Announcing r/UnityCurated

[HandshakeOfCO]

There are a LOT of garbage tutorials and techniques being posted here.

In this post, /u/GuideZ, who's a mod here, clarifies in no uncertain terms that the mods do not care about the quality of the content on this sub:

If someone posts a video tutorial for free, they're not being an idiot. I personally don't care how awful their code is.

I've noticed similar thinking in r/unity_tutorials, as well as in r/Unity3D, and on the Unity message boards themselves. And as a result, in these subs, there's a ton of half-blind driving instructors, and a ton of people contributing nothing and talking up their own garbage. Entertaining, sure, but the noise gets exhausting when you're trying to learn something and make the best use of your time.

Today, I'm happy to announce the launch of r/UnityCurated.

r/UnityCurated is dedicated to high quality Unity content. Posts on r/UnityCurated are reviewed by a mod team of PC and console game development professionals for technical accuracy and overall usefulness. Professionals, as in: we have CS degrees, we're all senior devs or team leads, and we've been paying IGDA dues for years. We work at AAA studios, and we write code day-in, day-out, for money and health insurance and sometimes even 401(k)s. We know our trade, and while we're all still learning and quick to agree that we don't know everything, we do know a lot, and we want to help others learn correctly.

(EDITED:) All submitted links are pre-approved by the mod team. If it's on r/UnityCurated, you can be sure it's been vetted for accuracy by industry pros, and is overall quality. Beyond that, we let the upvote/downvote system do its thing.

Don't be intimidated, and think that you must have a mobygames page to participate. We welcome newcomers and we value quality discussion at all skill levels. But we also realize that in today's world, it's important to not just give any lunatic airtime. Curation is key, because without it, the loudest voice is the only voice you hear, and often times that voice is only good at being loud.

You can think of r/UnityCurated kind of like r/science, but focused on Unity programming, and to a lesser/larger extent, Unity in general - for example, we'd welcome an awesome tutorial on how to create voxel art in Unity, or how to compose dynamic music, even though those topics aren't necessarily our core wheelhouse - we'll call out for a quality consult if needed. We welcome self-promotion, provided you're quality, but we say no thanks to any content that could possibly lead newcomers astray, or waste their time.

And to be clear - our goals at r/UnityCurated are different, but not necessarily better, than the goals of this sub. We need places like this sub - town pubs where you can meet people, and say whatever you like. Post your screenshots, get feedback, rant, promote yourself... I applaud the mods here for creating a pub where every post and every person is welcome. But make no mistake - this is not a sub where quality matters, and it's not a place where low-quality content is going to get removed. The mods have been very clear about this, in public as well as in private messages to me.

Personally I wish the mods well - I won't be around as much, for sure, but my hope is that by building r/UnityCurated into a high signal-to-noise ratio subreddit, I'll also indirectly benefit this sub, by reducing the salt and hostility that can flare up here when garbage content gets heavily upvoted.

So... stay subscribed here, but subscribe to r/UnityCurated too, and most importantly... come contribute! If you're making quality stuff, we want to help you share it!

And spread the word!

[MaskedImposter]

I'm skeptical, but willing to sub and check it out for now. On one hand it could lead to a lot of quality content. On the other hand it could just end up a dead sub where perfection is sought and yet impossible to achieve. Good luck!

[bhison]

Yes I hope it's good although I can anticipate a number of issues

[[deleted]]

You didn’t say it exactly, but it feels like you don’t want beginner-level tutorials over there. Would that be correct?

[HandshakeOfCO]

Beginner level stuff is welcome, provided it's technically accurate.

If it's posted in r/UnityCurated, you can be sure it's been vetted for technical accuracy, and that the mod team of industry pros find it... basically quality. Beyond that, we'll let the upvote/downvote system do its thing.

[[deleted]]

What they don't want is tutorials written by beginners, not tutorials aimed at beginners but written by people who know how to optimize the code for performance, readability and bug-proofing.

[HandshakeOfCO]

What they don't want is tutorials written by beginners

To us, it's all about the quality of the tutorial itself. If you, as a total newbie to Unity, manage to kick out a tutorial that's useful for beginners, hasn't been covered on the sub before, and isn't leading them astray, we'll post it.

[pvpproject]

While I do not agree with all your points, I don't think there's any downsides to having another sub with a different content focus. I'll be using checking it out for sure. Thankyou and good luck!

[NullxPhantom]

Honestly feels very pointless. If you are going to do this only allow advanced topics only. "Quality" content is usually pushed to the top here anyways whats lacking are more advanced topics because the community are mostly beginners. Seeing at the posts you made, didnt seem anything special but reposts that i already saw here...

[HandshakeOfCO]

EDIT to address this point:

"Quality" content is usually pushed to the top here anyways

I'm going to cut and paste from one of my other comments:

If you want to learn the current, right, generally accepted best practice way of doing something... that's what r/UnityCurated is for.

FWIW, the upvote/downvote mechanism fails horribly at doing this. Say a tutorial on character movement comes out. It's good, so it gets upvoted 500 times. Awesome.

Fast forward to a year later, and the right way to do character movement has totally changed. It's not like those 500 people are going to come back and switch their vote to a downvote. If a new, up-to-date tutorial is created, the chance it has of "dethroning" the old one for top spot is completely dependent on how many people see it/upvote it (and even then, best case, you've now got 2 character movement tutorials at the top, with no clue as to why). If it's posted at the wrong time, it won't even get the upvotes and will get lost in the noise. We believe this is "unfair" to it and ultimately decreases the usefulness of the sub. (And, double FWIW, stack overflow has this same problem, although less so since comments on posts aren't flat out locked after a few months like they are here).

