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Updates to site guidelines and AI/LLM tags

Article lobste.rs

Updates to site guidelines and AI/LLM tags

Hey folks,

I've been having to perform an increasing number of moderation actions surrounding the vibecoding tag and AI/LLM related content. I started reading Lobsters because it had the most interesting viewpoints related to computing. During that time, I've found that this community is at it's best when it's trying to, in good faith, help others grow. In lieu of a larger and more rambling discussion on this point, we would like to try two changes encourage that behavior again and re-focus topicality around ensuring that content submitted to the site should, at a minimum, be respectful of a reader's time and intelligence. 

The first adjustment is two updates to the about page, which try to provide a bit more clarity in what we consider topical and what constitutes self promotion:

Intro:

Lobsters is a computing-focused community centered around discussing links. Our goal is to learn, craft, collaborate, and share interesting viewpoints.

The administrator is Peter Bhat Harkins ("pushcx"), contact him or another moderator with any support issues. Lobsters was launched on July 3rd, 2012 by joshua stein (who is no longer running it, so please quit bugging him with site stuff) with careful design touches to encourage a healthy community:

At this risk of writing a mission statement, it seemed worth explaining what the site is and hopes to be to visitors from the first sentence of /about. (This original text came from an intro post.)

Then the Guidelines:

Topicality: Lobsters is focused pretty narrowly on computing; tags like art don't imply every piece of art is on-topic.  Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader's next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years? Is this compelling material that will seed a discussion, or is it just an artifact?

Pending an upcoming deploy, we no longer allow submissions which are code repositories. While, at first blush, this may seem odd for a community which is primarily centered around programming but it does eliminate the bulk of the "low effort, self promotional" submissions we've been seeing on the site. We've also found that being dropped into a new codebase doesn't start discussions because the reader has to have enough subject matter experience to immediately recognize what's novel or otherwise worth talking about. Instead, we are more interested in content around code bases which cover why it was created, the purpose it serves, the challenges overcome, and the reasons why it's a useful artifact in the ecosystem.

Some things that are off-topic here but popular on larger, similar sites: entrepreneurship; management; careers; news about companies that employ a lot of programmers; investing; world events; anthropology; self-help; personal productivity systems; last-resort customer service requests via public shaming; "I wanted to see what this site's amazing users think about this off-topic thing"; and defining the single morally correct economic and political system for the entire world when we can't even settle tabs vs. spaces.

We're listing "careers" as off-topic to try to head off posts about interviewing, promotions, burnout, and farming. We have the job tag because it's nice to help people connect to jobs, but the topic of getting a good job, weaving jobs into a career over your lifetime, and work is a different thing than the actual programming itself.

Self-promotion: It's great to have authors participate in the community, but we do not want the community to be exploited as a write-only tool for product announcements or driving traffic to their work. As a rule of thumb, self-promotional activity should be less than a quarter of one's stories and comments in the last year. New users (first 70 days) are not allowed to submit self-promo.

This is how we've been enforcing the rule for a while, better to be explicit. It's unfortunately common that authors see their work posted, join the site, but then only use us for traffic. Hopefully this time helps them understand the difference between a symbiotic and parasitic relationship.

The second adjustment is that the vibecoding tag is now marked as inactive. It still appears on old stories but can't be applied to new ones. From my perspective, the tag was overloaded with six differing responsibilities:

  • First, it was the tag which was trying to capture the discussions related to the use and implementation of AI/LLM tools.

  • Second, it was a marker for content which is partially related to AI/LLM tools, tooling or companies.

  • Third, it was a marker for content which includes a discussion on or output from AI/LLM tools in a part of a larger work.

  • Fourth, it was a marker for content which was generated using AI/LLM tools.

  • Fifth, it was being used in competition to the spam flag, for really low-quality content which was generated via AI/LLM tools but without apparent significant human authorship.

  • Sixth, it was being used as a tag of shame by people who really dislike AI/LLM tools and used it to insult people at every passing mention.

The last couple years have been the biggest upheaval in the field for decades. While it's acceptable, within limits, to express frustration towards circumstance or technology, it's not acceptable to direct that behavior towards individuals whether they be members of the community or not. Other people can't be your punching bags and Lobsters can't be your boxing ring. That's not acceptable.

While `vibecoding` is no longer an active tag, we still feel that a subset of the tooling related discussions are relevant to the site. While this is reaching far back into the annals of computing history, tools like compilers, databases, testing, and vcs had similar points of consternation and concern when they were introduced. I'm not going to claim that I'm able to guess how the industry is going to shape up, but my gut feeling is that but my gut feeling is that it's going to be closer to something like we've seen with systemd than compilers. This new tag `ai-tooling` covers "The design, ux, development of AI/LLM-powered tools themselves".

As a fun addendum, there's a variant of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which exist for websites, we kinda fell on the wrong side of that trying to migrate the site and get this out on a Saturday. Whoops!

Thanks, 355E3B

Discussion 83 comments · 128 points · 355E3B · 6h
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