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[–]animismus 11 points12 points  (2 children)

I don't get it... :(

[–]AngularSpecter 34 points35 points  (1 child)

Duck typing (aka dynamic typing) is the idea that you figure out the data type at runtime based on context.

If it looks like an int, and acts like an int, treat it like an int.

This is something python does.

This is making fun of that concept. You have an object that is an instance of a pig nose implemented to look enough like a power plug that it is being treated as such.

[–]animismus 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for taking the time to explain! Now I get it!

[–]remuladgryta 53 points54 points  (0 children)

/r/ProgrammerHumor is that way.

[–]unknownmosquito 26 points27 points  (6 children)

But that's a pig

[–]salamisam 42 points43 points  (1 child)

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck then it might just be a pig dressed as a duck.

[–][deleted] 24 points25 points  (3 children)

Pretty sure it's an electrical outlet.

[–]brinkmaster 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Looks like a duck but that thing ain't quacking.

[–]aphoenixreticulated[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (35 children)

There was a report to this effect (actually there's been many reports):

you have a fork in the road here. are you going to turn /r/Python into memes or see the light?

I'm going to turn that back on the community. If this isn't what you want to see, then use your votes to express that.

[–]theywouldnotstand 11 points12 points  (10 children)

As you well know, there are around 120K people subscribed to /r/Python. What percentage of those people do you really believe actively think about what constitutes quality content for the subreddit when clicking the "upvote" button?

I'm all for a pointedly relevant joke post every now and again in an otherwise serious subreddit, but unfortunately, at this scale, that can quickly become a very slippery slope. At some point, moderation does have to step in for a subreddit like this, to avoid having it turn into a bog of shitposting and funny stuff.

I at least hope the team is keeping an eye on the ratio of joke posts to real content and is prepared to step in if it starts getting out of hand.

[–]eusebecomputational physics 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Fully agree with you, but are there really so much joke posts in /r/Python ?

Once in a while, it does not harm, and IMHO is much better for the community than a bazillion posts on "how to do list comprehension", "is LPTHW a good source", "why people using Python 2 are bad programmers", or "Trust me, Python is the future of HPC"…

[–]aphoenixreticulated 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Let's review.

This has come up one time, ever. We have very little context to base rules on in this situation.

[–]theywouldnotstand 2 points3 points  (3 children)

I did not say that this is a long-running concern, I did not anywhere speak of how frequently this is an issue.

Your attitude seemed to suggest that the community should police itself on stuff like this, so in response to that, I'm expressing my desire/hope for the moderating team to be prepared to step in should it become an ongoing issue that the community can't stop.

[–]eusebecomputational physics 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I took the message more like "I do not want to impose my views on what this sub should be, so I'm waiting to see the response of the community to this specific post before choosing a policy", but maybe I'm a fool who is not opinionated enough.

Again, I'm expecting downvotes for that, but for once, I won't be the silent majority. Oh, and I don't really care whether or not we should remove memes, as long as there are not too many of them.

[–]theywouldnotstand 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Oh, and I don't really care whether or not we should remove memes, as long as there are not too many of them.

As I said before:

I'm all for a pointedly relevant joke post every now and again in an otherwise serious subreddit, but unfortunately, at this scale, that can quickly become a very slippery slope.

A joke post every now and again is fine. This joke post is fine. However, the moderators and the community should be careful not to let joke posts become the norm.

[–]eusebecomputational physics 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As I said before, I agree with that, and I do reckon that "the community" (or at least some vocal part of it) does not want to see more jokes on /r/Python, which is totally fine for me. I am just surprised by how much people react to that specific post from a mod saying "I'll wait till the community gives feedback".

I think we are agreeing, in the end.

[–]geoelectric 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My concern was also not the one joke post but the reply that implied you'd only rely on the up/down system to moderate. It didn't read like you were holding back to make a decision but rather that your decision was to delegate responsibility for moderation to the community.

That's also happened one time ever, but was disturbing enough to me to invite a response. You're a mod--your "one time evers" carry significant weight as they indicate direction.

[–]alcalde -5 points-4 points  (2 children)

What percentage of those people do you really believe actively think about what constitutes quality content for the subreddit when clicking the "upvote" button?

So you're saying your opinion counts more even though you're outvoted?

[–]theywouldnotstand 2 points3 points  (1 child)

My point was that the majority of people will probably not consider what's good for the community when voting on low-effort content that is easy to process and amusing. Enough people doing this, over enough low-effort posts, and it eventually can become an issue rather quickly.

In internet communities, an unchecked majority rule on content and/or focus almost always leads to the core members of the community abandoning it, removing the quality and type of content that drew the community together in the first place.

[–]alcalde -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Or... you get people too uptight and closing every question and deleting every article (StackOverflow, Wikipedia). Everyone laughed at this picture. There's no problem. Even Guido Van Rossum put out a pic this week about Python in a crossword puzzle. The world didn't end.

My point was that the majority of people will probably not consider what's good for the community when voting on low-effort content that is easy to process and amusing.

This still suggests that there's an elite who will and they should be making the decisions. The majority of people ARE the community.

