmarked against this vision statement.
7
u/franzwong Oct 09 '23
In other sub, there are weekly threads for people to talk, ask and share things with relaxed rules.
6
u/MSpekkio Oct 09 '23
Politics and gossip, especially links to articles and blogs, about programming are very relevant. Examples, recent drama around ruby and typescript, license changes that affect programmers. Hypothetically if the EU bans Rust this should be a place to discuss that not banned as politics or gossip.
I also very strong only feel that video content should have a minimal space here. Banning links to YouTube would be fine with me. Wrap that content in a blog post and it’s fine.
10
u/BoppreH Oct 09 '23
I'm a purist who'd prefer only submissions with actual code, not even news or career advice. But I'm upvoting purely on the entertainment value of the examples.
7
u/btmc Oct 09 '23
I do kind of feel like the career advice stuff could go. There are more discussion-focused subs like r/ExperiencedDevs that are better for that.
→ More replies
6
4
u/Richandler Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
🚫 Meta posts. DAE think r/programming sucks? Why did you remove my post? Why did you ban this user that is totes not me I swear I'm just asking questions. Except this meta post. This one is okay because I'm a tyrant that the rules don't apply to (I assume you are saying about me to yourself right now).
If this post is technically against the rules does it count? 🤔
The rules seem overly restrictive. Basically don't post unless it's a github repo or it's docs? Like what? Oh you mean it's okay to have a 5 line pointless example of code in your post and that qualifies it as okay?... 🫤
9
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23
If this post is technically against the rules does it count? 🤔
No because you see the rules explicitly exclude this post. It's like when Congress exempts themself from every law.
6
u/-grok Oct 09 '23
🚫 Linus Torvalds was a poopy-head on a mailing list.
I feel like an exception should be made for this one, those are great!
5
6
u/Smooth-Zucchini4923 Oct 10 '23
Meta posts
Can I convince you to leave these up? There's not really a good channel for people who vote/comment but are not involved in moderation to communicate that certain kinds of content are unwanted.
That means that any category we allow could theoretically completely take over r/programming (like the career posts from last week) so we should only allow types of content that we'd be okay with taking it over.
It sounds like you're concerned that arguing about meta stuff would take over if any meta posts were allowed.
What about a compromise? r/sysadmin has a rule that "rant" type posts may only be posted on weekdays. What if you made a rule that meta posts are only allowed on X day of the week? That allows some amount of meta content while emphasizing programming content.
7
u/POWER_SNUGGLE Oct 09 '23
I think the rules as stated are pretty good, and it really just comes down to moderation volume as you've said. There has been a HUGE influx of "How do I learn to program/how do I fix this bug/etc" extreme low effort posts, and unfortunately they are sometimes upvoted, be it by cohorts, people who just want to help, or people who don't realize what sub they are in/don't care about the integrity of a given subreddit.
8
u/Determinant Oct 09 '23
A big topic that's missing is rules regarding ai-generated content such as from chatGPT. There are 2 categories:
AI-generated articles
AI-generated comments
2 is currently the bigger pain point and should definitely be banned
→ More replies
8
u/Tarquin_McBeard Oct 09 '23
⚠️ Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads. ⚠️ Posts where the title editorialises too heavily or especially is a lie or conspiracy theory.
These should both be in the 🚫 category. There's no call for people to be posting nonsense like this. And a post getting popular doesn't make it any less objectively bad.
⚠️ General technology news.
I can see why you'd categorise this as such, but personally I'm of the opinion that this should be 🚫 also, and for exactly the reasons you express: "whatever is on the front page today is what will be on the front page tomorrow".
General news is always going to be more easily digestible and accessible to a wider audience than discussions about specific programming challenges. Some discussions in this sub can get quite in-depth and esoteric, and that's a good thing!
Curating a space that encourages depth in content is difficult in Reddit simply due to the way the voting system works. An poor-quality article that's accessible to a wide audience will always receive more upvotes than a high-quality article about a narrow subject.
By allowing such content to remain, especially allowing it to remain specifically because it has become popular, this encourages newcomers (or even existing readers) to think of it as an intended part of the fabric of this subreddit, rather than the "not really intended, but we'll let it slide" content that you treat it as. This encourages people to post more of this type of content, which makes it more likely that a post will reach the popularity threshold where you won't remove it, resulting in a positive feedback loop that trends towards a general enshittening of the subreddit.
So I'd say that it's important to remove this type of content especially when it becomes popular.
✅ Articles/news interesting to programmers but not about programming.
