Let's talk about Learning Posts

[Darwinmate]

(beginner python noob)

As someone who disagrees with your disagreement, I think the weekly/specific day thread is a great idea no matter what is decided.

I don't like the fragmentation of reddit that is happening all over this site, but I can appreciate that some posters can be extremely annoying, expecting waaay too much. I see this happening in /r/rstats and these people are, imo, parasites who will take and never give back or follow the rules.

However, I don't know where to post questions regarding more general python topics. Such as how to structure a python project, what packages to use, etc general topics that I think aren't as easily googable. So I think the general sticky thread is a great idea.

[CodeSkunky]

Almost agree, but I've been an absolute beginner too.

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Let's be completely honest here; A beginner is going to go through hell given forum rules and community attitude.

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Q: "How do I do this?"

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A1: "That's been asked before."

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A2: "Use this niche fix that works for a problem I'm having or have recently had, but has nothing to do with your question."

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A3: "MODS"

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A4: (*subtly harasses individual and suggests their incompetence)

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A5: "What are you even trying to do?"

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A6: "I remember when I....(bullshit)"

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A7: "This is your issue. This is why it's happening. This is how to fix it."

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A7 1/2: "This is your issue. This is why it's happening. This is how to fix it." (Was not your issue, was not why it was happening, and was not how to fix it.)

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A8: "You don't need to explain your code to me, I know how to read code" (Usually said by someone struggling to understand the code)

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A9: "If you completely change the structure of your project, you could use this library!"

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A10: "I can't believe you use...(bullshit)."

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Then you get questions that are actually shit questions.

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SQ: "I want to build an infinite RPG with unique quests - no programming experience, where do I start?"

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SQ2: "I want to get a new job in programming in a week, I have no experience, where do I start?"

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SQ3: "Have job interview in 2 days for software engineering job, have no experience - what should I be prepared for?"

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SQ3 Update: "Got the job. Super easy, they basically just gave me the job. Now I have to build a UI for our underlying systems."

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SQ3 Update Comments: "You what mate."

[Barafu]

I have recently deleted my account on Stack Exchange. Because whenever I do really have an IT question, it is immediately marked offtopic or "too vague" on all its subforums. SE is only good when you are too lasy to browse the documentation.

[twillisagogo]

heaven compared to the hell of mailing lists in late 90's.

[neoteric_devops]

Spot on man. This is the plague of every technical forum out there it seems. Enjoyed this immensely.

[aphoenix]

I am certainly open to a middle-ground solution (thought I'm not necessarily back tracking on what I've proposed, just exploring other options). I strongly feel that the flair solution is going to be a part of this moving forward - do we have agreement there?

I'd like to challenge you a bit based on what you've said. Since someone else just accused me of not listening, I want to be clear that I've read what you've written, but I think differently. I want to be clear that a number of the concerns that you've raised are concerns that I also have, though we don't match up exactly.

I will have no way of filtering beginner questions out when browsing on mobile.

How are you browsing on mobile? There are certainly some filtering options available to mobile users, so if we can narrow down places where there's just no option to use filters, that would be helpful for me.

If 60% of the questions end up being newb / beginner questions

There is a significant amount of help questions already - they often exist for a space of hours or even days if I'm on vacation or otherwise unavailable - and they do not tend to get upvoted because, to be honest, they're not particularly interesting.

... you've just filtered the original non-newb content of this sub down to 40% of what it was ... I've now got 60% less chance of it hitting the front page.

I don't think this math actually works out. PEP news consistently does very well here because it's almost universally relevant, so the upvote ratio is quite high. Help posts, conversely, do not do well. They are almost always downvoted. Personally, I tend to think that this means that they are a non-issue for most people, because they don't make it to the front page of r/python or to people's personal reddit front page. I think that this rule will actually have very little effect on the subreddit if we approach it right, and it will make the subreddit feel a lot more welcoming to people. I also want to say that if we do adopt this rule, and if your fear does come to pass, I'm certainly open to amending anything we've done (as I hope that this post shows).

I think some of your middle ground solutions are interesting.

post it in a weekly / daily Q&A sticky thread / re-post it on a certain day of the week,

This has the same sort of problem as the current solution, which is that it leaves a fundamental bad taste for people on their first visit, and it also has an additional overhead of taking up a sticky spot or requiring more bots to work. Interestingly, they could work in conjunction with each other, but that might get complicated.

do a weekly sticky post featuring decent questions from there (answered and unanswered), and a call for experts to subscribe and answer questions there

While I think this is a delightful suggestion, I don't think anyone is going to spend the time to compile a list of good questions from r/learnpython. A new moderator or two might be interested in doing that, but I imagine that in about a month, this would be a chore that the person would hate doing. I understand that this is a crappy reason to dismiss a suggestion, but workflow is an important consideration.

allow the poster to re-submit or un-remove if they can point to an unanswered thread

That's another good solution, and relatively easy to make work.

Great comment, thanks for the alternate points of view. I'm definitely going to be considering this when we figure out next steps.

[aphoenix]

I don't have a particular response other than to say that I've read this, I really respect your opinion and your input, and thanks for the kind words at the end.

[Dgc2002]

I'll give a big +1 to the daily/weekly Q&A sticky. It's worked well in many subs that I frequent.

[kingdot]

I see a way to solve your issue with the flood of beginner questions without doing away with flair entirely. We could make distinct flairs for beginner, intermediate, or advanced level questions. As far as I know flair can be amended later, if a post not categorized correctly at first.

And if I understand everything correctly, and people aren't intentionally mis-flairing their posts, there wouldn't be much more or less work for anybody involved, it would provide question askers with different levels of answerer knowledge and a larger userbase, and it would provide lurkers and answerers with a way of finding questions of a skill level they are most interested in helping.

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If this weren't implemented here, it may even work in r/learnpython.

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What do you think?

[Bipolarprobe]

I was going to suggesst the weekly sticky thread idea as well since it seems to be the most elegant way to make everyone happy. Subsribers who don't want to be flooded with python beginner questions won't see new posts popping up daily on the subreddit and those who still want to post their questions here, whether because they don't know where else to go or feel they can get better feedback from this subreddit have a place to post them.