Who cares, it's their choice and probably because they were overwhelmed with LLM-generated project announcements.
I'm aware that being anti-AI is trendy right now, so many people won't like to hear that, but the reality is that it won't take long until the opposite will occur. Projects will get rejected for not having been thoroughly checked by AI, if not written by AI, because purely human development will cause too many security and code quality concerns.
r/rust did something similar although more broad, banning code dumps. Other subs like r/programming, r/cscareerquestions, r/experienceddevs banned in part or in full anything related to AI or using AI (unless highly technical) and frankly they're much nicer places to read now, because I don't have to hear about yet another engineer who "lost the love of programming" as if they're the only one. It's a repetitive thread that still gets upvoted highly and is sort of an easy way to farm upvotes and thus is quite annoying to read generally.
Banning the dime a dozen slop projects popping up every 5 minutes isn't so bad of an idea, but banning new, or projects that have less than 3 contributors is just wrong. XZ would be banned from being posted. There's also the fact that it appears to be a blanket ban on LLM contributions, so I guess the Linux kernel is verboten?
Single contributor new project open source is LARP open source. It makes no difference what your license is, if nobody cares about your project. That comes first.
Just like r/math banning the huge math release by OpenAI. Reddit’s shunning of AI has rendered it useless. I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
Reddit struggles with AI submissions, there were like 20 AI oss projects per day in /r/Rust at some point. Most of them are slop and it’s hard to find something valuable.
X uses recommendations, so you don’t see all the projects and small accounts. You consume curated content.
I have sympathy for the users of these subs. I imagine you’d want to come to /r/opensource to discuss the code. The whys, the hows. When the answer every time is “because that’s what Claude chose” it’s not going to make for interesting discussions.
>Being realistic, a lot of decisions pre-AI work out to "Because that was what was on top of Google search".
That's not the same. Whenever you do a google search, it only gives out what to do. The decision making ultimately ends up towards you.
In AI case however, its like replacing the person who used to make decisions about what to copy and implement. It makes you a proxy towards the AI's decision making.
At least that is how I interpreted it.
Realistically, people do a lot of Googling "parse Json in Python" and going with whatever pops out, like "import json" probably. But there's other options out there.
With a LLM, you're almost certainly also going to get the standard json module if you just ask for a JSON parser.
But nobody says you have to stop there. For instance if I say I want "the fastest JSON module", it goes for orgjson instead.
And if I wasn't happy with that, I could ask it to just write a benchmark using every module available and actually measure what's optimal for my hardware and my data file.
Choices don't go anywhere, and a smart user can take advantage to evaluate possibilities for whatever factors might matter -- speed, size, number of dependencies, etc. I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
>I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
Honestly I agree with this take. The problem is that, under the context of the people banned for using LLMs, no one makes decisions like this.
For instance, say I want to do some data analytics on a pretty large csv file. Of course before AI I would need to think of 1.How to open the CSV file 2. What is the specific data I want to extract 3. How to extract the data 4. How do I change the data into a specific format (say a list, a set etc ..) 5. How do I sort it. 6. How do I visualize it .... and so on. Those kinds of steps on how to write the code forces you to research the libraries and methods and decide what is required. (for instance using pandas in python)
Using AI for that task however, I wouldn't have done any decision for how to extract the text in question. Maybe the AI's decision was marginally better than mine (Writing a csv parser from scratch is faster for that specific data for example). Maybe in the case of data analytics, there is no point in the code cause in the end what is desired more is the visualization. But dumping the code into communities where people were interested in how you came to that decision falls short cause you didn't do it in actuality. I think that is the current issue at hand.
Yeah, but what's more likely to happen is that when you look inside the code you see thousands of lines of code of a handrolled parser and when you ask "why would you write your own rather than use some existing one here?" you only get silence in return.
I don't really generate big chunks of code, but in general I found AI outputs to be quite sensible. It knows what the main modules are and uses them, I've not seen any as egregious as making a JSON parser from scratch without a need.
Maybe not a JSON parser in particular, but I've already seen a fair share of MRs that contained many thousands of lines that no human would have ever written without stopping to ask "do I really need to do it?". LLMs aren't bothered.