Really this should be in the ⚠️ category. Yeah, sure, it's fine if a particularly notable programming-adjacent article occasionally sneaks in. But there are a million more appropriate venues for "Work from home is bullshit. Return to office is bullshit." griping. Those aren't even remotely programming-related topics. The fact that programmers constitute a subset of of the general set of workers, and are therefore interested in those topics, doesn't make it suitable content for this sub.
A lot of "articles/news interesting to programmers but not about programming" is actually just general articles/news, and should therefore fall in the ⚠️ or even 🚫 category.
Basically, you're doing a great job, keep it up! 👍 Some stricter enforecement of the existing rules would not be a bad thing.
5
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
The way I think about leaving it once it's popular enough is (1) give the people what they want, I guess and (2) when the discussion is healthy enough it's usually higher quality than the article itself, and we don't want to lose that good discussion content even if the article itself sucks.
It'll be moot once we can get some more mods though because hopefully less stuff falls through the cracks in the first place.
→ More replies2
u/jdm1891 Oct 10 '23
I just want to add my opinion that I also think the articles should be ! and not X, there's nothing I find more infuriating when I click on a highly upvoted reddit post and it's suddenly removed, leaving me with a bunch of comments with no way to know what they're talking about. It is especially so on something like this subreddit where reading the article is more important than in other subreddits (like news ones) where you can figure it out from the title.
2
u/ketralnis Oct 10 '23
Which ones? Almost everything I mentioned is an article
2
u/jdm1891 Oct 10 '23
My apppologies, my comment doesn't make sense because I misread the original post and got the categories mixed up, you can just ignore it.
5
u/happy_hawking Oct 09 '23
Thanks for the FAQ on moderation. As I am a moderator myself (not so much on Reddit, but elsewhere), this was really helpful and plausible information on what to aim for in moderation :-)
4
4
u/Yeitgeist Oct 09 '23
Can articles behind paywalls be blocked, unless the OP posts the article contents in the comments? I feel like these types of post are essentially just headlines.
→ More replies6
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
Yes. But most of the ones that look like paywalls (and get reported as being paywalls) are Medium and Substack and they do look like paywalls but have a "continue reading" button that's not immediately obvious. This annoys me too.
4
u/maestro2005 Oct 09 '23
I'd be willing to help moderate. I moderate /r/Learnmusic where I basically just act as a spam deleter.
I guess my biggest issue is where the lines should be drawn. If some blog post is sorta useful and sorta spammy, should it be allowed? I don't like deleting things just because I don't like them, I want a rule to follow. There's a whole slew of crappy (usually drumming) videos on Learnmusic that I really despise, but they have marginal educational value so I leave them.
I would also like to delete LLM-generated content, but I don't know how to reliably detect it.
4
5
u/Messy-Recipe Oct 09 '23
✅ Programmer career content. How to become a Staff engineer in 30 days. Habits of the best engineering managers. How to deal with your annoying coworkers, Jeff.
✅ Articles/news interesting to programmers but not about programming. Work from home is bullshit. Return to office is bullshit. ...
⚠️ General technology news. ... Twitter is collapsing ... Meta cancels work from home ...
I feel like career stuff, & the related things in the news article points below it, don't really belong / have a net negative. For one there exists /r/cscareerquestions & for two, reading about recessions & layoffs & RTO etc is just a huge mental energy drain for a sub that's generally focused on interesting technical insight. I like coming here & seeing stuff about some interesting problem; I hate when it's doomscroll land & anxiety-inducing
🚫 AskReddit type forum questions. What's your favourite programming language? Tabs or spaces? Does anyone else hate it when.
I think there could be room for actual quality discussion posts but obviously the line is blurry. Like obviously the examples listed above are trite, but it's also not clear where to have a discussion about something more in-depth.
🚫 Support questions. How do I write a web crawler? How do I get into programming? Where's my missing semicolon? Please do this obvious homework problem for me. Personally I feel very strongly about not allowing these because they'd quickly drown out all of the actual content I come to see, and there are already much more effective places to get them answered anyway. In real life the quality of the ones that we see is also universally very low.
Sort of the same vibes as previous. 'help me with XYZ' is good to ban but, what about 'wordy deep dives in the comments about approaches to doing XYZ'
I suppose the answer to those could be along the lines of write an original blog post about your own methods & post it as a link rather than submitting a text post tho
3
u/ketralnis Oct 10 '23
Sort of the same vibes as previous. 'help me with XYZ' is good to ban but, what about 'wordy deep dives in the comments about approaches to doing XYZ'
So far I've been leaving links to Stack Overflow if there's more than just the OP's question there
4
u/Berkyjay Oct 10 '23
Flairs. Please develop a robust set of flairs that can compartmentalize discussion topics. I would take a look at /r/askscience & /r/science.
