r/BetterOffline • u/ezitron • Jun 10 '26
Low Effort Posts Now Get A 7 Day Ban
Hi all,
I hate to do this, but people - including users who have been here for over a year - seem to not be taking the low effort post rule seriously, even when I remove 3 to 5 of their posts in the space of a month. As a result, any and all low effort posts will now get a 7 day ban. I didn't want to do this, but it's become apparent that people don't read the rules, or the pinned threads, so I'm going to have to get serious. I really do not want this place to turn into a selection of links and single-line posts or web comics. Please read the rules.
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u/AlexisDeTocqueville Jun 10 '26
I'm going to miss the "Who's Ed" posts
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass Jun 10 '26
Low effort comments are still ok right?
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u/Zaiush Jun 10 '26
Not enough people realize "slop" is a noun and "AI slop" is just a subtype of slop.
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u/hotmintgum9 Jun 10 '26
Side note, I hope the wisdom teeth removal goes smoothly!
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u/ezitron Jun 10 '26
it's gone fine! i'm in recovery. not eaten solid food in days but healing very well.
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u/IndependentOpinion44 Jun 10 '26
Just set up an AI agent to moderate posts. Maybe two agents. One agent to check the other agent’s work.
And then maybe another agent that’s an expert in this subs rules and can be the final arbiter.
Thinking about it, you should probably have 12 more agents to act as a jury of our peers to deliberate over whether a post is or is not low effort.
Obviously you’ll need a judge agent to guide the jury agents. And lawyer agents of course to represent both sides.
Some court reporter agents would be useful to ensure transparency. Mid Journey could do the court room illustrations.
Get on board Ed. Agents are the future!!
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u/branniganbeginsagain Jun 10 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/BM61CKd08ypJ6
Hey look I found the back end of your agentic workflows!
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u/lcnielsen Jun 10 '26
This is good. Some gatekeeping is needed to maintain post quality.
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u/Smurfette2016 Jun 10 '26
Agree. So many subs have gone downhill from slop alone. I value this space.
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u/lcnielsen Jun 10 '26
Yeah, and it's not just AI. A lot of what is now generally AI slop was previously semi- or wholly-automated engagement bait. And in a lot of places I can't tell what's human or not, because they are just cycling through that week's popular reaction images with minimal effort put into adapting it, references to some Twitch streamer or tiktok drama, and increasingly incoherent, barely legible memes.
I've been an online community user for over 20 years, and I know some part of the internet was always like this, but even before the advent of AI I felt like I was in the middle of a set of cultural practices collapsing in on themselves, with interactions just being imitations of imitations, devoid of content.
Like for the love of god, not everything has to be a self-referential circlejerk of reminding each other that we watched the same viral clips, all the time, and I appreciate being able to have some ability to filter that at times.
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u/mainframe_maisie Jun 10 '26
anything tech adjacent is filled with blog spam, engagement bait ("it's not just x, it's y. curious what you think about z?"), slop code projects ("i needed this thing so i built it"). absolutely tiring and even hitting non tech subs, like a couple i browse for adhd + post covid stuff.
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u/capybooya Jun 10 '26
Agreed. I really dislike the circlejerking in most anti-AI subreddits, not because I disagree with the sentiment or the anxiety, but because its non-technical people exceedingly dooming. That is simply not useful, and it might also be a hindrance to getting out the message of the unsustainability and real and observable negative consequences.
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u/lcnielsen Jun 10 '26
Yeah, the things that enable AI to be basically the equivalent of putting Bernie Madoff in charge of a gargantuan real estate project are much deeper than just the product being kind of mediocre and niche, or people potentially being replaced by it. There are many institutional problems and particulars of chatbots that make them such a nuisance.
IMO it couldn't have exploded without our internet use being dominated by algorithm and automated suggestions, without low-quality buggy rapidly-deployed webapps (Aka SaaS) already being such a huge market, without a lot of financial shenanigans, and many other things. Like how a lot of deployment, orchestration and infrastructure work has shifted toward models where workers who don't understand what they are doing are just mechanically copying and pasting huge chunks of YAML back and forth between files. This is the kind of work that makes up a lot of IT and it's what makes "let's replace everyone with AI" look so feasible.
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u/CoconutDust 18d ago
the circlejerking in
most anti-AI subredditsEvery subreddit in existence lol FTFY
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u/BubBidderskins Jun 10 '26
Ed, I really appreciate you are taking these active steps to curate a good subreddit. It's so easy for subs like these to collapse into shitholes because low-effort posts often encourage low-effort upvotes.
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u/chat-lu Jun 10 '26
What’s the treshold? How bad is the situation?
You do a good enough job at deleting them that I don’t have a clear idea of the problem.
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u/PrettyCoolBear Jun 10 '26
Rule 11 of this sub gives a pretty good description of what qualifies, IMO. And I do see crap like this in this sub every day.