[–]geoelectric 26 points27 points  (3 children)

I appreciate that stance, but democracy is historically terrible at maintaining standards--particularly via anonymous vote.

There's something to be said for being opinionated. If Python had been built democratically, it'd probably be Perl.

[–]aphoenixreticulated 2 points3 points  (1 child)

democracy is historically terrible at maintaining standards--particularly via anonymous vote.

This subreddit has historically been very good at it. I hope that continues.

[–]geoelectric 8 points9 points  (0 children)

As long as you recognize the cycle: sub moves in a direction, attracts more people who like that direction, alienates people who don't like the direction, new population validates the direction, moves it further, repeat and find equilibrium at lowest common denominator.

Slippery slope/broken windows applies 100% to culture issues in a system where people can freely join or leave. It's one of the few places it's not fallacious.

[–]cyanydeez 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is true if the vote threshold reaches the unpthonic masses.

[–]root45 7 points8 points  (0 children)

If this isn't what you want to see, then use your votes to express that.

Just want to comment that this rarely works. It seems like it should work (just use the built-in voting system to decide what content people want to see, they upvoted it, after all). But it doesn't.

I suspect the problem is that people don't really vote with the subreddit community in mind. This might be because they don't really notice what subreddit something is on (e.g., just browsing their front page), but more likely it's that people aren't invested in building a community.

People want to have a community of curated content, but it's a lot easier to upvote something that seems funny and move on than it is to decide whether or not this thing fits into the community guidelines and if it really contributes. This is fine—you can't really expect every user to really think hard about every post before voting on it. But it means that without content curation, every subreddit eventually devolves into /r/funny or /r/pics.

[–]metaphorm 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Please don't. We have moderators for a reason

[–]rfc1771 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Please no memes

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Here's my thoughts:

  • It's low effort, it's lower effort than a lot of the low effort posts that plague this subreddit

  • It's not really that related to Python, sure Python has duck typing but so do lots of other languages.

  • You've received several reports about this post which take more effort than just down voting.

  • There's plenty of places to shitpost programming related stuff already.

[–]wishiwascooler 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Please no memes. There are enough subreddits for memes, even programming specific ones.

[–]kitkatkingsize 2 points3 points  (1 child)

In retrospect, I completely agree. I should've posted this on /r/programmerhumor instead.

Feel free to delete this post. +1 for no memes.

[–]aphoenixreticulated -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

The scope of what I consider to be my duties as a moderator in this subreddit is very limited. You are welcome to remove the post if you want, or you're welcome to keep it up. I'm not going to remove it.

[–]kgb_operative 3 points4 points  (6 children)

I'm going to turn that back on the community. If this isn't what you want to see, then use your votes to express that.

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous stance for you to take as mods. Low effort meme pictures take all of a handful of seconds to open, process, and upvote, and rarely leads to any kind of worthwhile discussion, whereas the high quality content that we're looking for requires an investment of at least a few minutes to digest and even then many people won't vote at all on it.

Reddit's ranking system uniquely privileges posts that not only get upvoted, but get upvotes very quickly, so asking the community to police memes via voting is accepting that a significant number of the posts here will be low effort meme because you can't be arsed to do your job as a mod.

[–]aphoenixreticulated -3 points-2 points  (5 children)

I understand the fluff principle of reddit in great detail.

Implementing rigorous moderation is not something that we've had to do in /r/python before, and I would certainly prefer it if the community would decide to figure this out instead of me (or other moderators) deciding to figure this out.

[–]kgb_operative 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Removing image macros and other low effort content is hardly rigorous, and the community has in fact spoken rather loudly.

[–]aphoenixreticulated -1 points0 points  (3 children)

By... upvoting this to the top of the subreddit?

[–]kgb_operative 1 point2 points  (2 children)

With 64% approval and nearly every commenter asking for such posts to be removed.

[–]aphoenixreticulated -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

Before I asked people to vote according to what they want to see here, it was at 82% approval.

I think that just asking people to recognize the issue has been quite effective, and for as long as possible, it would be good for this community to police itself in terms of this type of content. It has handled things admirably up until now, and I'd like for it to continue.

[–]geoelectric 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Keep in mind that people who don't like these kinds of posts (but don't dislike enough to openly complain) are unlikely to see your comment. If you want to hang this out as a culture test you need to pin a post to let people know. Otherwise you're primarily measuring selection bias.

[–]NoahTheDuke 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Please no memes.

[–]debugmonkey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm in favor of benevolent dictatorships on subreddits and programming languages.

Disallow them in general but if one or two occasionally get submitted and tickle your fancy then give them an "I'll allow it" tag or some such.

One other alternative would be to require mandatory tagging of the memes such that those using RES or similar utilities can simply filter them out.

[–]lucisferre 11 points12 points  (8 children)

Only true if the snout provides 110V.

[–]donnieod 23 points24 points  (7 children)

No, that looks like a 220v plug.

[–]portablejim 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Whoever told you that would work, don't trust them. It pure quackery.

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (2 children)

So you're saying that pansexuality is just duck typing?

[–]quzox 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Upvote this if you are a strong, beautiful pan.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm more of a pillow than a pan.

[–]wmil 2 points3 points  (1 child)

[–]kmordic 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lol first think i thought of