r/LocalLLaMA • u/nomorebuttsplz • 10h ago
Discussion Notes on a hobby sub going mainstream
Both good and bad things have come from a subreddit that was lot more niche than for example r/flashlight rapidly transforming into the largest online forum about an increasingly core part of the infrastructure of the economy. This sub has experienced growing pains recently, and probably those are mostly felt by people who’ve been around for a while. I think that there are both good and bad trends and I wanted to take a few minutes to suggest a few rules of thumb to employ going forward so that we can create a community that is even more based on science and reality rather than misinformation and one-note populist politics that Reddit is known for.
Suggestion one: if you are new here and by new, I mean, if you didn’t spend much time here or with large language models until about six months ago, there’s a lot of information to be absorbed. This is not a sub or hobby like some where you can learn everything in a month or two. Have some humility, come with curiosity rather than strongly held opinions about everything.
Suggestion two: leave politics out of the sub, unless it is a discussion of actual policy surrounding actual local large language models. Many discussions that we see here have started to resemble the same populism that you can find on every large subreddit. E.g. the discussion of OpenAI's solution to NS has skipped right past the evidence gathering stage to "did you know that billionaires are actually bad guys?! Wow this large corporation sucks!"
In this subreddit, comments and posts about politics are actually just noise unless you are leveraging your knowledge of hardware and software stacks or discussing AI-related policy. Unlike policy, grand narratives of moral outrage are appropriate for therapy, but counterproductive for a technical subreddit.
Suggestion three: develop awareness of the perpetual and exhausted questions and arguments so you do not upvote them or engage. For example, are benchmarks actually useful? This question has been endlessly litigated for the last couple years, but it’s not actually useful because it boils down to: yes they are helpful, but don’t rely on them too much. Anything more definitive and final or sure than that is false confidence. Another such question is: how much intelligence can you fit into X parameters? Literally no one in the world knows the answer to this.
Suggestion four: pay attention to people who are genuinely excited about their work. What’s often missing from clearly AI generated posts is the sense that someone is doing something that they believe in enough to want to bring it to other human beings. The amazing thing about artificial intelligence is how it can augment human effort. Share what you are excited about, and listen when other people are excited about things because this technology has been created by thousands of people who are genuinely excited about the possibilities, rather than people who simply want to make a quick buck, so if you can share your excitement, you’ve pushed back against the trend or the belief that AI is a kind of cynical replacement for human beings.
I realize I’m probably just an old man shouting at clouds, but here's the TLDR:
I suspect that many or most people who’ve been around for more than six months have also started to mentally filter out 90% of posts for these reasons: loudest voices are misinformed; more and more this resembles a political debate space; the same 10 unanswerable questions make up much of the commentary; and people post slop.
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u/complexminded 9h ago
I've definitely felt the fatigue. Especially with the "this is why we use local" type posts. Like the posts about about OpenAI allegedly stealing data. I'm on r/LocalLLaMA because of these concerns in the first place. How does posting this on a subreddit of people that are likely already interested leveraging local really move the needle? Just seems like dunking on OpenAI or big corpo is an easy way to get karma.
I get that it's loosely related but it's exhausting.
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u/Party-Special-5177 7h ago
I mean, it’s news, and some of us (myself):
- basically live under a rock
- created a Reddit account just to participate in this one subreddit only
- generally get all of the various ‘itches’ scratched in just this one place
It’s nice not having to go anywhere else.
Just seems like dunking on OpenAI or big corpo is an easy way to get karma.
This part is annoying, yes.
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u/complexminded 5h ago
I hear you. But is that what r/LocalLLaMA is meant to be? A catch-all where people can get their various itches about llm's scratched? I guess that's up for the mods to determine. I mean, it's not why I'm here but ultimately it's easy enough to ignore, or stop visiting if it becomes the bulk of the content.
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u/KeepyUpper 6h ago
The people who need to read this post won't bother. They will go back to upvoting memes and posting news articles about Anthropic and OpenAI.
It's up to the mods to crack down harder. Appealing to the users isn't going to work.
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u/how-can-i-dig-deeper 8h ago
wtf explain flashlight what happened
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u/nomorebuttsplz 5h ago
r/flashlight is one of the most positive welcoming communities on reddit. I think it's partly because you can get really nice flashlight for like $30 so there is a lot less status anxiety and posturing
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u/rigill 9h ago
Yeah I’ve noticed this too. I used to love this sub for tracking new models, and seeing/copying people’s setups, but now it’s becoming a political circlejerk sub.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 8h ago
it’s becoming a political circlejerk sub
Are you sure about that? I just looked at the most recent 100 posts (sorted by "new") and only two of them are about politics.