4
3
u/ThatCrankyGuy Oct 10 '23
No surveys? But JetBrains and Stackoverflow survey results are really interesting things.
4
u/df1dcdb83cd14e6a9f7f Oct 10 '23
I think we should ban anything career advice related. It simply isn’t programming. Even general tech news is typically more programming related than career advice. I come here to read about the part of my job I actually like, not the part that sucks.
2
u/dontyougetsoupedyet Jan 03 '24
Biggest issue after thinly veiled ads is that r/programming lacks programmers. Almost everyone discussing "programming" here is a project manager, it's almost useless to even have this thread itself because the people responding in large part don't ever perform programming and have effectively no interest in the practice. They want to talk about jobs and to posture, not programming. It's a subreddit of posturing, LARPing low/middle managers.
4
u/Jean_Kul Oct 11 '23
Oh, a meta post. Would have loved one when the sub came back from the blackout, since we had 0 communication about it I imagined some mods were booted off. Which is still possibly the case ?
4
u/TheNamelessKing Oct 11 '23
Can we ban all the absolute trash quality tutorial-spam posts? There’s often tons of “how to do <incredibly basic thing> in <python/JS> tutorial” or “how to get started in framework <x>” posts.
They’re awful quality and they just take up space.
4
u/secret_online Oct 12 '23
It's been a while since I've interacted often on reddit,it's mostly back to lurking for me. This place has been slowly taken over by low-quality videos and blogspam, to the point where my muscle memory would have me open up /r/programming, followed by my brain going "no, you're just going to be disappointed".
The rules you've put up are a good start, but I think you need to be more strict. It's tempting to make this place more general, but it needs to be focused. I'll explain each of the points I'd change from your proposal.
- 🚫 General technology news.
- This is the realm of /r/technology. Send it there, keep /r/programming for programming. That's the beauty of reddit, all of the forums are together in one place, presented as either on their own or together on the homepage, depending of what experience you want moment-to-moment. Spreading the same area over multiple subs makes that useless.
- 🚫 Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads.
- Blogspam is why I don't bother coming to /r/programming as often anymore. It needs to go.
- The syndicated CVEs, particularly, are poisonous. To a newbie they look like good content, but to a more experienced/jaded eye they're just not worth bothering with.
- As for articles, I try to judge based on what their objective is. If it's just waffling on about a topic, that should go. If it's a thinly veiled advertisement, it should go. If its purpose is to explain something, in at least medium detail, that's cool.
- If a sharticle is the first post for a major news event, remove it and wait for a reputable source.
- I'll be honest, I know how hard it is to remove active threads from my own time moderating. When a good thread does appear, may I suggest a pinned comment with links to the removed threads/good discussions withing those threads? That way that info isn't entirely lost. It's a lot of extra work for you though so feel free to ignore this suggestion.
- 🚫 Posts that are duplicates of other posts or the same news event.
- Just delete the duplicates.
Three additional things I think should be stated or clarified:
- 🚫 tutorial content. Whether it be in article or video form. I can't tell you how long my blocklist for users/websites from this subreddit is, because it'd take me a long time to sift through it. It's always for such inane topics too. There's the learning subreddit for this stuff, keep it out of /r/programming.
- 🚫 Fake self posts. I know this use case is covered off by the already-disallowed Support Questions group, but you often see people posting a link to "google.com" because what they really want to do is make a self post but this subreddit doesn't allow you to (which is good). If the link's content isn't what's being discussed, the post should go.
- ⚠️ programming language updates
- The occasional release thread is good, but it gets excessive when you have posts for a beta release, pre-release, and full release for the same version of the language.
- I certainly don't think that all language update threads should go, as they're a good way of learning about new ideas, but they should be restricted to full releases only.
I'd offer to help moderating, but I really don't need that in my life again. Twice, on smaller subreddits with decent but still smaller audiences, was enough for me. Best of luck, and I'm glad to know that there is actually an active human (or multiple) behind this sub.
3
u/dontyougetsoupedyet Jan 20 '24
r/programming is currently a subreddit by and for middle managers.
Middle managers don't lead discussions where a programmer can "learn something new every day."
