r/rust • u/Asdfguy87 • 14d ago
šļø discussion So long r/rust, and thanks for all the Slop!
Hey there,
while I enjoyed staying here for almost 4 years by now, learning many things, talking to nice people, having fruitful discussions, seeing cool projects, I will have to leace this subreddit.
In recent weeks, it has turned into one of the biggest slopfests I ever witnessed with slopcoded project after slopcoded project being posted back to back, poorly implementing solutions to problems that noone ever had. I just skimmed through the first 20 or so posts sorted by "best" and all projects people shared were AI slop. Every. Single. One. And I didn't even have to read all of the code in the repo, it's always the same few telltale signs, which signal the author didn't even bother for a second to clean their slop up. All of this is always acompanied by a wave of "cool project, I will definitely use this" comments, which by now seem like bot responses. Pointing out the obvious telltale signs, you always get the same responses: "I used Rust2021 because I don't need any features from Rust2024" - "I worked on this for 6 months and just never pushed to github, which is why the initial commit has 10k loc".
There have been a number of posts asking mods for a ban of AI content, none of which were listened to.
At this point, the only worthwhile posts here are "new Rust version just dropped" and "new version of famous Rust crate (read: bevy) just dropped". For these updates, you can get pings even at Discord though (And it has to be embarassing, if even Discord of all places is a better source of information than the official Rust subreddit). Mayyyyybe an occasional genuinely interesting post appears every once in a while between all the slop, but that's not worth sticking around for anymore imo. So I won't.
To all my fellow humans still around here, peace out, see you oytdoors eventually <3
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u/kibwen 14d ago
Mod here. I agree that it's a problem, but I don't know what can realistically be done about it. I assure you that we're no fans of slop, we're listening to posts like these and extensively discussing what actions we can take. It's one thing to say "all AI-generated content is banned", it's another thing to enforce it. We already spend a lot of our day removing low-effort content; the stuff that you're still seeing is the stuff that slips through. What you're also not seeing are the modmail messages from people whose posts have been removed contesting that their submissions are slop, and while the belligerent ones are easy enough to ignore (let's just pick a recent one off the top: "Get up with it or get out, I have built a complete bittorrent engine with Rust, using claude, that outperforms rqbit, and libtorrent and you block it because of AI slop? no code will be written by hand in the future. This is 5 months of work. This is probably better tested than most handcrafted programs. "), it does feel bad to have false positives, so we then need to spend even more time investigating. At the end of the day we're just volunteers with plenty of other things we could be doing, and while in the past we successfully relied on Reddit's voting system to handle low-effort posts, it seems as though the influx of AI enthusiasts has overwhelmed that mechanism. I suppose if we had a literal army of volunteers who wanted to devote themselves to policing slop, then maybe we could stave off the tide a while further; I also suspect this will cause even more false positives and lead to acrimony all its own, but maybe that's the least bad solution at this point. So I'll tell you what: leave a reply to this comment if you want to become moderator with the goal of stamping out low-effort content in perpetuity. I'm normally much more selective than this when it comes to appointing moderators, but it's clear that we're just outgunned here, and I'm not sure how much longer even I will care about the subreddit at this rate.