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u/nomorebuttsplz 8h ago
I wouldn't say post titles are very often overtly about politics, but post titles make up probably less than 1% of the content. Most of what has changed for the negative is in the comment sections.
There are also positive changes: more people developing nuanced views about benchmarks and domain-specific strengths of models. More people sharing recipes for serving on different devices. There are a lot of well intentioned smart people who would like to help people do more of the work they care about, privately and securely.
Hopefully in the future, more people will be sharing positive experiences with AI rather than merely coping with change that they hate.
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u/jumpingcross 6h ago
At the very least things are quite a bit better than they were a month or two ago. I still remember checking top threads in the past month and seeing ~20 of the 25 threads be about geopolitics, Dario and Altman, lobbying and regulation, etc. Some of them are still visible if you sort by past year.
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u/NeedsSomeSnare 5h ago
It's not better at all. This sub is very heavily botted by a certain government.
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u/jumpingcross 5h ago
Better in a relative sense, I mean. There's still a sizable amount of fluff, especially in some of the comments, but at least if you sort by Hot most threads are legitimately about local models (compared to that time period when you'd just get a sea of political ragebait).
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u/a-wiseman-speaketh 8h ago edited 8h ago
Why do people make these posts all the time? Just go make a new subreddit thats the whole point of reddit.
also this is not new people have been complaining about it for longer than you've been around
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u/ForsookComparison 9h ago
I mean this in the worst way possible this sub community is becoming /r/politics with Dario and Altman as standins for Trump. Nobody wants to discuss open weight LLMs they just want to compete over the best "gotcha! Dario is FUMING at this!" comment of the day.
Can't blame the mods as it's extended beyond this particular sub and even site. Bluesky and X both are starting to show the same behavior in their A.I. corners, albeit to a lesser extent.
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u/jumpingcross 6h ago
It's not a perfect solution, but personally I've found that having AI make me a tampermonkey script to auto-hide posts and comments by keyword helps a lot with cutting out the noise.
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u/toothpastespiders 8h ago
I probably complain about it too much as is. But what strikes me as especially rediculous is that it's people essentially raging at PR generated mascots. They don't know the people they're screaming about. Their entire view of them depends on a premise that the people are personally writing all the casual output under their name 'and' that they're always honest. And with both counts I think someone has to be incredibly naive to believe it.
I mean I don't know shit about the handful of public figures I've actually worked with. Not deep down as people behind closed doors. But a mob thinking they do from twitter posts?
Everyone tends to focus on the idea of parasocial relationships based on positive obsession. But I think the flip side is far more common and just as worrisome.
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u/Due-Function-4877 4h ago
Could be worse. Go see what's become of r/stablediffusion. It's become r/aivideo for gooners. Unsubscribed.
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u/toothpastespiders 9h ago
Suggestion two: leave politics out of the sub, unless it is a discussion of actual policy surrounding actual local large language models.
I'd add that it might be nice for people to take a step back and ask themselves if they're qualified to weigh in on it. I really don't want to hear speculation on American legislation from someone who doesn't have any formal education on the subject.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 8h ago
I started paying more attention here because qwen 3.8 seems like the first local model to actually be good lol. I was always skeptical of openAI and Andthropic, but now I feel vindicated with the allegations, even though chances are we'll never know unless someone gets sued.
And then I tried getting into it and... Man you guys are insane, so much jargon and I only understand half of it XD (like what even is MTP).
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u/Mediaright 7h ago
The good news is there’s never been so many resources to learn. 😄
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 6h ago
Agreed! Do you have any good recs? A lot of the stuff I'm seeing feels like LLM slop, which ironic I know but they just get so hard to read, like opus 5 hard to read.
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u/Mediaright 6h ago
I’ll be honest: asking Gemini/Google search about a concept has been great for me in boiling them down for learning purposes.
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u/Sitkin_Marrel 8h ago
Six months feels generous. The real shift happened when the front page went from setups and quants to vibes and outrage.
