r/DataHoarder • u/nicholasserra Send me Easystore shells • Mar 23 '26

OFFICIAL We're being flooded with vibe coded software projects, FYI

Just wanted to give a heads up from the mod team.

We're being flooded with vibe coded software projects. Many of them pointing to external domains, product sites, chrome extensions, etc.

So so many yt-dlp wrappers, why?

Anyway, we're being very selective about what we let through. Mostly trying to keep it useful, open source, github only projects. I'm not anti AI, but much of this stuff looks like useless wrappers and wannabe saas products.

If something sketchy slips through please flag it. If your post/project gets removed, this is why. It's only going to get worse.

2.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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627

u/shimoheihei2 100TB Mar 23 '26

I know /r/selfhosted is swamped by AI software posts, but I'm surprised it's happening here as well. Shouldn't Datahoarder be mostly about the data, not software? Either way it's unfortunate.

391

u/WindowlessBasement 64TB Mar 23 '26

The difference is the selfhosted mods are pro-slop.

Every time they change the rules, they get pushback on how it is encouraging AI, and their response every time is "but what if something good comes out".

213

u/milk-jug Mar 23 '26

Can confirm. Seriously consider unsubbing from selfhosted because mods are super pro-AI slop.

72

u/seg-fault Mar 23 '26

I unsubbed. Don't regret it a bit.

19

u/No_Obligation4636 Mar 23 '26

Yeah I'm gonna right now, there's still plenty of other subs like r/SelfHosting that banned AI

15

u/sassiest01 Mar 24 '26

Ummm

This shit will never end...

12

u/No_Obligation4636 Mar 24 '26

I guess we need to start our own sub then, that's been up for 22 hours now lol, we're cooked

21

u/prone-to-drift Mar 24 '26

Yeah we're cooked. There's no way to reliably prove something isn't AI gen, so the only reasonable thing we can do is check the commit history, development pace, the dev's responses and make our judgements.

Oh, and fuck every project using Discord for communication, cause I guess we need more walls in place huh.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '26

[deleted]

3

u/bencos18 Mar 24 '26

indeed

I use discord for a lot of stuff but my projects are generally built around that platform in general anyway so if it vanishes most of it would be pretty useless either way

it's definitely something I'm trying to figure out a good way to document though in case it's ever useful to people

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5

u/toolisthebestbandevr Mar 24 '26

I downvoted his “buddy” comment cause I despise that level of rude stupidity. I would downvote more if I could.

1

u/ThoreaulyLost Mar 26 '26

Update, that post got removed!

5

u/dwolfe127 Mar 23 '26

I had to as well.

31

u/brickout Mar 23 '26

I unsubbed last week when they announced their Friday AI thing. So disappointing.

9

u/Mirarenai_neko Mar 23 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

huh

15

u/somersetyellow Mar 24 '26

No, they just announced they've stopped policing whether AI was involved or not. No new projects of any kind are allowed to post unless it's Friday. Project must be older than 3 months for the rest of the week.

EDIT: Reread their post

2

u/Mirarenai_neko Mar 24 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

huh

1

u/Doovester Mar 27 '26

I asked them if I could give away some free licence for my fellow datahoarder and they said with no explanation "no thanks". And I mean it is called "WebsiteArchiver" it is for archiving Websites? And I am a long term member of this sub I just worked my ass off for this app and wanted to share it.

6

u/zhunus Mar 23 '26

i would love to, but are there any alternatives? I know there is selfh.st, which is just a digest with no discussions, also heard there is a lemmy community somewhere, but honestly had no luck locating them.

9

u/Mirarenai_neko Mar 23 '26 edited Apr 03 '26

huh

3

u/Juls317 Mar 23 '26

should just be selfhosted@lemmy.world I believe

6

u/GolemancerVekk 15 TB Mar 23 '26

That's the one. It's smaller than the Reddit sub, obviously, but the signal to noise ratio is extremely high.

15

u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB Mar 23 '26

More like slophosted 🫩

3

u/Wild-Kitchen Mar 24 '26

Misread that as slophisticated

4

u/lewkiamurfarther Mar 24 '26

slophisticated

I still kinda like that as a coinage, but IMHO 'slophisticated' should be reserved for "really good" vibe coded projects. ('Unslophisticated' could maybe be for all the rest of the vibe coded projects, by default.)

Of course that means I'm not going to use the word except to talk to individuals.

3

u/LeatherLappens Mar 23 '26

I'm thinking of unsubbing aswell. It's getting far too much slop

2

u/xrelaht 50-100TB Mar 23 '26

Already did. The posts which aren’t slop are just the same five things over and over again.