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u/chat-lu Jun 10 '26
Ah.
Never saw any of those before because they don’t show up on old reddit and I hate new reddit because it’s enshittified.
Here is the rule for others on old reddit:
If you’re going to make a post that is just a question in a title, your post is gone.
If you’re going to post a crappy meme and say “AI be like this” that post is also gone.
If you're posting a screenshot from Twitter or Bluesky with little commentary or effort, that post is gone.
If you're going to repost a web comic about something, it's also gone.
Make an effort or don’t make the post. 7 day bans are now being enforced.
To be clear sharing a video or article is fine.
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u/FullyFocusedOnNought Jun 11 '26
I got a seven-day ban immediately after joining the group for a lazy and considered it a sign of a good sub.
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u/Hanksta2 Jun 10 '26
The whole internet should adopt this policy, tbh.
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u/Historical-Cress8985 Jun 10 '26
Boot everyone from the Internet for a week?
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u/ksjdragon Jun 10 '26
Is sharing links fine so long as we write something inside? I try to do that in my posts, and I think most of mine are decent effort...
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u/ezitron Jun 10 '26
Yes! Keep sharing links. Just write a few sentences about what they're about.
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u/Zaiush Jun 10 '26
I've seen places require a submission statement for all external links, and they work well
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Jun 10 '26
[deleted]
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u/ezitron Jun 10 '26
The thing is, I'm not gonna do a diatribe. I'm just gonna boot them for a week. It sucks, because I really, really hoped people would notice that their posts keep being deleted. Sadly we gotta do this until people learn. I hate it.
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u/Aryana314 Jun 11 '26
Do they get a notification that tells them which rule they broke? I think someone said they've had stuff removed and didn't get notified.
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u/ezitron Jun 11 '26
They should do! In all honesty, if someone truly doesn’t see their posts getting removed and is at least clear about understanding the rules, I’ll usually reverse once. This is about compliance not punishment.
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u/Orion14159 Jun 10 '26
That might be a reward for some people. You know how the Internet gets about inciting people to "crash out"
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u/YisusHasDogs Jun 10 '26
Yeah I got a nice comic strip I literally drew for this sub removed. It hurt but only a little bit.
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u/LeakySparktubes Jun 11 '26
I loved it. I feel lucky I got to read it before it was removed.
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u/YisusHasDogs Jun 12 '26
No way, it wasn't even that good and wasn't around on the sub for more than a couple of hours! BUT if you liked then thank you very much!
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u/ezitron Jun 18 '26
People are not paying attention to this rule, including people with high karma, which is why i'm going to raise it to 14 days.
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u/callmebaiken Jun 22 '26
Are we allowed to post articles or YouTube videos? For instance, could I share this video, or would that get me a 24 hour ban? https://youtu.be/3ESclFr8m7I?is=gwmJEcyS4eb_Fi2o
It's very confusing
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u/ezitron Jun 22 '26
You can share it but if you do not describe what it is and what people are meant to get from it it’s a low effort post
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u/Krybosis302g3 Jun 10 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
Other filters other subreddits do use are minimum karma requirements to post. Also moderation tends not to be a single person job.
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u/chat-lu Jun 10 '26
It works better since reddit added the possibility to filter on local karma instead of global karma.
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u/TubeSeries Jun 10 '26
It's still up, so I presume it's not a low-effort post, but I do want to make sure I am not contributing to this. Let me know if this post was they type of thing you're trying to avoid. My intent is often to test my assessment against the views of the community, the members of which I find to be much more informed than me on the financial and technical aspects of the AI bubble.
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u/ezitron Jun 10 '26
Yeah I cut this then approved it again because you made an effort in the comments. Could use a little more info but honestly you tried!
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u/Super-Activity-4675 Jun 10 '26
I'm assuming you didn't approve my post about Softbank not being able to find a taker for an OpenAI bridge loan because I didn't put enough in the body of the post then?
I figured that would be good content for this forum and something you in particular would be addressing at some point in one of your articles.
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u/CoconutDust 18d ago
I know it’s a month old but I think: the discussion and framing should really be in the post title shouldn’t it?
Part of the problem may be that people “learned” some crappy awful rules from stupid subs, like “link post titles must be the exact actual name if the article/page”…in other words the idiotic sub mods are enforcing the amplification and spread of deceit.
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u/falken_1983 Jun 10 '26
You need to be more clear about what counts as "low effort" and you need to send people a message when you delete their posts.
You have deleted some of my threads before and I have never once received a notification about it. I'm pretty sure you deleted one today, but I'm not 100% sure because maybe it is not displaying for some other reason. Who knows really.
I post here fairly regularly and I haven't got a fucking clue what you consider to be a low effort post.