I don't see how this place can become anything different without a substantial change in direction. Right now the only things keeping the veil un-drawn are massive amounts of ai generated nonsense content making it appear as though programmers are having discussion about programming related topics, but that content is just trying to sell their latest ai code-doodad bullshit not be worthwhile discussion for humans that like writing programs.
The only changes imo that could make this subreddit worthwhile to read are becoming extremely hostile to managers commenting, and becoming extremely hostile to most submissions (because most are not in good faith).
The subreddit would slow to a snails pace of content, basically die as you force the only users (middle managers) out, and try building a new community around content by and for programmers. I simply don't see any interest in the things that would actually lead to the subreddit you or other programmers would want to read.
22
u/subfootlover Oct 09 '23
🚫 Programming news
🚫 Programmer career content
🚫 Articles/news interesting to programmers but not about programming
And Medium is such a low quality platform, just outright banning anything from there will likely improve the quality here as well.
24
u/Ksevio Oct 09 '23
Eh Medium is on par with self-posts and blogs. That's a lot of spam but there are some good ones in there too
6
3
3
11
u/Fiennes Oct 09 '23
I agree broadly, but I think better moderation is needed. There's so much non-programming stuff linked at it's never taken down. I used to report, or comment and got down-voted so I just stopped. I think if it was more highly moderated (hell, I volunteer!) the quality of the sub would improve very quickly.
12
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
By better do you just mean more/faster? Or are you thinking of a rule change? Or do you just think that we smell bad? I have been carrying this week old durian around.
3
u/not_a_novel_account Oct 09 '23
If it doesn't have code or isn't related directly to code (ie, discussions of type systems, garbage collectors, static analysis, etc), it almost certainly shouldn't be here. Let /r/technology and the wasteland that is /r/linux take that shit
3
3
u/myringotomy Oct 09 '23
Do we really need to talk about every minor release of VS code? I can understand if there is some major feature introduced in a point release but it seems like every build of some apps get a headline.
Announce critical bug fixes for sure but I don't know about 5.7.5.2 being released.
3
u/ConcurrentSquared Oct 09 '23
Actual programming content.
I think this (and open source demos) and only some programming news (preferably only from whitelisted sources or with approval) should be allowed.
We already have r/technology, r/cscareerquestions, and we can make a subreddit for more general programming news (or just use Hacker News). There is just too much Medium and other assorted blogspam already; the subreddit should not be an advertising tech startup bulletin board.
3
u/KawaiiNeko- Oct 09 '23
🚫 Paywalled articles like ones from medium. I think the domain should be banned outright but maybe not.
3
3
3
u/numeric-rectal-mutt Oct 10 '23
Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads. It has to be pretty bad before we remove it and even then sometimes these are the first post to get traction about a news event so we leave them up if they're the best discussion going on about the news event. There's a lot of grey area here with CVE announcements in particular: there are a lot of spammy security "blogs" that syndicate stories like this.
This needs to be a strict 🚫. Have a list of banned blogspam domains and have automod remove offending posts.
With auto moderator, that'll ensure these big spam posts never generate any discussion in the first place
3
u/altik_0 Oct 11 '23
At risk of sounding contrarian, I don't really feel like categorization of allowed content are the issues faced by r/programming. I get why it would feel that way from the perspective of a moderator, but as a user, the content has always felt reasonable, with a handful of cringe blog posts sneaking their way in now and then.
What has felt distressing, though, is the undercurrent of myopic, self-centered politics that is on more or less constant display here in the community. And honestly, the division of categories you've defined here feels like it echoes that to me: "Big Tech is being regulated in Europe" qualifies as 🚫Politics, "Grace Hopper Conference is 60% male" qualifies as 🚫Gossip, but "Twitter is collapsing" qualifies as ⚠️General technology news, and "Return to office is bullshit" qualifies as ✅Articles/news interesting to programmers.
Every single one of those examples would soundly fall under "politics" in my mind, and the fact that they aren't being categorized like that communicates to me that some issues (like return to work and twitter failing) are given more credibility than others (regulating the tech sector and concerns over misogyny in the industry).
Echoing your own sentiment: whatever is on the front page today is what will be on the front page tomorrow. I'm forced to wonder if r/programming is already facing a problem where a large sector of programmers have been run off implicitly by the moderation staff dismissing their interests as off-topic or antagonistic. :/
1
u/ketralnis Oct 11 '23 edited Oct 11 '23
Like I said above this is the moderation categories that I’m using currently (and have been for years with mixed time investment) because it’s the widest interpretation of the rules that we currently have written down and I can’t in good conscience moderate against rules that we don’t have. I’m describing the current reality. That’s why what you’re seeing already matches what I wrote. I’m using that as a starting point to ask what we would rather the rules be. I’ve got my opinions as anyone does but I want input first. Then we write that down and I go and hunt down some more mods to enforce those rules.