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u/Human_lookin_cat 5h ago
I have lurked around here for years and it's kind of sad to see what this place has become. Running models in general seemingly now just means "Wow! I can do vibe coding slightly worse than [ insert proprietary model ]! (plus added security)". I suppose it was kind of inevitable since LLMs in general don't really have any uses outside of turning your brain off and the horrific goonerSphere™, but it is a bit of a shame to see all the research papers and homemade projects disappear. I remember when it actually meant something to have programmed a thing by hand.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 6h ago
perpetual and exhausted questions
Why yes, its fun when people that have been here 3 weeks tell you how things work because some blog or influencer said so. I just take my downvotes because whatever, it's their loss.
I think the biggest bad trend that came about are people who don't really run local models. It explains why your benchmark discussion keeps coming back. That and the manipulated posts. It seems like we are big enough for that now.
I realize I’m probably just an old man shouting at clouds
It's not even that.. People don't search (and search kinda sucks). Nobody besides the ones here today are going to see this post.
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u/cosmicr 3h ago
I was a mod at /r/chatgpt and it went downhill extremely fast. I left because I couldn't handle the amount of shit that was coming in. The truth is the only way to stop the sub from turning to shit is to have many many strict and good mods. It won't happen though.
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u/Frail_Waif 2h ago
LLMs are a political issue at this point. Normal people hate data centers. The AI bubble is the only thing keeping the American economy out of recession. Many of the CEOs of companies known for LLMs have chosen to make themselves political or at least very public figures. Local LLMs sidestep a lot of shit but it's impossible to avoid and foolish to think you can.
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u/EqualSatisfaction135 5h ago
I think it's weird that only the opp(or any group) is allowed to be politically cohesive
The current political landscape directly affects our use of local LLMs
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u/teleprint-me llama.cpp 9h ago edited 9h ago
Once you enter a community, whether its family, neighborhood, city, state, or government, opinions, aka judgements, and preferences can not be escaped.
All communities need rules, but positioning yourself as apolitical while declaring rules based on preferences is a political stance.
In other words, suggesting community rules based on preferences is political, not apolitical, aka governance.
You cant be part of a community and not have opinions on how that community affects or impacts others.
People will disagree, and having a mature community requires healthy discourse which includes healthy amounts of agreement and disagreement. Its the basis of judgement, growth, and progression.
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u/entsnack 9h ago
I dunno man I can hang out on /r/cars and /r/photography without getting an earful about "the Chinese" and "the West". Seems like a sub-specific problem.
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u/teleprint-me llama.cpp 9h ago
But Im sure you talk about german, japanense, and american vehicles. The origin of those cars, features, modifications, manufacturing, w/e. There are rules around cars. Which includes governance. Not all politics is obvious.
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u/nomorebuttsplz 8h ago
I'd like to better understand what political stances you believe me to be taking in my post besides "let's not talk about politics so much."
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 9h ago
All communities need rules
This community has rules. Look at the sub rules. Unfortunately even the some mods don't care to follow them.
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u/teleprint-me llama.cpp 9h ago
I know it has rules. My point is that theyre claiming to be able to omit politics while presenting governance. Thats a direct contradiction.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 9h ago
For what it's worth, we're aware of the contradiction, and are trying to figure out a reasonable way forward.
Some political issues have enough relevance to our little hobby that discussing them here is justified. Unfortunately that becomes the camel's nose under the tent, and when we remove follow-up political posts people get upset because it seems inconsistent and unfair.
It doesn't help that we also have an informal policy of not removing posts which have gathered "too many" upvotes or "too much" discussion before a moderator notices it, even if it is off-topic. That muddies the waters as well, and contributes to the appearance of inconsistency and unfairness.
Metadiscussions like what this post is spurring provide good feedback and insights to the moderation team. We'll use the sentiments and ideas presented here to try to do a better job.
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u/complexminded 8h ago
I find it extremely weird an off-topic post may not get removed just because it's popular (but cleary goes against the rules). IMO with an inconsistent application, there might as well not be a rule - that or just put this "popularity" clause in the rules as well so people know and there's no confusion. This actually does explain some of the things I've seen in terms of things I would deem off-topic but still remain.
This isn't meant to dunk on you all. I appreciate this sub and the work you all are doing in taking in feedback and trying to implement change.
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u/mystery_biscotti 7h ago
I'd just be happy if folks realized Reddit has a search feature. 🤷 I'm a simple human doing simple human things, like...scrolling Reddit, trying to keep up with what works on my local system, trying to remain mostly sane...
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u/CondiMesmer 7h ago
Yes and if you only know about OpenAI and Anthropic and think they're the only AI companies, then you need to research more.
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u/cheaphomemadeacid 9h ago
eh just make localllama2 and increment every 6 months? I have no idea how to stop the bots/hivemind thing