Except that's exactly what the slop machine peddlers are saying. Why would you, a mere mortal, dare to question the decisions of the superhuman intelligence after all?
This kind of rhetoric confuses me. Do you hate watch OpenAI (or whoever) ads or something?
I haven't a clue what the peddlers are saying because I run uBlock Origin and do my best to never see an ad. I don't care or even know what they're advertising, and don't take my guidance from big tech CEOs.
I don't think it's that simple. I don't agree with them banning anything AI related. However, I used to frequent several programming related subereddits that overtime became unbearable because every other post is someone posting an obviously vibe coded horrible slop project. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve on a forum like Reddit.
> X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
This inherently restricts you to projects maintained by people who are willing to wade through a neck-deep cesspool of far-right content, either because they think it’s worth it (Twitter is, alas, still a good source for up-to-the-minute info) or because they agree with it. That’s a small subset of the OSS world. Everyone else has decamped to Bluesky and Mastodon, which are near intolerable in their own special ways.
It's ironic that Reddit started as a place to share links, and then every community banned sharing links.
You can't share your own videos on /r/youtube, your own projects on /r/opensource, etc.
And the weird thing is that normally you would think this would be an overarching strategy by Reddit admins to keep users on site, like Facebook penalizes outbound links, but it's unpaid moderators unconsciously furthering Reddit's agenda.
It's because you otherwise get loads of self promotion spam by people only interested in promoting what they have to sell, who don't otherwise participate in, or care about, the community.
Someone who makes youtube videos about Foo belongs to the Foo community, but they can't post on /r/Foo. Why? Because /r/Foo isn't the community of "Foo."
The "community" in this case refers specifically to a group of people on Reddit.
That is, the guy will never belong to the "community" because he is busy making videos on Youtube instead of posting comments on Reddit. And you can replace that with anything else. Someone who writes their own blog, or own books, or has an Instagram, TikTok, or even a Facebook page.
He would be considered a "high effort" OC creator in /r/foo if his videos were hosted on Reddit instead of on Youtube. That's how silly this whole thing is. This is not about "the community." This is about someone's personal Reddit group that they're moderator of.
It's not something unique to reddit, even classic forums will often have a self promotion section or thread, Discord servers will often have a self promotion channel. HN has a guideline against posting your own stuff too much.
Spam is a problem and has been since the dawn of the internet. Efforts to limit it will always affect innocent people to some degree but it's not really feasible to not do anything. And reddit especially has an astroturfing problem since it became such a popular source for recommendations. Like, just looking at GP's profile here kinda adds some context as to why they might say this change makes reddit useless to them.
Reddit started as a place to share link to other people's projects that you find interesting - so at least two people find the project useful. That's very different from promoting your own crap.
If you want to find people's vibe coded projects, you have no shortage of places to do that. You have almost the entire rest of the Internet, have fun. For myself, I don't have any interest in someone's project that they couldn't actually be bothered to make and just handed it off to a clanker. So I'm glad there are communities banning those.
Reddit has never been about AI, so shunning it hasn't made it useless. Reddit's purpose was to allow communication between people, not to talk about AI.
Were you actually a member of /r/opensource before this announcement?
> I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
How can this be true when the problem they’re dealing with is an explosion in the number of submissions? Even with some of these policies, the number of software projects being submitted to these subreddits is so much higher than a few years ago.
If you like nonhuman content and nonhuman takes on nonhuman content just chat with an LLM. If reddit is only useful as a secondary source o lf LLM consensus I think you could vibe code your own reality and let the rest of us who like talking to humans about human content out of your loop
Someone sees an opportunity to get some internet points, has zero engagement with the discussion, makes an announcement for a half-baked project... I think your 'initiative' is perfectly illustrating what that community is trying to avoid.
After pondering this for a while, I actually agree with this from the principle of community and socials. I have been in 4-5 open source communities where I met a lot of friends, but since LLMs the communities are flooded with slop PRs, slop projects, and the human interaction in general has fallen dramatically.
In some sense, if everyone can build everything, people's attention becomes the currency. If you are able to hold together an audience by banning automated tools, you might had suboptimal software but you might keep the actual goal.