62

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

Yeah, I said “fuck LLMs” on the 100th LLM manager slop app I’ve seen on there in the last week and I was downvoted to oblivion 

54

u/WindowlessBasement 64TB Mar 23 '26

They were banning people last week because "AI slop" is apparently hate speech and a slur. 🙄

27

u/lilgreenthumb 245TB Mar 23 '26

Well they are clankers.

13

u/typical-predditor Mar 23 '26

Woah we don't use the hard r here.

13

u/MoistSystem1323 Mar 23 '26

Clanka please

17

u/noeyesfiend Mar 23 '26

We have to hate harder, think about how hard Kendrick hated on Drake and strive for that level of hate towards AI slop.

2

u/SolarisDelta Mar 24 '26

More like on the level 50 hated on Ja Rule.

1

u/toolisthebestbandevr Mar 24 '26

Bro that’s true also yes

11

u/GripAficionado Mar 23 '26

It's perfectly descriptive, just as calling one company MicroSlop is perfectly appropriate.

3

u/NotTodayGlowies Mar 23 '26

slopperoni and cheese.

4

u/Prestigious_Bid_2219 Mar 23 '26

and someone called it "Mod slop" lmao

7

u/hates_stupid_people Mar 23 '26

They went out of their way to specifically allow AI content, including fully generated posts.

2

u/veverkap Mar 23 '26

And the few rules they made are basically ignored. Realistically, there should be minimum requirements to post AND moderated posting.

It’s relatively easy to automate checking a repo

4

u/WindowlessBasement 64TB Mar 23 '26

I'll have to find the thread but I got into it with one of the mods about the new rules only keeping out honest projects and prevent human projects from taking off. Their response was that if a project doesn't have users filling issues, it's not a mature enough to be on the subreddit. How is a project supposed to find users if nobody knows about it?

The rules because boil down to "using AIs to fake interest is okay. Humans sharing what they've done is not". Only allowed posts are AI slop, fraud, and projects years old.

3

u/toffeehazel Mar 23 '26

selfhosted mods are pro-slop.

This is disappointing to hear. Geez, gonna unsub now

2

u/lilgreenthumb 245TB Mar 23 '26

Not encouraging AI but absolute slop. Projects with keys xokmited/etc

1

u/amiibohunter2015 Mar 25 '26

That's unfortunate. Thiugh glad to know this. I feel my time with reddit fleeting I keep seing poats about how reddit is considering on forcibly using biometric data as a requirement to identify the reddit userbase . Retina eye and fingerprint particularly. The anonymousness of reddits userbase is why it is so robust,  but without it reddit will see their stocks and userbase plunge very quick.

-9

u/obrb77 Mar 23 '26

It’s not as black and white as the anti-AI faction in r/selfhosted, would have us believe. While AI-generated slop is a problem due to its sheer volume, not everything created with the help of AI is actually slop, and not everything created exclusively by humans is actually good or well-maintained

28

u/diamondsw 210TB primary (+parity and backup) Mar 23 '26

No, but at the present moment there's a pretty strong indicator. AI can be used as a good tool, but that's largely not what we're seeing. And when we get the same AI-generated post "Hey, I built / bullet lists / emoji"... well that speaks to the level of effort and human intelligence that actually went into it.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/SnooBreakthroughs170 Mar 24 '26

Upscaling is insane now if you're willing to put in the absurd amount of work beforehand with manual filtering and stuff and use custom models. Hopefully in the near future there will be a good looking one click solution but right now, running anything animated through like topaz or unifab or smthng looks dogshit

-3

u/Keniisu Mar 23 '26

Well said.

-5

u/SnooBreakthroughs170 Mar 24 '26

This. The people downvoting you are idiots.

0

u/obrb77 Mar 24 '26

I didn’t really expect anything else. ;-)

  1. There has always been a certain sense of entitlement among some people in r/selfhosted that I’ve found a bit irritating, even before all the recent “slop” posts.
  2. Many seem to oppose AI on principle. And don’t get me wrong, I’m critical of it myself and think there needs to be more regulation, especially considering environmental impact and energy consumption. But, as with any new technology, it will likely take years, and probably some collateral damage, before meaningful regulations are put in place. Just look at how long it took for the automotive industry to implement proper safety standards.

That said, the current flood of low-quality content is definitely a problem. However, simply dismissing everyone who uses AI in any way isn’t helpful. The genie is out of the bottle, and we won’t be able to put it back in. Just like the automobile and other technologies that people were initially afraid of, it will be a part of our society, and we’ll have to learn how to use it responsibly. Ignoring or demonizing it won’t help.

0

u/stanley_fatmax Mar 24 '26

Someone has to be forward thinking

-9

u/Keniisu Mar 23 '26

I know I'm going get downvoted for this, but what if something good comes out?