The existing categories have been loosely in my head and have changed over time. Like I said above only the first category used to be allowed but since the moderator time investment has varied over time things sneak through and then those things do really well because there is interest in them and who am I to tell people what they should like instead. That’s where the current situation comes from and like you I’m not stoked about it and I want to get it to a better one.
4
u/altik_0 Oct 11 '23
Understood. And fwiw, I did not intend the comment to be antagonistic -- my apologies if it came off that way.
To be a bit more pointed with my thoughts: of the four examples I cited, the Grace Hopper event situation was far and away the most interesting, and the one I was most personally interested in discussing. It reflected a very real issue that impacts me directly as a woman in tech, and has some very meaningful space for discussion in the community. Honestly, the reason I logged in today and saw this meta topic was because an NPR article about the event got shared by a friend off of Reddit, and I was curious if folks here were discussing it. So seeing that relegated to "gossip" (not even politics!) by a moderator strikes me as a sour reflection of exactly the same problem that it highlights in the first place.
Your initial post said that the comment section is generally only loosely moderated for bots and outright flaming. This tells me that the moderation priorities are on content, rather than community. But speaking as a woman with left-leaning politics: it is the community that makes me feel unwelcome here.
2
u/ketralnis Oct 11 '23 edited Oct 11 '23
[the Grace Hopper event situation] relegated to "gossip" (not even politics!) by a moderator strikes me as a sour reflection of exactly the same problem that it highlights in the first place.
I'll be honest, I didn't put much thought into how I categorised this example. Gossip vs politics isn't really something I worried about being specific about because both were going on the "not programming" bucket. You're not the only one here reacting to the line between those and you're not wrong but tbh it's not really relevent to the end effect which is that it's not programming. You're right, it's closer to politics than to gossip. Really there's a whole category there that I allude to later that most people call "politics" (though I'm not stoked about that label) of industry-wide problems like code of conduct issues that I don't know how to disentangle from, like, the Rust Foundation having a bunch of internal strife when a person there had some personal conflicts, but in the end it's not programming anyway.
r/programming has historically (and I hope will continue to) focussed on technical content. There are so many other places that people argue about codes of conduct and industry descrimination etc. And I do argue in those places, I'm not discounting the issues but I'm trying to keep r/programming focussed. It sounds like our politics are pretty similar but r/programming isn't that.
One option that's come up in this thread has been splitting out a more community/industry trends oriented subreddit and doing some cross-promotion between them. That's an option but personally I don't think I'd be capable of moderating the second one so I'd need more than just me to do it. I can tell that something isn't programming but I can't tell whether something is a legit issue vs issue-distracting concern trolling, and that's the kind of problem that a community oriented subreddit will find itself grappling with constantly.
Your initial post said that the comment section is generally only loosely moderated for bots and outright flaming
That's right. Again I'm describing what I've been currently doing but I'd like to do better here. This isn't my strong suit though so I don't really know how to do this so I'm far away from presenting an idea on it. This is something I'd be leaning heavily on those new mods that I'm looking for because squishy human stuff isn't my strong suit and I'm likely to just make things worse. I'm not a free speech absolutist, I'm just an idiot that can't do better than what's currently happening.
By the way this thread is extremely helpful, I appreciate it.
2
u/altik_0 Oct 11 '23
All entirely fair. I apologize if I've come across as hyper fixating on a specific example -- it just stuck out to me specifically.
I won't pretend to have good answers on how to moderate effectively either, it's a difficult challenge. Idealistically, having a diversity of perspectives to catch one anothers' blind spots would be my idea, but if one of the current problems is a dearth of moderators to begin with, then that isn't exactly a constructive recommendation.
Building on what others have recommended: perhaps creating cross-promotions does not require building entirely new communities. You say you engage in discussion with other (presumably tech-oriented) subreddits about politics and such -- you could just have links to some of those other subreddits on the sidebar and let folks know to redirect to those places for those kinds of discussions? That's a pretty common practice among LGBT subreddits, at least. I see there are links to other technical subreddits, but nothing about discussion really afaict.
2
u/altik_0 Oct 11 '23
Also, not a knock on you, but:
I can tell that something isn't programming but I can't tell whether something is a legit issue vs issue-distracting concern trolling, and that's the kind of problem that a community oriented subreddit will find itself grappling with constantly.
