The /r/opensource Rule Changes

After this week being a little more stressful, with the PHP vulnerabilities, and putting out a BookStack security release, I was looking forward to a chill weekend of decompression. Maybe finish up Death Stranding. But then a fellow moderator posted new rules to /r/opensource which blew up, to the point of being reported on by The Verge. Wonderful!

Perspective

To put it bluntly: I can see how the rules have come about, but I don’t agree with them myself, and I especially don’t agree with the tone and manner they were announced.

Just to state some facts about the situation: As far as I can see, there was no mod discussion about these changes. As far as I can tell, these rules are the result of just the lead mod /u/Wolverness. As far as I know, us other mods cannot remove them as a moderator.

And to put this up front: Wolverness is the only one really doing moderation work on the sub. I’m second, but very very far behind in monthly mod actions, especially as I’ve been trying to use Reddit less. Moderating the sub takes a lot of time and is a thankless task. Without Wolverness’s efforts, the sub would be full of spam, low-effort posts, and outright crap marketing.

Personally, I see this scenario as one person that’s absolutely had enough of dealing with moderation, and resorted to these reactionary/blunt rules. To Wolverness: If the above is correct, I don’t think it’s worth the stress. A subreddit is not worth harming the mind of anyone. I’d rather see the subreddit erode through lack of moderation than impact anyone’s life. It’s better to walk away with your sanity.

I do think the sub is frankly too large, with a scope too wide, and maybe this is a way to break it down to more focused communities, but that could have been done via a better route with a lot less drama.

Breaking Down the Post

Your tokens aren’t valuable: No more AI.

I don’t think this title was productive. It seems personal, and will only inflame a passionate audience of a divided subject.

Projects advertised here must be all of: 1 year old (not just age, but actively maintained), have multiple contributors (subjectively 3+), not be a common capstone project (school projects, such as note-taking, PDF viewers, cli music players, etc), not be intended for AI (such as MCPs), and have an existing community. No, we can no longer field requests asking for maintainers or people to contribute. Of course it still needs an OSI license as it’s always been.

I can see the intent, but this is a really high bar that won’t really make moderation easier since it’s more things to check. The influx of vibe-coded projects has been a problem though, due to their sheer quantity flooding the sub, which pushes down news, insight, and projects which have had significant amounts more effort put into them.

The approach taken by /r/selfhosted was better IMO, by requiring an AI disclaimer, and a 3-month project age (unless shared into a single megathread). That lessens the flood. Personally I’d probably prefer the sub to ban all projects, and reduce it to news and insight, with other subs created/used for sharing projects (whether AI or not). That of course would need to be done with pre-warning, clear reasoning, and community feedback though since it’s a harsh change, and ultimately I don’t think it’s up to me.

Though not “new”, 1 year account age minimum, with significant Reddit contributions. You should not be creating a Reddit account to come here; we’re a community of existing redditors. If you send us a message in modmail about this after having attempted to post, you will be permanently banned and muted. If this seems harsh, know that I estimate 20 messages a day from people expecting their slop projects and burner accounts to get an exception.

This one I support, although it should be a lesser age (maybe 3 months) than scaled up depending as needed. The sub is heavily used and abused for marketing due to its popularity, and this kind of rule would help prioritise posts of those in the actual community instead of those automating bots and/or fly-by marketers throwing their project in without being part of the community. It would also help reduce mod work since I feel a large majority of time is taken from new accounts. We do have karma rules in place, which kind of do this, but they are often gamed.

If it’s obvious you’re using AI in your project, we don’t want it. Tokens are cheap, and we don’t care how many you spent to make your amazing project.

I’m more on-the-line when it comes to use of AI. I believe it’s fantastic technology that’s great as a tool, but it can be used badly, and the impact/state of the industry pushing it is quite terrible. I generally avoid publishing AI-created content, but I use AI for a range of personal little projects, code review, spellchecking and for secondary scripts. I have also benefitted from LLM-found security reports.

I respect those who flat-out don’t want AI in their lives. That said, I think it’s too far gone, and frankly too time-consuming, to enforce this on an existing community of this size. As above, I’d probably prefer project posting overall to be delegated to new subs, for which there could be AI and non-AI variants, but that’s not for me to decide.

If you don’t speak English, you need to find a different community. We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated. Since you don’t speak English, you can’t even verify yourself if it translated correctly.

The wording and communication of this is frankly terrible, to the point of being offensive. In the context of the entire post, I feel like it’s written in anger against AI users rather than non-English-speakers, but I can see how it does not come across like that, and I understand why multi-lingual users are insulted by this.

I have experienced issues with people using LLMs for translations when working in my open source project. Some users will jump to these tools, using translation as a reason, but the text would be very clearly AI interpreted, adding extra cruft in the AI wording, the standard filler text we’re all fed up with. That said, my solution was to ask users to avoid translating text themselves, and instead post their original untranslated text for me to translate.

I don’t think the same solution will work here, but a better option would be to request users to use direct translation tools (e.g. Google translate, kagi translate). That said, I don’t know how enforcement would work for that.

Temporary bans are only for community members that made temporary lapses in judgement, such as when getting agitated. If you post (or comment) things we don’t want, such as the result of your LLM output tokens, you will never be welcome back.

I think it’s fair to provide a little more lenience against more established community members, but this comes across harsher, which does not combine well with all the other elements of the post.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I’d vote to revert these rules and return to the previous status quo for now. While the anger may die down eventually here, I think there’ll be continued friction. A drastic change to such a large audience would be better served by a new community, or at least as a slower evolution with the community in the loop.

To be honest, I’m personally not that fussed on the outcome. It’s just a subreddit, and this could be an extra push for me to put my time and efforts in an open alternative, like lemmy, instead.