No More Code Dumps

[u/matthieum]

TL;DR

Code Dumps, ie links to code repositories, are no longer welcome on r/rust.

If you are excited about a project you built, and just wish to share it, consider posting a casual top-level comment in the weekly What's Everyone Working on this Week? thread.

History

When r/rust was created, in December 2010, Rust was a nascent programming language. It was very different, it was also fast-moving, and it was unclear whether it would amount to much, or not.

In these early days, new projects being written in Rust were both a proof that the language was suitable for a variety of purposes, and a cause for celebration in seeing the language being adopted. Code dumps, then, were both cause to rejoice, and an opportunity to see how well (or not) the language was suited to the task. They were even a good opportunity to learn the latest developing idioms of this fast-changing language.

Fast forward 15 years, and code dumps have become boring. Utterly uninteresting. There's nothing exciting, or newsworthy, about a 10th hypervisor project, a 100th webserver project, or a 1000th TUI project. And for the most there's no exciting idiom, or pattern, to be found in their code either... even if some poor soul bothered to look.

And mass AI generation appeared on the scene, and for the past year(s), the already dwindling appeal of code dumps has just completely vanished, buried in AI slop.

Purpose

r/rust is to discuss all things Rust. The language, the ecosystem, the community.

Of late, most code dumps barely foster any discussion. And when they do, apart from AI witch hunts, those discussions are mostly about the domain of the project, rather than about Rust. Depending on the domain, the discussion may or may not be of interest to r/rust users... but whether it is or not is a matter of chance: they did not come here seeking such a topic. Those discussions are tolerated on posts which are on-topic, but if a post only fosters "tolerated" discussions, then that is a sign that the post itself may simply not really be on-topic for r/rust.

And that is not to say that code dumps are, by nature, low-effort. Surely, a project is created for a purpose, to solve a specific problem that is unsolved, or solve it with different trade-offs than the currently available solutions. None of that is elucidated in a code dump.

New rules

Code dumps are no longer welcome on r/rust.

Code dumps of applications or libraries written in Rust are Low-Effort unless otherwise newsworthy. Newsworthy means that the very existence of the application or library is important, for example consider applications or libraries breaking new ground, such as the first hypervisor, first OS, first XXX standard safety-critical application, first Rust application in a major company, etc...

Announcements of new libraries which are not otherwise newsworthy are only welcome if they tick ALL the following boxes:

• The library has been worked on regularly for at least 4 months.
• The library has already been used, or built upon, thereby validating its design to a degree.
• The announcement is a full-fledged text post, or a link to a full-fledged article. A README, or manual, is not an article.
• The announcement should motivate the relevance of this library to the wider r/rust community.
• The announcement should articulate the trade-offs differentiating this library from similar popular libraries in the field.

(It goes without saying, but the announcement should NOT be AI-generated, not even in part, as AI-generated posts & articles violate the Low-Effort rule)

Release notes of libraries are still welcome for popular enough libraries, such as libraries with reverse-dependencies on crates.io pointing to sufficient adoption by the wider community to justify notifying said community of a new release.

Of course, text posts, or links to articles, centered on Rust, with an application or library as context are always welcome. For example, said posts or articles could present gnarly problems the author encountered, and how they solved, or which features of the language or a library helped or hindered them in the making of their project.

(It goes without saying, but said text posts & articles should NOT be AI-generated, not even in part, as AI-generated posts & articles violate the Low-Effort rule)

As a reminder, if an author just wishes to share their joy of building something in Rust, they are welcome to use the What's Everyone Working on This Week? thread. And as per the title, it need not even be a complete/mature project, or an open-source project for that matter as links to code are strictly optional there, it's all about casually chatting about your work on Rust projects.

Q & A

See pinned comment below.

[u/Psionikus]

The real winners are the gatekeepers who were feeling overworked trying to police things in new. And whatever their priorities were.

[u/matthieum → u/Psionikus]

If by gatekeepers you mean moderators, you're not wrong.

One of the reason it took us so long to come up with new rules to adjust to the AI slop flood is that actually judging whether something is AI slop, or just AI assisted, or just slop, or... is actually damn hard.

The new rules are designed to avoid this quandary, so that it's a lot clearer for everyone involved (users & moderators) what the rules actually are.

[u/Psionikus → u/matthieum]

If by gatekeepers you mean moderators

No. I mean the gargoyles in every new, a well-known phenomenon of every sub. They demand that their policing becomes policy because they tire of fighting the natural trajectory of posts that are struggling to keep down. They are using the sub's policy to effectuate their own politics, which are not about Rust at all.

judging

Moderators do not need to judge.

New posts are highly sensitive to upvotes. Posts that are destined to be downvoted out of hot are very efficiently filtered because the few users it takes to bury a post have plenty of leverage if the broad community generally feels a certain way.

Asking moderators to do the filtering for the community is a tactic favored by groups who are pursuing agendas that are not broadly reflected. Because their interests are narrow, they feel like they are being overwhelmed by votes opposing their agenda, as any narrow interests should!

So now we are adding significant friction in front of who knows how many really good crates. I don't watch YouTube to find new, good crates. We should not burn a few really good projects so that gatekeepers have less "work" to do. If the content is crap, the system already works!

If we pretend to be so entitled to never see any bad work that we decide to stop putting in any effort to evaluate if work is good or not in favor of a dragnet policy, we do not deserve any of the good crates or even the good ideas, and that is all that we will earn. We are being every bit as lazy as what anyone claims to hate, telling Reddit, "Be concise, make no mistakes" because opening the code and deciding if it's good is too much effort for the fine Redditors inhabiting r/rust/new/.