Programming

The State of the Subreddit (May 2024)

Hello fellow programs!

tl;dr some revisions to the rules to reduce low quality blogspam. The most notable are: banning listicles ("7 cool things I copy-pasted from somebody else!"), extreme beginner articles ("how to use a for loop"), and some limitations on career posts (they must be related to programming careers). Lastly, I want feedback on these changes and the subreddit in general and invite you to vote and use the report button when you see posts that violate the rules because they'll help us get to it faster.

r/programming's mission is to be the place with the highest quality programming content, where I can go to read something interesting and learn something new every day. Last time we spoke I introduced the rules that we've been moderating by to accomplish that. Subjectively, quality on the subreddit while not perfect is much improved since then. Since it's still mainly just me moderating it's hard to tell what's objectively bad vs what just annoys me personally, and to do that I've been keeping an eye on a few forms of content to see how they perform (using mostly votes and comment quantity & health).

Based on that the notable changes are:

🚫 Listicles. "7 cool python functions", "14 ways to get promoted". These are usually spammy content farms. If you found 15 amazing open source projects that will blow my mind, post those projects instead.
🚫 Extreme beginner content ("how to write a for loop"). This is difficult to identify objectively (how can you tell it from good articles like "how does kafka work?" or "getting started with linear algebra for ML"?) so there will be some back and forth on calibrating, but there has been a swath of very low quality "tutorials" if you can even call them that, that I very much doubt anybody is actually learning anything from and they sit at 0 points. Since "what is a variable?" is probably not useful to anybody already reading r/programming this is a quick painless way to boost the average quality on the subreddit.
⚠️ Career posts must be related to software engineering careers. To be honest I'm personally not a fan of career posts on r/programming at all (but shout out to [cscareerquestions](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/)!) but during the last rules revision they were doing pretty well so I know there is an audience for it that I don't want to get in the way of. Since then there has been growth in this category [all across the quality spectrum](https://www.reddit.com/domain/eng-leadership.com/) (with an accompanying rise in product management methodology like "agile vs waterfall", also across the quality spectrum). Going forward these posts must be distinctly related to software engineering careers rather than just generic working. This isn't a huge problem yet but I predict that it will be as the percentage of career content is growing.

In all of these cases the category is more of a tell that the quality is probably low, so exceptions will be made where that's not the case. These are difficult categories to moderate by so I'll probably make some mistakes on the boundaries and that's okay, let me know and we'll figure it out.

Some other categories that I'm keeping an eye on but not ruling on today are:

Corporate blogs simply describing their product in the guise of "what is an authorisation framework?" (I'm looking at you Auth0 and others like it). Pretty much anything with a rocket ship emoji in it. Companies use their blogs as marketing, branding, and recruiting tools and that's okay when it's "writing a good article will make people think of us" but it doesn't go here if it's just a literal advert. Usually they are titled in a way that I don't spot

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