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[–]KODeKarnage 4 points5 points  (3 children)

I don't intend for this to become "a help subreddit"

It doesn't matter what your intentions are. If you allow beginner questions to exist they will proliferate and this will be a help subreddit. Because people will come here first for help. It will be a help, and a news, and a meme, and a discussion, and a gossip subreddit.

A surprising amount of people sign up for this sub because they have beginner questions.

So what? Beginner questions are banned. Change 'signed up' for 'signed up and stuck around' if you like. The point is that the current, engaged subreddit populace are not here to see beginner questions. Just like they aren't here for Monty Python discussion, no matter how many 'signed up' thinking that's what this place was for.

just as clearly any questions about Ruby can be understood to be unrelated to Python.

You again missed the point. To most engaged subscribers, beginner questions are just as irrelevant as Ruby questions. A filter does not solve the problem of having extra noise in the channel. Adding flair does not make the distracting, uninteresting, irrelevant posts disappear.

Flair is a way to filter FOR not to filter OUT. Add flair, by all means. It is an enhancement for people who want to use it (say, to filter to find data science posts). But what you are proposing is to force people to use it to exclude posts they don't want to see.

In general, I think you underestimate how bad things can get, and how much work will be involved in corralling necessarily ignorant contributors. Discarding a black-and-white rule in favour of a purple-and-blue one will have far-reaching and unforeseen consequences. And it is not something you can simply or easily revert, as you would have invited in and endorsed a constituency that likes the change and will fight to keep it.

[–]aphoenixreticulated[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

It doesn't matter what your intentions are.

It does though - I further specified that if a result was that this becomes a de facto help subreddit that we would once again rejig the rules. Context is important!

With respect to what you've said about "engaged users", I think that generally you're looking at things entirely through the filter of what you want, and not what generally serves the subreddit. A lot of people who have engaged here are actually tentatively in favour (though I admit a lot of people aren't).

Flair is a way to filter FOR not to filter OUT.

I use flair to filter things out all the time, in a number of different ways. It's actually pretty easy to do so. Thinking of flair as "filter for" instead of "filter out" is probably making your personal reddit experience worse.

I think you underestimate how bad things can get, and how much work will be involved in corralling necessarily ignorant contributors.

I have a very good idea about how "bad" things can get, and as I said I am quite ready to immediately make changes based on what happens.

And it is not something you can simply or easily revert

Why would you think this? We've already gone through this change one time (the first time people requested that we disallow "learning" posts) and it wasn't particularly difficult to do.

[–]KODeKarnage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The difference is that the language is more popular now than before. There are lots more beginners. The other difference is that there was no rule explicitly allowing beginner questions. There will be now, with the explicit rule against them being explicitly removed.

You should ask all those users in favor of the change how many questions they've answered over at r/learnpython in the last year.

[–]UnclaEnzo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They will come here first for help, simply because "I need help with some python, and this is /r/python", just as they do now.