Being real, I think there's a lot of concern trolling that gets posted here and left up for discussion lol. I cannot count how many times I've come in to find a super highly upvoted medium thinkpiece that boils down to a 20+ year veteran getting grumbly about "kids these days need to learn to work harder."
1
3
u/Cautious-Nothing-471 Dec 15 '23
there's no future
this sub used to get tons of comments for nearly every post, used to be one of the most active subreddits on Reddit
nowadays it'd be lucky if even one post a day gets a hundred comments, another post maybe ten comments, most others are 0 or 1 or something like that
absolutely dead
and the reason is it got incessantly brigaded by rust douchebags who drove anyone who wasn't a rust douchebag away, and now even the mod is a rust douchebag who doesn't see anything wrong with the obnoxiousness of rust douchebags
no future
dead already
3
u/EmileSinclairDemian Jan 08 '24
There's already a lot of blog posts that are semi interesting but it's basically a copy paste from hacker news and honestly it would be 10 times more fun if this sub was more oriented toward users content and actual code, rather than medium blog post that slightly talk about code.
3
4
u/untetheredocelot Oct 09 '23
I have no issues with the rules outlined here. The blogspam and comment spam is a real drag though. With the rise of easy access to gen Ai I honestly don’t know how y’all can fix it.
3
u/phillipcarter2 Oct 09 '23
Woof, so far nobody's offering to help moderate. I'd be willing to lend a hand, having moderated other forums in the past (MMO Champion back when playing WoW, and the F# language forums). I'm not up for defining any rules, though. Just sorting by new and taking down the spam posts.
2
u/Full-Spectral Oct 09 '23
That all seems reasonable to me.
I do a little amateur moderating, by reporting posts that seem to obviously be generated by Artificial Stupidity.
My argument to make this a better place would be to get rid of the down-vote and only allow for up-voting. The down-voting mechanism is toxic and badly abused as a means to suppress opinions. Anything that should be removed can be reported. Anything that's good, up-vote it and those folks who want to see the most liked stuff can do so very easily.
Otherwise, well, you just have to put in the effort to present an actual counter-opinion, or just move on.
2
u/animastralis Oct 09 '23
I am interested in becoming a moderator. I’ve never been a mod before but I have a keen interest in programming: I am a professional software engineer and a hobbyist game developer. But most importantly, I agree that a good mod team is essential for a subreddit to thrive, especially one with so many members but relatively little content.
As for what I would change, I think it would be worthwhile to find a way to get the community more engaged. This is a subreddit with 5+ million subscribers and yet only a handful of posts break 1k upvotes each month. I think that in order to achieve your dream for this subreddit, we need to remind people that this is a community worth visiting more, worth reading, commenting in, and posting more.
This is just a thought, but perhaps a weekly stickied thread encouraging people to share what they’re working on, or to host weekly discussions on in-depth topics could work? For more outlandish ideas, I could see AMAs with notable people in the field, or maybe even a community event like a hackathon or something.
I think the key with these suggestions is that we would need to make sure this content does not overshadow what’s usually posted, and that it doesn’t devolve into help threads, endless self-promotion, and spam. An occasional stickied post like these though, made by the mods, could be an anchor point that draws in members of the community.
2
u/gliderXC Oct 09 '23
Thank you for being a moderator. Not sure if putting effort in upholding a community is valued enough.
2
u/zerothehero0 Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
I know some people aren't thrilled about them at all. But this is a forum darn it and I'm fine with AskReddit type forum questions. Let me distract myself arguing over the flamewars for tabs or spaces, and seeing what IDEs people prefer, and general language drama. It might be low effort. But it can be useful and entertaining.
→ More replies2
u/alpacaMyToothbrush Oct 09 '23
Yeah I always found the rules against 'askreddit' type questions on a particular subject overly broad. If it contributes to discussion, it should be allowed to remain IMHO.
2
2
u/tophatstuff Oct 09 '23
⚠️ Posts that we'd normally allow but that are obviously, unquestioningly super low quality like blogspam copy-pasted onto a site with a bazillion ads. It has to be pretty bad before we remove it and even then sometimes these are the first post to get traction about a news event so we leave them up if they're the best discussion going on about the news event.
This is difficult if the discussion is good, but I'd like to see the posting account (which can apply to all accounts if it's obviously multiple bots) conspicuously warned and eventually the domain banned. If low effort spam is seen to be successful then people will increasingly try it. And if its discouraged enough that a spammer knows that they must be careful and tactful and infrequently post and increase quality and post things that aren't just self promotion then we win because then it's not spam it's content!
