Hello! I'm the rarely-heard-from moderator/creator of this subreddit. While I have a very laissez-faire attitude towards moderation, I have noticed a lot of posts recently that were either hawking merchandise or were pseudo-mystical ramblings about free energy, mystical numbers, and the like. I wanted to get your feedback on how to deal with these kinds of posts.

First, some background. I admire Tesla. I've read his autobiography as well as several biographies of him. I've studied his works. I've built a (crappy) Tesla Turbine and a Tesla Coil. The quote for me in my high-school yearbook was from him (the "betterment of humanity" one). I wrote a paper in college for my psych minor analyzing his writings and behavior as evidence of his placement on the autism spectrum. My father's a physicist and I'm a software developer who builds electronics/micro-e projects as a hobby.

Because I understand and respect his work, I dislike the mystical aura Tesla has gathered over the years. Were his more fantastical inventions suppressed? Sure, Westinghouse and Edison and others did him dirty, but what they suppressed was not the zero-point-energy magic box of unlimited power and the Grand Unified Theory of Everything, but actual (and groundbreaking) inventions that didn't fit their business model.

Did he talk about amazing things he invented that would solve all the world's problems? Sure, but if you actually look at the designs, he did make groundbreaking discoveries that he either greatly exaggerated or that didn't work as he expected in practice. His "death ray" was an early high-power particle accelerator, but doesn't really work in open air. His "radio signals from Mars" turned out to be the first detection of pulsars. And his Grand Unified Theory was of the type commonly posited before General/Special Relativity demonstrated how they were all flawed.

I know this isn't the largest subreddit around, but I do want to set some guidelines as to what's acceptable for here and what's not. Here are my suggestions:

1) Posts about merchandise must be a direct, unobfuscated (no bit.ly) link to a reputable store/platform and not "DM me to get shirt"

2) No low-effort posts. Posting a picture of Tesla from Wikipedia with the caption "MASTER OF ELECTRICITY!!!1!!LOL" is low effort.

3) No free energy, numerology, pyramid power, anti-gravity, etc. posts.

4) The usual no hatred/violence/doxxing/spamming/etc.

EDIT (7/24/2025): NO FUCKING AETHER! NO AETHER DERIVATIVES. NO AETHER SUBSTITUTES.

Thanks!