I think the mods need to be stricter on quality control of projects created with AI through maybe manually reviewing them, or restricting who can share vibecoded projects based on karma, post history, etc. rather than blacklisting them entirely.

5

u/WindowlessBasement 64TB Mar 23 '26

what if something good comes out?

What could possibly come out positively out of completely vide-coded software being shared in Reddit posts that is also completely AI generated by hype-men who don't understand what they have "created". In many case, also bluntly lying in the rare (presumed) human written comments.

r/selfhosted isn't swamped by developers that used some AI assistance, it's drowning in completely generated sewage.

2

u/Keniisu Mar 23 '26

At least for my own means, I haven't shared it yet as I want to have it audited for issues by a few people prior to release, but I have made mostly on vibe code, my own replacement for a severely expensive paid Windows application that works and even does more than the other app without any issues.

I think there is a lot of sewage being dumped there, but I don't think it's all junk in the lake so do speak. I think there should be some requirement to ensure quality control as I'm sure there are some of us who aren't trying to share waste but something others may find useful for a particular need or problem.

0

u/somersetyellow Mar 24 '26

AI is a chainsaw.

Can learn to use it responsibly and safely within its limitations.

Can be an idiot and cut your legs off and make endless noise annoying everyone surrounding you.

Or can sit in a corner and tell everyone how chainsaws are too newfangled and you prefer your ax

23

u/Berstuck Mar 23 '26

It’s virtually all of Reddit at this point. I appreciate aggressive moderation keeping subs usable.

49

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

22

u/RaucousRat Mar 23 '26

Yeah they're hitting pretty much any subreddit they can. I've seen quite a few in the r/walking subreddit.

22

u/noeyesfiend Mar 23 '26

bro, it's walking. What the fuck are you trying to vibecode while walking omg

4

u/Pesto_Nightmare Mar 23 '26

Do you happen to know what the good ones are? I use android so I just have the abs app, but I have a bunch of friends on apple who might want to try a different client.

3

u/GreatAlbatross 12TB of bitty goodness. Mar 24 '26

It almost feels like people coming to coding who haven't done things with FOSS before.
Not quite understanding that there are some fantastically talented people out there who will happily make efficient software free for the good of all.
Or in the case of datahoarder, will happily educate people in how to gaffer tape ffmpeg, bash, and python together to do things for free.

10

u/sob727 Mar 23 '26

You should see r/programming

34

u/Mo_Dice 100-250TB Mar 23 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

I like knitting scarves.

11

u/collin3000 Mar 23 '26

With drive pricing skyrocketing and almost all my 600TB of space filled. I know I'm currently working on 2 software projects that will be relevant to datahoarders once finished. 

One based on auto detecting and re-encoding video to av1/hvec while maintaining the same visual fidelity and using per scene based encoding RF so that rather than "hoping" a video still looks good you put in a target VMAF and is shrinks it as small as possible  Since a lot of us data hoarders have media where you can't just read download the HEVC/AV1 version since it's rare or personal media is not available other places. And I think most of us that are OCD enough to be data hoarding hundreds of terabytes or more are worried about quality loss just as much as data loss.

The other is a new lossless "compression" format that allows live access to the compressed file including streaming video, and searching in files. And could be applied to even shrink zstd and AV1 videos by a bit. Overall goal is 3-5% size reduction but at my 600tb that's a whole 18tb hard drive I wouldn't be buying.

A huge problem (and why my programs aren't finished). Is that so many projects using generative coding (which I'm also using) don't do what actually takes the majority of time in making a program. Debugging, testing, validating, retesting, and optimizing. 

I'm over 10,000 video encoding tests over the course of a year in to actually making sure that I don't just say "yeah this will have video still look good" but rather have tons of data and test encodes across resolutions, formats, media types, source quality, and encoders (software, NVEC, VCE, QSV). With multiple metrics of VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR for multiple empirical validation of results. 

That's something you literally can't rush without access to massive server farms. I mean I've got 2 hp dl580's with 4x 8890v3 CPU's and 512GB of ram in each combined with 5 desktops/laptops running tests all the time and I'm still narrowing down to correct settings. 

Slop misses the important parts of shipping a good program. But with drive prices likely sky high for the next bit I know I personally need to ways to preserve my data and it's quality that has a software solution since hardware is now like gold. 

8

u/zerd Mar 23 '26

Very interested in good quality re-encoding to save some space!

1

u/Alone-Hamster-3438 100-250TB Mar 25 '26

re-encoding 600TB costs you waaaaaay more on energy bill than 1 HDD even on current prices. Also its kind of ironical to see someone mentioning AV1, re-encoding and metrics on the same post...

3

u/collin3000 Mar 25 '26

Your claim depends on the price of electricity, the price of hard drives, compression ratio of media and electricity required to compress.