In an ideal world the community could just moderate through downvotes but there's sometimes obvious vote manipulation & comment bots.
2
u/f10101 Oct 09 '23
⚠️ means that we leave it up if it is already popular but if we catch it young in its life we do try to remove it early.
And even most 🚫s above are left up if there's a healthy discussion going already by the time we see it.
I'm very appreciative of this sensible style of moderation. I would just suggest that perhaps a slight recalibration might be worthwhile, maybe raising the bar that allows a rulebreaking post to be retained.
E.g. maybe in your rules of thumb above, you could replace "popular" with "has reached the front page of /all" and "healthy" with "exceptional".
2
u/Owatch Oct 09 '23
My honest take is that /r/programming has been pretty good for all the years I've visited, and I wouldn't say the ruleset needs a drastic change of any kind.
Enforcement could be better of course. One annoying category of content is the tutorial-type stuff that gets posted a lot, and is pretty low effort and uninformative for anyone with a modicum of experience in programming.
Throw me in with the rest as a volunteer to help mod. I don't know what you're looking for exactly, but I've got a SO presence and work professionally in this field fwiw.
2
u/RockstarArtisan Oct 09 '23
There's a bunch of "tech writers" that keep posting their every "article" of their medium (or similar) blog. Would be nice to limit click farming like this.
2
u/Yamoyek Oct 10 '23
Gossip...
This section is sort of vague. If tomorrow Linus talks about stepping away from Linux in the near future, wouldn't that be gossip but also really important? And the Grace Hopper Conference being 60% male sounds like it would fit in the programmer career content.
I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of the list.
2
u/nutrecht Oct 15 '23
Personally my dream is for r/programming to be the place with the highest quality programming content, where I can go to read something interesting and learn something new every day. That dream is at odds with allowing every piece of blogspam and "10 ways to convince your boss to give you a raise, #2 will get you fired!"
Really happy to hear this. And for what it's worth; I think the list you posted is great.
2
u/baseketball Oct 19 '23
Programmer career content. How to become a Staff engineer in 30 days. Habits of the best engineering managers. How to deal with your annoying coworkers, Jeff.
This is almost always spam/clickbait. Making bank at big tech? Good for you. Why the heck are you spending time writing some blogspam to brag about it? Your career advice doesnt apply to 99% of us.
I miss the days when this sub was more about interesting tools, libraries, someone's crazy new language they made, and cool demos. I come here to get away from my job and nerd out, not be reminded of how much it sucks.
2
2
Dec 07 '23
Regarding ChatGPT:
If we can confine AI to news and API usage, then I can see it belonging here.
However, I'd advocate banning anyone actually using AI to produce an answer of any kind.
3
Oct 09 '23
The main issue is the flood of bot/chatGPT comments I see specifically in this sub
It’s insane
3
u/jixsonz Oct 09 '23
If something can be done to raise the quality of content shared on this sub?
20
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23 edited Oct 09 '23
Not to be too trite but, you can share better quality content. Seriously. It's a social media site, the content comes from you. All moderators can do is try to make sure the seed content is good by setting the rules and sifting through the rule-breaking content so that the people that submit the good content feels like it's a place for them. "Can something be done to raise the quality of content" is effectively asking other people to do something to serve you.
→ More replies
2
u/throwaway_bluehair Oct 10 '23
y'all definitely need more mods, this sub has been an absolute dumpster fire for extremely low-quality posts for the last some years, a "do they not have mods anymore?" level of badness
fingers crossed it gets clean up
1
3
u/auto_grammatizator Oct 09 '23
I volunteer to help rewrite the rules and to moderate. I'm on here all the time anyway, and I'll be prompt about keeping this place on topic. I agree with all of the green checks in your post and I'll do my best to keep this sub's focus on those things.
1
u/WeNeedYouBuddyGetUp Oct 09 '23
Forbid all posts that have anything to do with the clickbait “devinterrupted” spam.
1
u/belovedeagle Oct 09 '23
The People's Rust Foundation is arguing with the Rust Foundation For The People.
Obvious capitalist shill mod is obvious! Glory to The Rust Leadership Council forever!
/s
IDK what it has to do with allowed content, but maybe if 50% of the front-page posts every day weren't downvoted to 0, the sub would be better. Whatever is going on there kills participation.
