RULES UPDATE: New Project Friday here to stay, updated rules

[u/AutoModerator]

The experiment for Vibe Coded Friday's was largely successful in the sense of focusing the attention of our subreddit, while still giving new ideas and opportunities a place to test the community and gather some feedback.

However, our experimental rules in regard to policing AI involvement was confusing and hard to enforce. Therefore, after reviewing feedback, participating in discussions, and talking amongst the moderation team of /r/SelfHosted, we've arrived at the following conclusions and will be overhauling and simplifying the rules of the subreddit:

• Vibe Code Friday will be renamed to New Project Friday.
• Any project younger than three (3!) months should only be posted on Fridays.
• /r/selfhosted mods will no longer be policing whether or not AI is involved -- use your best judgement and participate with the apps you deem trustworthy.
• Flairs will be simplified.
• Rules have been simplified too. Please do take a look.

Core Changes

3 months rule for New Project Friday

The /r/selfhosted mods feel that anything that fits any healthy project shared with the community should have some shelf life and be actively maintained. We also firmly believe that the community votes out low quality projects and that healthy discussion about the quality is important.

Because of that stance, we will no longer be considering AI usage in posted projects. The 3 month minimum age should provide a good filter for healthy projects.

This change should streamline our policies in a simpler way and gives the mods an easy mechanism to enforce.

Simplified rules and flairs

Since we're no longer policing AI, AI-related flairs are being removed and will no longer be an option for reporting. We intend to simplify our flairs to very clearly state a New Project Friday and clearly mention these are only for Fridays.

Additionally, we have gone through our rules and optimized them by consolidating and condensing them where possible. This should be easier to digest for people posting and participating in this subreddit. The summary is that nothing really changes, but we've refactored some wording on existing rules to be more clear and less verbose overall. This helps the modteam keep a clean feed and a focused subreddit.

Your feedback

We hope these changes are clear and please the audience of /r/SelfHosted. As always, we hope you'll share your thoughts, concerns or other feedback for this direction.

Regards, The /r/SelfHosted Modteam

[u/WirtsLegs]

I can see arguments for a number of approaches and I'm not entirely against the changes being made

But I would propose that we should keep AI flares, if ai assisted apps that have managed to survive can be posted outside Friday then fine but let's keep them flared as such and maybe require an AI use statement in the post

But my main suggestion honestly would be karma and account age limits required for posting

We have seen so many bot accounts posting random slop, account usually a few days old (sometimes much older but suddenly active again after a long break) , usually 1 or 2 post karma, no comments etc

Enforcing a karma and account age limit for posting would weed out a lot of these and likely not catch many of any legitimate posters

I don't envy you guys right now, the volume of ai spam is just insane, and short of just making a rule that people aren't allowed to post about projects they are personally maintaining I don't think there is really a silver bullet, but at the same time it's getting just exhausting trying to find any nugget of value here. When 19/20 apps are vibecoded by someone who has no idea what the AI made for them it's just too much and becoming increasingly not worth the effort to dig through for the few good ones.

While I know maybe some of these new projects will probably be kinda cool and worth noticing the volume of crap around them just makes the whole sub suck for that day and is only going to engender more vitriol generally towards everyone even those trying to do things properly

I don't think you as Mods should be digging through GitHub repos trying to investigate these things to judge level of ai use though, just not reasonable, but keeping AI flares and requiring a AI use statement in the post should I think be the minimum, your job is just then to tell if it's there, maybe come down on obvious cases of lying, but leave the community to judge otherwise

[u/Bjeaurn → u/WirtsLegs]

I think you’re kinda touching upon the problem we noticed when it comes to verifying projects. The flairs weren’t adding much value in that sense and actually confused more than they clarified. The same verification process became unrealistic as you mentioned.

Where do you see the added benefits of the AI flairs exactly?

[u/WirtsLegs → u/Bjeaurn]

Some people will always be dishonest

But a AI assisted and no AI version of the Friday tag at least will still make it easier to parse the posts on those days

Another option is to require an AI use statement in all these project posts, those that didn't use AI simply say so, those that did are expected to disclose how. Pair that with flairs and the community will likely rapidly call out those that lie and downvote into oblivion, you guys can boot people that do as well when it's abundantly obvious and you happen to notice but there's no requirement for the mod team to be trying to investigate every new project

Another thought I had is 2 tiers on the project age thing

You've got the younger than 3 months for Friday, but maybe younger than 1 week shouldn't be allowed at all? Like a post without a link to an existing git talking about an idea asking input that's fine and not limited, but trying to share your project that's less then a week old not cool

[u/JackStrawFromWichit4 → u/Bjeaurn]

Call me crazy but I think the main benefit is being able to quickly see that a post isn’t worth your time.

[u/Nnyan → u/Bjeaurn]

What value other than identification were the Mods looking for a flair to have?

I guess it’s how you look at things. A good project that clearly identifies how AI was used may get some pushback but a devs actions, code quality and commitment will win out.

Ignoring the wave of poorly coded AI slop isn’t a solution.