Programming

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

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