If you say you want to go and get some milk, but then on the way to the shop waste 3 seconds to avoid an old lady instead of plowing right through her, even though it's the middle of the night and there are no witnesses, the result of your milk getting is suboptimal, and you cannot claim to primarily have been getting milk, but something else.
I’m neutral on whether they “should” ban it, but a question that has so much passion on both sides, it seems like it’s better for everyone to just “fork” so to speak and make a second subreddit for “like r/opensource, but AI-positive.” Everybody gets the subset(s) of content they want. If it “kills” one or the other subreddits that means it turns out most people don’t want that rule. But that’s fine.
We essentially need a human interface for llm-based projects
Some simple rules that would work better:
- Projects should have someone that understands the overall project at a systems level
- If you link to a github, or code project, it can't be ai-written, it has to be a clear README, maybe with some code examples. But, it can call the other project that has AI generated stuff.
The latest frontier models no longer produce slop. The code is pretty good in general - better in fact in many situations compared what a human might have produced with limited time, resources and experience.
The argument against AI-assisted programming just doesn't hold anymore.
That’s not my experience. The frontier models produce ok code that works but it’s still very sloppy. Further evidence is that the number of massive PRs is increasing not decreasing, i.e. the LLMs are brute forcing changes rather than introducing quality code patterns.
This is not a good metric IMHO. I would expect new projects to have bigger changes initially as they try to find a suitable architecture. That is not slop. This is no different than rewriting a project 2-3 times pre-AI to find out what sticks and how to organise it better.
I have yet to see the churn ever go down. I'm not saying it won't but what I see is that current frontier LLMs are still bad at identifying functional abstractions or patterns that can actually scale.
I have not seen an LLM rewrite 2-3 times and then settle on what sticks, it just rewrites constantly and usually while leaving residue of previous attempts behind.
Which in some projects is still fine. Like I said, they are generally producing working code, but I haven't seen proof yet that it can actually scale and evolve well over time.
I guess in some parts of the FOSS movement, predominantly in the left-wing politicised (“woke”) parts, there is a hard anti-AI wave flooding through these days.
They consider AI to capitalist, fascist and whatever is their current slur for things they don’t like.
On the other end of the moment, the non-political side of the movement, people seem to think AI is just another tool. Some absolutely love it. Others don’t care.
Both of these are thriving in their own ways because they are not instilling confrontation and restriction on whatever is being made. They focus on output, and not the politics of creating it.
Over time I’m pretty sure which side is gonna come out of this with most successful projects and the most healthy communities.
Sorry folks, gatekeeping is coming back. In a world where AI can produce infinite software and infinite "content" there have to be stricter rules to participate in a community.
If you don't have a filtering mechanism moderators will burn out and more interesting projects may never be seen. If you've run a bunch of LLM agent sessions concurrently you run into the human review bottleneck problem. That's all this is on a larger scale.
From the reaction to this post here and on Reddit, I know this is not the majority opinion in the open source community. Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review, but the outright opposition to LLM assisted coding in general.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.
> Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review
That is the problem in these subreddits.
Up until 2024, if someone took the time to write and publish an open source project you could use that as a sign that they were trying to participate in the community and that it could be worthwhile to look at.
In 2026, that assumption no longer holds. You can’t tell if someone put 1000 hours into a project or 15 minutes of asking Claude Code to make a thing and then suggest copy to post to Reddit.
For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.
Sounds like a reasonable explanation. I've never wanted to deal with running an open-source community (I'm way too introverted and focused on coding, not chatting), but now that AI is here, I will be releasing something awesome. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the community though. Possibly it will be so awesome that others create the community in my absence, and that solves the problem.
> For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
I don't know which LLM's are still doing it, but the amount of Posts I remove from r/selfhosted that still have the AI's markdown formatting included is astonishing. At least a few of them per day.
> So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.
This sounds like a knee-jerk reaction and it hamstrings OSS while others gain from LLM assistance. There are better ways to deal with this issue and I predict that OSS projects which blanket-ban LLMs are going to lose out to more competent maintainers.
This is, to me, the key conceit when the complainers complain. Sometimes it's obvious (like not even changing the visual style). But most of the time it's just pogroms.
