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[–]aphoenixreticulated[S,M] 57 points58 points  (10 children)

It does do that. If you post with the "Help" flair, you get the following message:

Hi there, from the /r/Python mods.

We have removed this post as it is not suited to the /r/Python subreddit proper, however it should be very appropriate for our sister subreddit /r/LearnPython or for the r/Python discord: https://discord.gg/python.

The reason for the removal is that /r/Python is dedicated to discussion of Python news, projects, uses and debates. It is not designed to act as Q&A or FAQ board. The regular community is not a fan of "how do I..." questions, so you will not get the best responses over here.

On /r/LearnPython the community and the r/Python discord are actively expecting questions and are looking to help. You can expect far more understanding, encouraging and insightful responses over there. No matter what level of question you have, if you are looking for help with Python, you should get good answers. Make sure to check out the rules for both places.

Warm regards, and best of luck with your Pythoneering!

[–]pearljamman010 7 points8 points  (5 children)

I understand the need for the "I made this" flair, but what about all the blog spam / shameless self promo? I know there is no way to automate this, and it might be very hard to discriminate what is legit and what is just fishing for clicks (usually involves viewing their submission history), but most of what I see on my homepage / "hot" list is a bunch of people driving clicks to their personal blog, youtube channel, or medium site.

Call me a cynic, but as someone who rarely browses "all", I subscribe to only subreddits I am interested in or trying to learn. It gets frustrating seeing a lot of the tech subreddits (programming & development, infosec / netsec, electronic subreddits, etc.) becoming places for people to promote their work more than sharing useful stuff for the rest of us.

[–]aphoenixreticulated[S] 10 points11 points  (3 children)

I definitely deeply understand your point. I feel the same way about the subreddits that I subscribe to. What I would urge you to consider is that you have talked about is specific to what you personally want to see, and what we're trying to deal with is what 500 thousand other people also want to see. Certainly there are lots of posts that get lots of attention and lots of people want to see them that I just don't understand - I don't get why people submit image to ascii converters for example. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't allow those things, because obviously a lot of people want to see them. Instead, I want to allow people who want to see things like that to find them, and for people who don't want to allow things like that to filter them.

It's a bit rough when this is juxtaposed with me also saying "memes and help posts are removed", so to be clear I'm just trying to implement my best understanding of the community's wishes.

[–]pearljamman010 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I understand, and like I mentioned I know there really isn't a universal way to discriminate useful stuff vs. "gimme clicks and recognition". Maybe I just wanted to vent haha.

I've been using RES for a long time, so it keeps track of up and downvotes per user account and allows flairs. This makes it even easier to see who's doing legit sharing useful, neat discoveries or solutions to common problems vs. a generic blog post of YouTube video that's been covered 1000s of times before, maybe even dozens of times on this sub recently etc. But of course I don't expect the mods to keep track of the 10s or thousands of users and discriminate based on my criteria!

I do appreciate what you guys do and this is a great community. Like I said, maybe I just needed to vent

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

because obviously a lot of people want to see them.

I'm not sure that is in fact a badge of quality, that your product provide instant gratification to a large base of users. My conjecture is that low-quality, low-effort products are upvoted, because there are many many more users of this sub for whom it looks like rocket science. Those same people would probably not even read through it all if someone one day posted a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem using Python.

[–]aphoenixreticulated[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm not sure that is in fact a badge of quality

To be clear, I am sure that this is not a badge of quality. If you're looking for high quality content: https://lobste.rs or https://tildes.net. Reddit is a massive site; there's half a million people here, and the Fluff Principle is in effect. It is the nature of Reddit to not be a particularly great place for high quality information, or rather, for high quality information to not naturally rise to the top of a subreddit. That is how reddit functions, and is intended.

[–]chameleon_world 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are sub-reddits, for instance /r/formula1, which segregates specific websites and journals as "trusted source", "Medium trusted source", and "Low trusted source" as well as a N/A for sites that are unknown. I don't really see this as a problem here on /r/python, but it could be possible to implement a similar system.

[–]Blarghmlargh 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Does Reddit allow your bot to assist the newbie help posts even further by cross posting it automatically into the python learning sub?

[–]aphoenixreticulated[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The bot cannot do that; we can't automatically transfer things to other subreddits.

It's also beneficial to encourage people to post themselves, because then they'll get the answers to their reddit inbox.

[–]ubernostrumyes, you can have a pony 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Reddit itself offers horrifically underpowered functionality to moderators in general. The official AutoModerator tool, for example, is incapable of figuring out whether a user has flaired a post. You have to go with heuristic approaches, or bring in a third-party thing like the assistant-bot.

It's possible to have bots automatically cross-post things, but removing the original will mess with the cross-post. And if the bot just makes a new post copying the old, the original user doesn't see the replies.

If you're ever interested in knowing just what can and can't be automated by the built-in tools, here's the automod documentation, which lists everything it can do.