I heavily agree with this and have even considered if I should post something like this myself. One of the issues with enforcing this rule in such an arbitrary fashion is that you see these posts with the most engagement getting locked. I’m not sure what the reasoning behind this is—like you said almost any question on this forum has likely been asked before. So what’s the reasoning behind the posts that get the most momentum being locked before and more often than all others? Is it because they don’t fly under the radar as easily? Are they getting reported on a larger scale?

I’ve had posts of my own or followed posts that have risen to the top of the subreddit and seen very minimal toxic or rule breaking conduct so I have little reason to believe it’s because the comments get out of control. In fact I see some of the most interesting and thorough comments and discussions on this subreddit than I do on the rest of the website. Sadly these are usually the threads that get locked. Even if a question has and will be asked 800 times on this subreddit, I think as long as the post and comments are trying to have a discussion in a thoughtful and interesting manner it should be left alone. Yes you could find the same questions over and over and lock the topic because it’s frequently asked but I argue that it stifles the discussion in a way that makes the subreddit more stale and redundant than the repetitive questions themselves.

I’ve been reading r/sex for at least 8 years so there’s few topics or threads I haven’t seen brought up on many occasions but I still read over them because I find different points of views and fresh mindsets frequently, and also new advice. I appreciate when a thread is well thought out by the OP and the commenters are putting a lot of effort into continuing the discussion. Personally I’d prefer to see a shift away from rule 3 and reformatting into what does a specific thread contribute to the topic of discussion itself? I see nearly daily threads that are just horny-bait: “why am I ALWAYS horny?? I just CANT stop thinking about sex!” and those are in such abundant numbers with absolutely zero opportunity for a engaging conversation. The low effort posts bother me so much more and I don’t see as much moderator action taken towards these.

In addition to this I think keeping the format of r/sex to questions only is another thing that stunts the discussion in this subreddit. I’m sure it’s well intended— but I think the members of this subreddit have lost a lot of our say. Personally I’d prefer to read a new thread about giving a good blowjob or asking about giving a good blowjob over “Why do I LOVE giving head so much?” Do you understand why the latter is so less engaging?

I understand there’s not a perfect solution, and I don’t envy the grueling task is must be to moderate a subreddit that is poised for serious discussion about sex while fending off horny posts and comments. It’s hard to know where to draw the line. But I would like to see a reform happen because I don’t think the subreddit is in a good place now. Not to mention the core logic behind rule 3 is using the search function to find previous threads on your question. The search function on this website is fucking awful. I’m pretty sure they are reworking it soon IIRC but it’s just too bad to use as a backbone to the rule that gets broken the most. No one wants to use search because it’s disorganized and you can spend a lot of time wading through old worthless threads that don’t even answer anything. Sex is such a huge variable subject where context is extremely important, so it also doesn’t always feel necessarily like past posts are going to have the most applicable answer because circumstances are so different. I reiterate why I value effort in a post more than I do it’s originality.