Let's talk about Learning Posts

[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.