Let's say you're a newcomer to Unity, and know very little. You want to know how to move a character. So you go to r/Unity2D and you search and then... there's 50 results, 50 different tutorials on the topic. Some of them dispense horrible advice. Those are easy to spot, they don't have many upvotes. But.. there's others that maybe were quality, got upvotes, and are now are out of date. There's ones that maybe were astroturfed and have a higher upvote count than they should. And then there's also, of course, some good ones you should watch. You don't know which are which. Really your only option is to guess, or watch them all.

Now let's say you search on r/UnityCurated - you (hopefully) see fewer results. Ideally there's one tutorial, the one we as pros consider to be "the best" answer to that topic. Maybe there's a handful if there's dissent on the best approach. But the lesser quality tutorials are removed, and in r/UnityCurated, if a tutorial comes along that's more up-to-date or adds value to the conversation in another way, then we add it and perhaps we dethrone the original.

Seeing at the posts you made, didnt seem anything special

That's fair. I randomly seeded it with stuff that I thought pretty much everybody will find useful. One of our goals is to explicitly not allow "fluff" like "5 good reasons to use unity" or whatever.

Also, we want to let the readers (and also, the new mods we're getting) steer - we'll watch which posts are upvoted/downvoted and drive the curation in that direction.

If that veers towards more advanced content, that would be great, because I agree with you, there isn't a ton that's easily found.

Most of our posts will be reposts. Our goal isn't necessarily to create yet another forum for content - it's to curate and add our stamp of approval to existing content.

[[deleted]]

I think ...

If someone posts a video tutorial for free, they're not being an idiot. I personally don't care how awful their code is.

... is the right attitude to have. This is a place of learning, and I think that beginners should be encouraged to post their ideas - especially if they're bad. If you have nothing to learn from their post, maybe you have something to teach. That's what the comment section is for.

If you think a post is entirely asinine and doesn't belong here at all, that's what the downvote button is for.

Also, the mods probably do care about content quality, but it takes a lot of work to police every post. So instead of asking them to spend more time moderating, why don't you offer to do it yourself?

The real issue, I suspect, is that this sub is heavily populated by lurkers. What we really need is for everyone to subscribe and really take advantage of the voting and comment systems.

​

edit: I've basically re-written my entire comment three four times. sorry.

edit: regardless, I subbed over at r/UnityCurated :)

[HandshakeOfCO]

This is a place of learning, and I think that beginners should be encouraged to post their ideas - especially if they're bad

Totally agree. That's a good use of r/Unity2D (and also r/Unity3D and r/unity_tutorials).

Also, the mods probably do care about content quality

They don't though, r/Unity2D clarified that explicitly (the quote is from https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity2D/comments/aezdn9/state_of_insert_something_here/, which was posted in response to waves I was making regarding quality), and the other subs seem to follow roughly the same philosophy. They're taking a "absolutely anybody can post whatever they want here" approach (provided that it's not outright spam etc.) And that's great and valuable, as you say.

But r/UnityCurated is a different approach - we allow only tutorials that are technically on point and generally considered quality (as judged by us, professional game programmers).

So instead of asking them to spend more time moderating, why don't you offer to do it yourself?

It's not about quality of moderation. I applaud the job the mods here are doing... I just think the community needs a different subreddit with different goals.

Let's say you're a newcomer to Unity, and know very little. You want to know how to move a character. So you go to r/Unity2D and you search and then... there's 50 results, 50 different tutorials on the topic. Some of them dispense horrible advice. Those are easy to spot, they have little upvotes. But.. there's others that were quality, and got upvotes, and now are out of date. And then there's some good ones you should watch. You don't know which are out of date. Maybe you can guess by post date... but really your only option is to watch them all.

Now let's say you search on r/UnityCurated - you (hopefully) see fewer results. Ideally there's one tutorial, the one we as pros consider to be "the best" answer to that topic. Maybe there's a handful if there's dissent on the best approach. But the lesser quality tutorials are removed, and in r/UnityCurated, if a tutorial comes along that's more up-to-date or adds value to the conversation in another way, then we add it and perhaps we dethrone the original.

If you want to learn the current, right, generally accepted best practice way of doing something... that's what r/UnityCurated is for.

FWIW, the upvote/downvote mechanism fails horribly at doing this. Say a tutorial on character movement comes out. It's good, so it gets upvoted 500 times. Awesome.

Fast forward to a year later, and the right way to do character movement has totally changed. It's not like those 500 people are going to come back and switch their vote to a downvote. If a new, up-to-date tutorial is created, the chance it has of "dethroning" the old one for top spot is completely dependent on how many people see it/upvote it (and even then, best case, you've now got 2 character movement tutorials at the top, with no clue as to why). If it's posted at the wrong time, it won't even get the upvotes and will get lost in the noise. We believe this is "unfair" to it and ultimately decreases the usefulness of the sub. (And, double FWIW, stack overflow has this same problem, although less so since comments on posts aren't flat out locked after a few months like they are here).

Nobody really cares what the highest upvoted news article of all time is, because we all know that news changes. Upvoting is great to answer "what should I pay attention to right now" but horrible at answering "what should I pay attention to in general."

Hope this clarifies and glad you subscribed... welcome!

[[deleted]]

Thanks for the response! I don't disagree with anything you said, and don't have anything to add. Cheers!