u/ketralnis How much work is it to populate/curate all these articles/posts? It does not seem like a trivial task. It's appreciated, but I can imagine it's fairly thankless work.
For context I'm a mod on r/programming and I try to keep the subreddit full of fresh content, both to keep it active and also because today's content will attract the kinds of users that submit tomorrow's content so good stuff today means good stuff tomorrow.
I've automated the discovery a little bit to look in places that I typically find content that I enjoy, but after that runs and classifies some articles as a good fit I'm ultimately still eyeballing every article and submitting it manually. The automation took me a couple of hours initially and now I'm spending 5-10 minutes a day submitting posts.
Then actual moderation takes about that much time as well. Most of that time is checking the new page a couple of times a day and removing rule-nonconforming posts. Those are about 40% support requests and 40% "I made this" and then a longer tail of other things. We don't allow those two categories under the same two theories, that (1) content should "point outward", i.e. provide a service or knowledge to subscribers rather than solely benefit the poster and (2) that kind of content attracts more of that content and if left unfettered to take over the subreddit it wouldn't a programming subreddit anymore but rather a beginner's support subreddit or product showcase subreddit, either of which would both drown out and discourage true programming content.
So all in all about 20 minutes a day for those tasks combined
amirrajan@reddit
Wish more dev thought like this
BoilerEuler@reddit
u/ketralnis How much work is it to populate/curate all these articles/posts? It does not seem like a trivial task. It's appreciated, but I can imagine it's fairly thankless work.
ketralnis@reddit (OP)
For context I'm a mod on r/programming and I try to keep the subreddit full of fresh content, both to keep it active and also because today's content will attract the kinds of users that submit tomorrow's content so good stuff today means good stuff tomorrow.
I've automated the discovery a little bit to look in places that I typically find content that I enjoy, but after that runs and classifies some articles as a good fit I'm ultimately still eyeballing every article and submitting it manually. The automation took me a couple of hours initially and now I'm spending 5-10 minutes a day submitting posts.
Then actual moderation takes about that much time as well. Most of that time is checking the new page a couple of times a day and removing rule-nonconforming posts. Those are about 40% support requests and 40% "I made this" and then a longer tail of other things. We don't allow those two categories under the same two theories, that (1) content should "point outward", i.e. provide a service or knowledge to subscribers rather than solely benefit the poster and (2) that kind of content attracts more of that content and if left unfettered to take over the subreddit it wouldn't a programming subreddit anymore but rather a beginner's support subreddit or product showcase subreddit, either of which would both drown out and discourage true programming content.
So all in all about 20 minutes a day for those tasks combined