That phrase has as much inherent meaning as "the goal of software" or "the goal of technology." People have different goals for technology and society. This is normal.
I'm more surprised that is not more common. LLMs are pretty antithetical to copyleft as they allow anyone, including corportations, to exploit the labour people have original shared under the assumption that they are only sharing it with peers.
Every subreddit eventually has a collapse of quality due to popularity. As the activity of a subreddit grows it becomes too attractive to those who want eyeballs, clicks, responses, traffic, or attention.
All of my interesting and helpful subreddits became unusable over time as the low effort posts took over. Every one of my hobby subreddits that became popular is now 90% or more posts that fit 3 categories:
1. Questions about getting started in the hobby. The same asks about what to buy or requesting feedback on something they’re thinking about buying. The subreddit can have a perfect wiki and up to date buying guide posts, but it will still get 5 posts per day from people who want personalized advice.
2. Posts from people who acquired something new and want to show it off. They’re excited for their new 3D printer or skis or other hobby acquisition so they post a photo. I know the subreddit is cooked when these posts start getting upvotes and taking spots in the feed. This is the sign that the low effort beginner posts are becoming the central content of the subreddit.
3. People posting every small achievement and looking for praise. I get it. It’s fun to share little progress with a community and feel excitement when sharing it with others. Feeling like you’ve made it with a group of other beginners is fun. There really should be a place for this, but once it takes over the subreddit it becomes uninteresting to see the same beginner posts day after day so the experience commenters leave.
The availability of LLMs has caused an explosion of #2 and #3 type posts for any software related subreddit. Starting late last year every subreddit with a software component become flooded with posts about something someone had cooked up with Claude Code. Some of them might be interesting but most were quickly abandoned. Many of them didn’t even work at all.
LLMs made it easy to feel like you’re joining the club. Spend $20 of a subscription and tell Claude what you want and you now have something to post and collect praise for.
The absolute worst are the posts where all the content is also generated by Claude. Even the OP’s comments are Claude written for many of these. You can click on their profile and see their comment history is written in one style for everything else, but suddenly they’re posting capitalized sentences and Claude-style prose paragraphs in this one subreddit. Then you realize you’re entirely viewing the output of a robot, which someone is putting forth as their own work. It’s just not interesting.
I don’t know if banning solo projects or projects using LLMs is going to lead to a quality outcome, because those two measures aren’t specific for the slop that people hate. I do understand why they feel the need to do something, though.
I think AI and open source go hand in hand. Open source can make AI so powerful and in return AI can bring to open source so many projects that were likely not possible before or are now considered "low value" because AI could replicate it so it makes more sense just to open source the project.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 11.8 ms ] threadI'm aware that being anti-AI is trendy right now, so many people won't like to hear that, but the reality is that it won't take long until the opposite will occur. Projects will get rejected for not having been thoroughly checked by AI, if not written by AI, because purely human development will cause too many security and code quality concerns.
X has somehow became the best place to find interesting open-source projects people are building.
X uses recommendations, so you don’t see all the projects and small accounts. You consume curated content.
Hyperbole much?
This is a direct response to AI slop destroying a community; what’s your solution to the AI spam problem?
Also there doesn't seem that much discussion of code in there.
That's not the same. Whenever you do a google search, it only gives out what to do. The decision making ultimately ends up towards you.
In AI case however, its like replacing the person who used to make decisions about what to copy and implement. It makes you a proxy towards the AI's decision making. At least that is how I interpreted it.
Realistically, people do a lot of Googling "parse Json in Python" and going with whatever pops out, like "import json" probably. But there's other options out there.
With a LLM, you're almost certainly also going to get the standard json module if you just ask for a JSON parser.
But nobody says you have to stop there. For instance if I say I want "the fastest JSON module", it goes for orgjson instead.
And if I wasn't happy with that, I could ask it to just write a benchmark using every module available and actually measure what's optimal for my hardware and my data file.
Choices don't go anywhere, and a smart user can take advantage to evaluate possibilities for whatever factors might matter -- speed, size, number of dependencies, etc. I'd say smartly used LLMs make for better choices because you can do research much more easily. Benchmarks, prototypes, asking it to search for you whether a given library has a good reputation or not and is well maintained, etc.