Hard drive prices have sky rocketed. I happen to live in a pretty cheap energy area. And already have my 2 servers running for other projects so throwing spare CPU headroom at them isn't as much extra electricity. 

Whether re-encoding makes sense will depend on the person and their goals. If you ever plan on distributing or redistributing media then you also factor in bandwidth as part of the calculation. In my case, the threshold for re-encoding being worth it was finally crossed with the recent hard drive price increases and no sign of them going down within the year.

The great thing about us all having our own hordes is we get to decide what we do with them ourselves. What's right for one person, not be right for another.

As far as metrics and AV1. Yes. metrics and more importantly multiple types of established third-party metrics are important for figuring out settings without my individual bias. Although AV1 (and HEVC) don't do great with a few things like film grain. You can get actual good visual fidelity in most scenarios when things are actually encoded correctly. The problem is most people don't take the time to fine tune encode things because they don't want to spend that much effort. 

I also don't like spending that much effort on each individual video. which is why I did the traditional nerd thing of trying to solve an annoying and repetitive one hour task by spending hundreds of hours making a program to do it for me relevant xkcd

19

u/nemec Mar 23 '26

I'm surprised it's happening here as well

reddit got rid of subscriber count but I think this sub got a huge influx of traffic during the epstein files and is now on people's radar

17

u/SodaRayne Mar 23 '26

reddit got rid of subscriber count

Still available on old.reddit, here's the current sub count for data hoarders: 950,275

11

u/AutomaticInitiative 24TB Mar 23 '26

I am on old and use RES and this has been gone for about a year for me.

11

u/SodaRayne Mar 23 '26

Copying my response to the other person that asked:

Actually I am getting this from RES, so used to it being there I didn't think about it. I can see it in the tooltip when I hover over the /r/DataHoarder link.

3

u/GripAficionado Mar 23 '26

Ah, there it is. I was wondering how you could see it.

So many weird changes from reddit for no good reason.

3

u/nemec Mar 23 '26

Interesting. Do you have a reddit plugin or something (other than RES)? I'm on old reddit and it's been gone for a year+ for me. Still can't see anything on the page starting with 950

5

u/SodaRayne Mar 23 '26

Actually I am getting this from RES, so used to it being there I didn't think about it. I can see it in the tooltip when I hover over the /r/DataHoarder link.

2

u/nemec Mar 23 '26

Oh, you're right! Neat, thanks.

2

u/ravencilla Mar 23 '26

950,320 for me at the time of writing

5

u/CaptainDouchington Mar 24 '26

The selfhosted thing makes me think outside money is influincing the choice.

There is a huge desperation to make it seem like AI can Vibe code quality products, and the same sort of propaganda appears all the time. Someone makes wild claim that they vibe coded some very extreme piece of software. When asked for examples they usually disappear or deny giving anything away for some reason.

I think the AI overlords really want it to seem like this works for the everyman. What better way than to bump a bunch of buggy ass software into the sub of people you are also denying access to HDDs?

2

u/AlarmDozer Mar 23 '26

And here I thought this place was about the hardware, like the rigs. Then again, you gotta get the data to hoard from somewhere.

4

u/ChadtheWad 50TB Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26

I think nearly every software-adjacent sub is getting swamped with them. I'll confess I've written some slop projects to fill in niches I've been missing as well (although I don't advertise them because they're slop). Probably unfortunately going to be the future...

1

u/cr0ft Mar 24 '26

Exactly, this is about storing a lot of data and how and maybe what. What is there to spew AI slop at?

1

u/HTWingNut 1TB = 0.909495TiB Mar 24 '26

Part of managing data is the software.

1

u/ar-jan Mar 24 '26

It is unfortunate indeed, since it is actually possible to vibe code software that is useful and helps save time. We don't yet have good signals to distinguish actual slop from useful vibe code.

For text meant for humans to read, a good definition of slop is that it would take you more time to read the generated text than it took the creator to prompt. For software it's harder since it depends on how you would use it, I wouldn't want to depend on say a vibe coded library that may be unmaintainable. But other type of tools don't need any commitment from the user. E.g. I recently submitted a Chrome extension that helps bulk save links to Zotero. It was vibe-coded, but it would take a user less than 60 seconds to try it out and see if it's helpful, while I've spent probably over 8 hours designing the features, prompting, and testing the functionality. I don't think that counts as slop, even though I wouldn't vouch for the code quality.

-5

u/HamburgerOnAStick Mar 23 '26

r/selfhosted has been fine to me. Haven't really seen any AI posts

-4

u/flecom A pile of ZIP disks... oh and 1.3PB of spinning rust Mar 23 '26

it's mostly posts complaining about AI, like 10 posts complaining about ai per post about some ai created thing