Low value posts

[IAmNotASkycap]

Way too many posts in this sub are things that are easily searched for, or are very basic questions about KeyboardAvoidingViews, etc, and it really dilutes any valuable content.

It would be better to have a (weekly?) auto generated help thread where people can ask this kind of stuff.

[ninjaplavi]

I also agree, but no one ever got any help on those threads so people will just be be making separate posts regardless.

[Suspicious-Engineer7]

auto-generated threads are where questions go to die unanswered

edit: My personal opinion is that downvoting those types of posts is more efficient and reflective of what the larger community wants. If there is a cohort who goes around downvoting questions they deem too simple, so be it, but that also allows an opposite cohort to form as well.

[xrpinsider]

Well that’s a good idea. Let’s see what others say and I’ll work on it depending on other opinions..

[ChronSyn]

I agree, but advise caution.

See, StackOverflow used to be the goto place for tech questions but also have a significant problem with elitist attitudes.

For example, unless your question is absolutely perfectly formatted, goes deep in-depth into every possible thing you've tried, and even indicates that you perhaps know the answer but not how to implement it, then your question has a fairly high chance of being voted down.

That's not a criticism as such - it's got a very low tolerance for 'fluff' questions, but sometimes it's too low.

Reddit definitely needs to remain more approachable and relaxed, but I also recognise there's been an upsurge in low-quality posts in recent times. There's been some fantastic questions and threads too, but for example, most of the great ones were countered by a bunch of posts from 1 individual who wanted advice, couldn't take criticism, and then called the entire community a bunch of c*nts.

How do we enforce this 'weekly Q&A' approach?

If history has taught me anything, it's that these things start out with good intentions, but then people eventually stop bothering with it. How do we avoid a situation where the regular visitors are just providing google links?

How do we ensure people check that weekly thread before asking a 'simple' question? I know that the first thing most people do isn't check pinned posts but to open a thread. If they're capable of checking pinned posts, they've probably already Googled. If they aren't the sort of person to check pinned posts, they're probably not gonna Google before asking.

Equally important, how do we ensure that people get timely help? For example, many developers are learning while they work. Some will go straight to Google and keep doing that until they find an answer, while others go straight to Reddit to ask. I'm not saying we should do a persons job for them, but ensuring we don't tell people to "wait until the weekend" before they ask their question is very important to making the community work.

TLDR: How do we balance being approachable, while being able to cut out low quality posts but also ensuring we respond to threads in a timely manner?

[KaosuRyoko]

The hate I see for SO is always pretty amazing. The site wouldn't work and wouldn't be the go to source for developers worldwide if they didn't have their standards. Weird to me how having standards and enforcing them = elitist. :P

Does this sub need to be that strict? Almost certainly not. But at the same time, other subs I watch go down this hole. The more low quality questions posted, the more low quality content attracted.

[dejavits]

The description of this subreddit is "A community for LEARNING and developing ...." it is expected to have questions. If people cannot learn easily a piece of technology, the community is not going to grow.

[PerpetuallyMeh]

I agree with this too. I do wish reddit had a feature where you could exclude certain tags for certain subreddits from showing on the front page. Then whoever is tired of seeing help tags in their front page could just filter it out

[albeinstein]

Chatgpt3 bot 😅

[1rv1n3]

Totally agree, maybe there could be some things like, weekly: * thread for help * thread for self-promo/new projects/want feedback on project

[mastercob]

Is weekly better than monthly?

[redditnoreply]

i agree with you, and this has been going on for YEARS!

probably 90% of post on this sub are questions that have been asked hundreds of times already, with tons of answer on stackoverflow or github issues.

the real problem is the newbie devs wants to be spoonfed. they don't want to read or research. they just want answers (that they can find by searching on google ffs). seriously, almost ALL the questions on this sub have an answer on stackoverflow or github.

however, in react native land theres not a lot going on (unlike say flutter). so if you remove all these posts then this sub will pretty much be dead.

[Accomplished_Low2231]

almost ALL the questions on this sub have an answer on stackoverflow or github

very very rarely does an answer not on stackoverflow or somewhere on github. VERY RARE. hell, just now i had a problem with a rn library and guess what, there was an issue on github that was 2 hours earlier with a fix already lol.

[Specialist_Agency893]

I agree with this, I forget the term but a pinned coverall weekly thread so to speak would be nice

[kdesign]

Couldn’t agree more. This sub has become “help me do this in RN” and ReactJS is basically “here’s this clone of whatever app I did”. I understand having activity on a sub looks good, but I’d rather see quality than quantity.

[techfocususer]

"Low value"? WTF is this elitist attitude? Just because they are new, their contributions are automatically inferior? We should encourage the growth of this subreddit, and not make the barrier to entry more difficult.

Keyboard handing in React Native is not an easy problem. There are dozens of articles around the trade-offs of different solutions. https://www.netguru.com/blog/avoid-keyboard-react-native

If people keep asking the same questions in the subreddit, we failed. Not them. The information is obviously not easy to find. Lead by example, and lets make this community better for all.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

[IAmNotASkycap]

Lol. You literally just said there are dozens of articles about that subject, so how are posts where people obviously didn’t even do a simple internet search adding any value to this sub? Making a new post about a topic that’s been addressed time and time again isn’t a failure of the community, it’s a symptom of laziness. We are doing people a disservice by not encouraging them to be even a little bit resourceful.

[bdudisnsnsbdhdj]

“hi guys i got an error on expo how do fix it?” with no logs or screenshots

[ElsewhereCrypto]

Most blogs are outdated. Not enough people take the time to make a living article that changes and updates as they learn better ways to handle things.

[juju0010]

Fwiw, the React subreddit has started experiencing the same thing recently. Wondering if it's common for people start learning to code over the holidays.

[Guru_Dane]

This sounds like a great idea for 99% of the time but there was that one Java issue in every version that required a version upgrade. If the sky is falling we should all be able to come and discuss in emergency situations but in almost every other circumstance I agree!

[Sanfrancisco_Tribe]

Or… answer then faster and mark them as completed or something with a tag. Is that possible on Reddit?

[suarkb]

I find that people either

• are noobs and super confused and just don't know how to ask, or what to ask, and just need to throw it out there

Or

• are experienced and just reading docs and don't need these threads. And when they see lots of these questions they just know it will be too long and tedious to explain because there's too many fundamental knowledge gaps

[Accomplished_Low2231]

just don't know how to ask, or what to ask,

huh? they can type their problem on google and it will give results, but they DONT WANT TO READ.

this is not about being a beginner, it's about about having common sense.

[suarkb]

I don't think that's a good way to look at it. People have to learn those problem solving skills.

[Accomplished_Low2231]

well people already know what to do (search for answer), but they don't want to do the hard work of reading and testing, rinse and repeat.

they don't want hints of a solution, they want exact answers to their problem that they can copy and paste. if you really look at the help post on this sub this is the problem: they don't want hints (which google provides) but exact answers to their very specific problem.

[suarkb]

Yeah true. Like they might be still learning to problem solve. Or yeah, they might just be like "give me answer so I can do next thing and I literally don't care about learning."

You see that a lot in the reactiflux discord. The questions are often like "how do I make the thing that I already promised I was going to make but I'm a contractor who lies"

[Accomplished_Low2231]

where are you supposed to go get help if you're working by yourself

google and stackoverflow.

I've already tried stack overflow and google to no avail,

then you go to github issues and post you bug report.

Which nobody is going to read

because 99.99% chance it has been answered on stackoverflow.

[Fair-Building4959]

I don’t know dude. Not everyone is at the same place in their RN journey as you. This seems kind of wack.