Honestly I agree with this take. The problem is that, under the context of the people banned for using LLMs, no one makes decisions like this.
For instance, say I want to do some data analytics on a pretty large csv file. Of course before AI I would need to think of 1.How to open the CSV file 2. What is the specific data I want to extract 3. How to extract the data 4. How do I change the data into a specific format (say a list, a set etc ..) 5. How do I sort it. 6. How do I visualize it .... and so on. Those kinds of steps on how to write the code forces you to research the libraries and methods and decide what is required. (for instance using pandas in python)
Using AI for that task however, I wouldn't have done any decision for how to extract the text in question. Maybe the AI's decision was marginally better than mine (Writing a csv parser from scratch is faster for that specific data for example). Maybe in the case of data analytics, there is no point in the code cause in the end what is desired more is the visualization. But dumping the code into communities where people were interested in how you came to that decision falls short cause you didn't do it in actuality. I think that is the current issue at hand.
Yeah, but what's more likely to happen is that when you look inside the code you see thousands of lines of code of a handrolled parser and when you ask "why would you write your own rather than use some existing one here?" you only get silence in return.
Except that's exactly what the slop machine peddlers are saying. Why would you, a mere mortal, dare to question the decisions of the superhuman intelligence after all?
I haven't a clue what the peddlers are saying because I run uBlock Origin and do my best to never see an ad. I don't care or even know what they're advertising, and don't take my guidance from big tech CEOs.
This inherently restricts you to projects maintained by people who are willing to wade through a neck-deep cesspool of far-right content, either because they think it’s worth it (Twitter is, alas, still a good source for up-to-the-minute info) or because they agree with it. That’s a small subset of the OSS world. Everyone else has decamped to Bluesky and Mastodon, which are near intolerable in their own special ways.
You can't share your own videos on /r/youtube, your own projects on /r/opensource, etc.
And the weird thing is that normally you would think this would be an overarching strategy by Reddit admins to keep users on site, like Facebook penalizes outbound links, but it's unpaid moderators unconsciously furthering Reddit's agenda.
Someone who makes youtube videos about Foo belongs to the Foo community, but they can't post on /r/Foo. Why? Because /r/Foo isn't the community of "Foo."
The "community" in this case refers specifically to a group of people on Reddit.
That is, the guy will never belong to the "community" because he is busy making videos on Youtube instead of posting comments on Reddit. And you can replace that with anything else. Someone who writes their own blog, or own books, or has an Instagram, TikTok, or even a Facebook page.
He would be considered a "high effort" OC creator in /r/foo if his videos were hosted on Reddit instead of on Youtube. That's how silly this whole thing is. This is not about "the community." This is about someone's personal Reddit group that they're moderator of.
Spam is a problem and has been since the dawn of the internet. Efforts to limit it will always affect innocent people to some degree but it's not really feasible to not do anything. And reddit especially has an astroturfing problem since it became such a popular source for recommendations. Like, just looking at GP's profile here kinda adds some context as to why they might say this change makes reddit useless to them.
> I used to find so many projects on Reddit and now, it’s less and less.
How can this be true when the problem they’re dealing with is an explosion in the number of submissions? Even with some of these policies, the number of software projects being submitted to these subreddits is so much higher than a few years ago.
Doesn’t add up.
It makes sense AI would explode on a platform now used by the bad parts of society.
The AI defense people don't seem to realize the funny things they say defending AI and how detached it is.
Lol calling reddit useless because mods are pumping the brakes on low quality AI slop posts. Hilarious.
Reddit mods aren't paid to deal with low effort auto submittions from LLMs. It ruins the subs.
r/opensource_projects would love to have your open source projects shared
The best feature of LLMs might be that you can do so much without needing anybody's help. (Or that you don't have to deal with anybody)
In some sense, if everyone can build everything, people's attention becomes the currency. If you are able to hold together an audience by banning automated tools, you might had suboptimal software but you might keep the actual goal.
If the result of your software project is suboptimal software compared to what others are achieving, what was really the goal you say you get to keep?
If your argument is to hold together, the goal must have been something besides the software.
To be clear, this is fair, but then you cannot claim to primarily have been working on a software project, but something else.
