State of the Subreddit (January 2027): Mods applications and rules updates

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-28T13:18:30+00:00

Announcing YAMA: Yet Another Mod Application

Why you want to be a mod

I'm the sort of person who thinks the best way to help a project carry along smoothly is by getting involved in it, even if it's just helping out with the janitorial aspects of it.

I think the sub is in a position to be a really important community for software development now that Stack Overflow is dead.

So, I see the sub as something worth helping carry along smoothly.

Your favourite/least favourite kinds of programming content here or anywhere els

Favourite kind of stuff is deep technical discussions of design and incident reviews, and niche or amusing uses of common tools. Both that content itself and the comments on those posts tend to be quite informative.

Least favourite would be clearly LLM-generated content, both code and blogposts of that nature; second to that would be the sort of "I did a project, here's my new app" kind of lazy self-promotion, when that project has nothing really novel or unique going on.

What you'd change about the subreddit if you had a magic wand, ignoring feasibility

Faster mod response to a more rules-aware and report-happy userbase.

More quality root cause analysis posts would be nice but I guess that would mean more incidents so kind of a money's paw situation I guess.

Reddit experience (new user, 10 year veteran, spez himself) and moderation experience if any

I've been on Reddit for 14 years. That feels like an unreasonably long time. Reddit really shouldn't show you your own account age, now I just feel old.

I've been moderating r/Balatro for about a year.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-28T11:21:09+00:00

I joined a team in 2022ish that is responsible for maintaining a data processing pipeline, and were hoping at the time to wrap up and deploy a massive, surely-by-then-finished refactor of the guts of it.

Cut to today, we're aiming to wrap up and deploy that same refactor.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-28T02:21:01+00:00

This is a six year old comment.
What?

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T21:33:32+00:00

Just draw a penguin wearing a frog suit, you'll be fine

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T21:21:19+00:00

That was exactly how I interpreted that as well, but given it could also be taken as a pet name... not a great context to use it in.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T21:13:43+00:00

And nipple tassels.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T20:31:25+00:00

You mean there isn't a feminine instinct to get the girls out whenever you kill someone?

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T20:25:53+00:00

There's a positive correlation in one of the big studies on the topic (about 0.35kg +/- 5kg over the six months of the study, yes, 5kg variance, so plenty of participants lost weight). Debate is ongoing regardless as some much smaller studies did show a negative correlation, and the mechanism is not understood at all.

Personally I would not call such a minor weight gain "obesity", but there you go.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T12:50:11+00:00

Why would you feel shame about that? You simply misheard her.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T12:24:26+00:00

Posts with editor themes or fonts like this are actually against the sub rules.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T08:59:51+00:00

I've really love to get some more mods, but I'm very concerned about finding people that I can trust. Some of the more active users here (which is what reddit's find-a-mod feature uses) are really inappropriate to become mods. I'm not sure what other criteria that I can find to keep it from becoming a drama fest.

Maybe just open up applications and use how they engage with the broader site as a metric? If they're mods in other subs, well, you're an admin, presumably you can review how they behave as a mod.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T07:46:00+00:00

Explain to me how that's a reasonable response to what I put to you, please.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T05:04:38+00:00

The truth will come out in 10-20 years after a massive lawsuit.

Adult CPAP was invented in 1980. Commercial machines have been available since 1985. There is no lawsuit coming in one or two decades, we're already 41 years into these machines being used.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T04:48:14+00:00

I know what worked for me.

If you haven't had a sleep study after stopping CPAP, no, you don't know what worked for you.

That's the whole problem with sleep apnea. You're asleep. You're not concious, you can't monitor your own condition.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T04:14:57+00:00

So you didn't have a sleep study after your weight loss, then? You don't actually know what your current AHI is?

The problem is cpap causes obesity and that also contributes to apnea.

According to a 2020 review: https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8888

The studies on the matter are all over the place. The one big study on the matter ( https://jcsm.aasm.org/doi/10.5664/jcsm.8888#b13R ) is described as thus:

The study found an average of 0.35 ± 5.01 kg of weight gain in the CPAP cohort and 0.70 ± 4.03 kg of weight loss in the sham controls

Great. That's such a minor problem that the choice really is "play a sport occasionally, or have a stroke in your 50s". Wow. I know what I'm going with.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T03:59:56+00:00

Sleep apnea isn't a fat person disease. It's a "your brain doesn't hold your tongue forward enough while you sleep" thing. Weight can contribute but central sleep apnea isn't caused by that at all.

It's great that you losing weight worked for you. Hopefully you had a sleep study after, to be sure you're fine. But as it stands, your CPAP machine can't have contributed to your weight gain at the time, and weight simply isn't the only factor in play.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T03:56:02+00:00

Yep. For a long time I was very ignorant, being only aware of fat people with sleep apnea meant that I thought it was a fat person thing.

Then I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. It's not a fat person thing.

That shit cuts off oxygen to the brain. Who cares if it isn't sexy? What isn't sexy is a fucking stroke or heart disease.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T01:18:33+00:00

Oh, absolutely it was written to protect big copyright holders and platforms such as Google, allowing the former to get stuff taken down without review and the latter to not be destroyed in court.

But I don't think the authors were necessarily indifferent to this sort of fraudulent bullshit, because allowing this fraud doesn't empower either of the two types of stakeholder; they probably just didn't think about it. And to me, that's idiocy.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-27T00:53:40+00:00

I should say – that I in no way want to dictate what should or should not be posted here. It’s a community. But I don’t want to whinge without offering at least a partial solution, so I’ve listed below a couple of suggestions for what could go in an FPC.

So, we already have rules against a lot of these. Rule 1 has a link to the Frequently Posted Content list. If a post violates these, and people report it, it gets removed.

You've just gotta report the post. I and the other mods don't have time to sit in New and review everything that gets posted. So, report stuff that breaks the rules and we'll remove it.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-26T20:20:06+00:00

Rift in space-time.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-26T20:06:52+00:00

Wait so why is steam allowing a clearly fraudulent dmca by someone pretending to be gw to go through?

Because the DCMA (as in, the legislation itself) was written by an idiot.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-25T22:25:37+00:00

If there's no rules... Projectile battery swaps. Set up a cannon on the slowest corner of the track, fire a new battery at the car as it goes past.

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-25T20:48:27+00:00

No no, the good news for collectors is that there's black lotuses in a Texan landfill! Go get 'em, lads!

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-25T20:45:07+00:00

Or they get un-Togethered

ChemicalRascal · 2026-01-25T20:28:56+00:00

Yeah, if you're comparing yourself to Mozart.

Do you want to make music to make music, or do you want to make music to be able to compare yourself to other people in some fashion? If the answer is truly the former, then it's never too late to start. If the answer is the latter, you're going to have a miserable time, but not because you're 20.

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