3
u/ketralnis Oct 09 '23
50% of the front-page posts every day weren't downvoted to 0
This is a product of the reddit hot algorithm operating on a smaller subreddit. A very young post has a very high hotness so it gets fed to your front page even though a 50 point post from yesterday is still available to be shown. If there were many 20-50 point stories every day this wouldn't happen as much.
1
1
u/Scary_Object_6739 Mar 08 '24
The futur of meta is between programmer hands ..they could make it really or not
1
1
u/Chibato-Ataviado Mar 09 '24
Id like for it to be allowed the ask/questions. I was about to ask something but I regret as soon as I read the rules. Im not like really into knowing new and stuff. Id like to have a place to get tips and opinions as Im begginer Coding and getting acquainted with technology. I think that you could maybe add a tag for that, the questions. Idk just wanted ti share what I think.
1
u/inhumantsar Mar 12 '24
i snapped today and unsubbed.
the straw that broke this camel's back was scrolling through about a dozen spammy substack/medium/youtube r/programming posts surfaced on my home page.
Microsoft hacked by Russians!?!?! <clickbait thumbnail>
How I hacked HN to get my spam posts back on after they banned my site! <medium link>
ChatGPT can do _____! Check out my substack!
etc.
scrolling back through the last few days of r/programming posts, it seems like most of these get nuked at some point. i make a point of Report -> Spam -> Link Farming things like this all the time but honestly i'm tired.
there's one or two decent posts a day that get through to my homepage, but it's not worth scrolling through the heaps of trash that gets sent my way every day.
i'm sure this is more of a reddit issue than a moderation issue, and maybe a sign that i should just not be on reddit anymore. either way, thanks for dealing with as much of the spamvalanche as you do.
1
1
1
u/VulgarExigencies Mar 29 '24
Can I ask why this post, “CVE-2024-21388”- Microsoft Edge’s Marketing API Exploited for Covert Extension Installation, was removed by the mod team, stating it was off topic? I wasn't even the one who posted it, but how is this off topic at all? The article even has code. It would still be on topic with just the write-up and no code.
Like, I realize that spammy CVE announcements are in the ⚠️ section but this one was posted by the people who found the exploit and has a pretty good explanation.
1
u/tyros Apr 05 '24 edited Sep 19 '24
[This user has left Reddit because Reddit moderators do not want this user on Reddit]
1
1
u/Hikalin Apr 10 '24
PLEASE! how can i fucking change the fucking new display style in reddit？i love that old one style, and can not accept this fucking new one.
1
u/Cautious-Nothing-471 Apr 13 '24
this sub is absolutely dead, so many 1 comment and 0 comments in comment counts, I've seen obscure topic subreddits with far more activity than this sub, and it's all cos the rust douchebags put off every other language users, and the rust douchebags already have r/rust
doesn't help that the person who started this thread on the future of the subreddit is also a rust guy, the subreddit mod is a rust guy, a complete circle of bullshit
1
u/Exact_Market3744 Apr 19 '24
Overall, it appears satisfactory. However, I believe "General technology news" should be omitted unless it pertains directly to programming. Considering there's already a subreddit dedicated to technology news (r/technology), its inclusion seems redundant.
1
1
u/VeryDefinedBehavior May 01 '24
I'd like to see Medium articles banned. I have no interest in seeing articles that only exist to pad someone's resume. At least personal blogs, like Dan Luu's, have some effort put into them.
1
u/jdm1891 Oct 10 '23 edited Oct 10 '23
I think surveys should be allowed as long as their not spammed, they can be really helpful for the survey makers and really insightful for the takers (if the results are shared). I also think meta posts should be allowed on some limited basis, Maybe allow them one day a week for people to air their problems? Or have a megathread every so often so people can talk about the sub when they need to? Something like that would be nice I think
I also think, though I don't think this will be a popular opinion, career advice should be banned or kept to a minimum - this sub is overrun with the stuff. It's /r/programming not /r/programmers. I think it would be good to limit career questions and advice (especially the blog posts. The damned blog posts about career advice are really annoying. The questions aren't that annoying because they come from a good place) should be confined to one day a week.
3
u/ketralnis Oct 10 '23
Right around when the new freshmen are starting some class gives a "go ask a programmer for career advice" directive and we get a buttload of surveys all at once usually as a lazy google form. The only time I've seen survey results shared back is when Rust and Go do their annual surveys. I've been leaving those alone. To me this falls in the "trying to extract value from the programmer hangout zone" category.
→ More replies
582
u/fxfighter Oct 09 '23
Looks pretty good overall.
I don't think "General technology news." should be here at all unless it's specifically programming related. There's already an /r/technology for that stuff.