Some simple rules that would work better:
- Projects should have someone that understands the overall project at a systems level
- If you link to a github, or code project, it can't be ai-written, it has to be a clear README, maybe with some code examples. But, it can call the other project that has AI generated stuff.
The argument against AI-assisted programming just doesn't hold anymore.
I have not seen an LLM rewrite 2-3 times and then settle on what sticks, it just rewrites constantly and usually while leaving residue of previous attempts behind.
Which in some projects is still fine. Like I said, they are generally producing working code, but I haven't seen proof yet that it can actually scale and evolve well over time.
They consider AI to capitalist, fascist and whatever is their current slur for things they don’t like.
On the other end of the moment, the non-political side of the movement, people seem to think AI is just another tool. Some absolutely love it. Others don’t care.
Both of these are thriving in their own ways because they are not instilling confrontation and restriction on whatever is being made. They focus on output, and not the politics of creating it.
Over time I’m pretty sure which side is gonna come out of this with most successful projects and the most healthy communities.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.
That is the problem in these subreddits.
Up until 2024, if someone took the time to write and publish an open source project you could use that as a sign that they were trying to participate in the community and that it could be worthwhile to look at.
In 2026, that assumption no longer holds. You can’t tell if someone put 1000 hours into a project or 15 minutes of asking Claude Code to make a thing and then suggest copy to post to Reddit.
For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.
I don't know which LLM's are still doing it, but the amount of Posts I remove from r/selfhosted that still have the AI's markdown formatting included is astonishing. At least a few of them per day.
This sounds like a knee-jerk reaction and it hamstrings OSS while others gain from LLM assistance. There are better ways to deal with this issue and I predict that OSS projects which blanket-ban LLMs are going to lose out to more competent maintainers.
This is, to me, the key conceit when the complainers complain. Sometimes it's obvious (like not even changing the visual style). But most of the time it's just pogroms.
That phrase has as much inherent meaning as "the goal of software" or "the goal of technology." People have different goals for technology and society. This is normal.
The mod is overreacting. By this logic, Linux kernel is banned on the sub...
This is ridiculous and it would be reverted. I'm sure of it. They can't have this long term
All of my interesting and helpful subreddits became unusable over time as the low effort posts took over. Every one of my hobby subreddits that became popular is now 90% or more posts that fit 3 categories:
1. Questions about getting started in the hobby. The same asks about what to buy or requesting feedback on something they’re thinking about buying. The subreddit can have a perfect wiki and up to date buying guide posts, but it will still get 5 posts per day from people who want personalized advice.
2. Posts from people who acquired something new and want to show it off. They’re excited for their new 3D printer or skis or other hobby acquisition so they post a photo. I know the subreddit is cooked when these posts start getting upvotes and taking spots in the feed. This is the sign that the low effort beginner posts are becoming the central content of the subreddit.
3. People posting every small achievement and looking for praise. I get it. It’s fun to share little progress with a community and feel excitement when sharing it with others. Feeling like you’ve made it with a group of other beginners is fun. There really should be a place for this, but once it takes over the subreddit it becomes uninteresting to see the same beginner posts day after day so the experience commenters leave.
The availability of LLMs has caused an explosion of #2 and #3 type posts for any software related subreddit. Starting late last year every subreddit with a software component become flooded with posts about something someone had cooked up with Claude Code. Some of them might be interesting but most were quickly abandoned. Many of them didn’t even work at all.
LLMs made it easy to feel like you’re joining the club. Spend $20 of a subscription and tell Claude what you want and you now have something to post and collect praise for.
The absolute worst are the posts where all the content is also generated by Claude. Even the OP’s comments are Claude written for many of these. You can click on their profile and see their comment history is written in one style for everything else, but suddenly they’re posting capitalized sentences and Claude-style prose paragraphs in this one subreddit. Then you realize you’re entirely viewing the output of a robot, which someone is putting forth as their own work. It’s just not interesting.
I don’t know if banning solo projects or projects using LLMs is going to lead to a quality outcome, because those two measures aren’t specific for the slop that people hate. I do understand why they feel the need to do something, though.
https://lemmy.ml/post/54271214
https://lemmy.ml/post/53021594