Hey everyone
Theres been some discussion recently about the content allowed in this community so I wanted to make a quick poll to gauge what is wanted in terms of what people see here
The current description of the community is a bit ambiguous so this will determine whether everything is allowed here or if only more general programming topics are
You can just dm me with options ranked based on your preference (its ranked voting) to vote and ill share the results in a day of the overall vote tallies
1: Allow all posts relevant to the instance (main community)
This will let pretty much any post be able to be posted in here whether that be a help question, discussion, news, etc.
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
2: Allow any posts and direct people in the comments to more specific communities for their future posts (people catching community)
This will also let any post be able to be posted in here like the previous option but will guide people towards the more specific communities in the future to make them then post the content in those
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
3: Only allow topics that arent limited to one language, library, etc. (general topic community)
This will let posts such as: what is your favorite music to listen to while coding? or Here is some details about functional programming be able to be posted while something like a library for python will instead be posted in the python community
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
4: Dont allow questions of how to do X in X language but allow actual discussions or news about the language in addition to general topics (general & discussion community)
Like above but also allows conversations about specific languages in the community as long as its not a question on how to do X in the language
Allowed:
- What is your favorite music to listen to while programming?
- Has anyone else seen this interesting “challenge site” when googling a programming topic?
- Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta
- Discussion ES6 Classes. Good or Evil?
Disallowed
- Things not relevant to the instance
- Intellij and docker on vm memory issues
- [HELP][Python] How to use Selenium correctly
5: Only allow crossposts into the community with things like news being posted in the specific community first (crosspost community)
This will ONLY let crossposts be made. All other options also allow crossposts but this makes it so that the post will fill up the specific community while c/programming is a main post feed for people who want to see many different topics from the specific communities
Allowed
- anything as long as its crossposted
Disallowed
- anything not crossposted
- things not relevant to the instance
You can find some past discussion here https://programming.dev/post/388375 to see some points for the different options
Based on whats voted some other communities may be created or adapted to fit the new niche of people
(ill reply to your dm when your vote is counted, if I havent responded in awhile I may not have gotten it or im asleep)
My vote is 4 2 1 3 5. I DMed, just sharing my thoughts.
(I think the “or hyper specific towards it” part of option 4 needs to be removed because the rest of the description says it allows specific topics and that is the only thing separating it from option 3.)
I find 3 (don’t allow topics related to a single technology) to be foolish. How do you even begin to count? Take Rails, isn’t that two, Ruby and Rails? Or Spring being two? Even if there was a proper and reasonable way to count it would just be so odd.
Option 5 I rank the lowest because there doesn’t seem to be any cross posting functionality built in currently other than just sharing the URL. It just seems like an odd restriction.
One of the most off putting things on Reddit was always over zealous moderators. They’d get more concerned with the letter of the law than the spirit. It’s annoying putting effort into something only to ha e someone seemingly flippantly remove it. I understand the desire for less posts people don’t want to see but we’re still very small. I don’t think we should be so concerned with that yet. Better to have relaxed rules for now.
Just an anecdote, but on Reddit there were three communities for Java. r/java, r/learnjava, and r/javahelp. On top of that, r/java ONLY allows discussion of Java, not JVM languages or the JVM. It’s just exhausting. People just feel this need to organize things super rigidly I guess, but to contributors it just feels like people wanting to have dominion over their little sections of the internet.
I think option 4 is probably the best middle ground. It most closely reflects r/programming which is what I think most people want to be close to. I know I just complained about the idea of splitting communities too much but I think having !programming be for things directly related to programming and then a community akin to the random section of a forum for things like music people like is a pretty common sense split in my opinion. Call it like programming_chat or something.