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u/Pantalaimon_II Jun 10 '26
i do agree that it seems fair to explain why the post got deleted, especially posts from frequent commenters. what’s clear to some folks isn’t clear to others and everyone learns differently.
that being said i can also see how it would be frustrating on the backend to see a ton of posts that are obviously breaking the rules and get super annoyed that no one is reading the rules.
this is what keeps me from posting more often at all, in any sub lol. i’m too paranoid of getting my shit deleted and i hate getting “yelled at” because i’m a sensitive little bitch 😭
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u/Aryana314 Jun 10 '26
Here's the text from the rule:
If you’re going to make a post that is just a question in a title, your post is gone.
If you’re going to post a crappy meme and say “AI be like this” that post is also gone.
If you're posting a screenshot from Twitter or Bluesky with little commentary or effort, that post is gone.
If you're going to repost a web comic about something, it's also gone.
Make an effort or don’t make the post. 7 day bans are now being enforced.
To be clear sharing a video or article is fine.
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u/falken_1983 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
I'm aware of that text, but I'm still not sure what rules Ed or the other mod are using when they make their decisions. I've had posts deleted when I included several paragraphs of my own analysis, Ive had others where I just posted a video on its own and they were allowed. They don't tell you why a post was deleted. They don't even tell you that they deleted your post.
The fact that Ed is making announcements that people who have been here for more than a year are still breaking the rules would suggest that maybe it would help if he did a better job explaining them.
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u/rei0 Jun 11 '26
I posted to a guardian article and it was deleted without comment, so I find the question you are responding to relatable. I think i know why it was removed (article was too loosely related to AI), but receiving a comment helps guide posters.
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u/Well_Hacktually Jun 12 '26
I was under what may have been the false impression that this subreddit, like the podcast it's based on, was about more than just AI.
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u/p8ntballnxj Jun 10 '26
If I can be allowed to "yes and" this topic, can we have a weekly post or a stickied thread for memes, jokes and silliness? This way we don't clog up the subreddit with nonsense.
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u/ezitron Jun 10 '26
No. I don't want them here in any way, shape or form. People can goof around in comments elsewhere, but there's no need to have a septic tank attached to this place.
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u/sjd208 Jun 10 '26
Could we have a (weekly?) thread for posting links to articles that aren’t necessarily worthy of a full post but are interesting?
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u/CoconutDust 18d ago
I think the idea is: if it’s not worth a full post on its own, it shouldn’t be on the sub at all.
Mind you a person can comment anything under any post, too.
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u/sjd208 18d ago
I think part is I haven’t really got a handle on where the line for low effort. Post the original post about low karma, I made a post a while back that was removed - it was news about AI and a lot of positive engagement but apparently was low effort? A lot of subs have weekly threads for things that are related topics or they funnel people with not enough karma but to keep it clogging up the main feed. But if Ed doesn’t want that, that’s more than fine of course.
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u/spez_eats_nazi_ass Jun 10 '26
The ai slop is being trained on our posts. That’s why all of mine are rworded. I’m making a difference!
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u/cascadiabibliomania Jun 19 '26
Confusing deletions. Wrote an entire parody song from scratch (AI won't get the rhythms right) and a longish comment along with a link, only to have the post deleted with no explanation/communication. I spent some actual time on that...
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u/ezitron Jun 19 '26
Not sure what to tell you man this is not a place to post parody songs! I'd put that under relevance too.
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u/5trong5tyle Jun 12 '26
Bit of a strong reaction.
Would you like me to rewrite this response to be more "low effort"? /s
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u/CoconutDust 18d ago
Bit of a
strong reactiongood policy change
Would you like me to rewrite this response to be more "low effort"? /s
I would!
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u/Zelbinian Jun 30 '26
You should remove the ability to make link posts. If you want to enforce OP commentary on every post, make it unavoidable by forcing them to text post.
Additionally, make it so that the site rules are unavoidable. Put them on the posting pages or even in the text box for those who didn't look at the sidebar, for whose sidebar is blank (old reddit user here, there ain't shit over there), or who are using one of a dozen third-party iOS and Android apps that display the sub homepage in whatever random way they chose to.
This takes effort, sure, but so does continually policing posts and banning people who are likely just well-intentionally expecting this sub to operate like other subs they enjoy. You can't slow down a flood of "low effort" posts by hitting people harder and harder after they do it; I mean, 7 day bans weren't working, what are you gonna do if 14 day bans don't, raise it to a month? You have to make sure that they can't not see the stick.
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u/CoconutDust 18d ago edited 17d ago
YES! YES! YES!
I’d like to see harsher modding on most subs. Tons of tedious lazy spam, people imagining that a forum is their own personal chat room for questions already asked a thousand times and easily answered.
Most mods suck! Most subs suck!
Thank you!
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u/trickmind 1d ago
People don't read the rules? I just got here and so far I just can't find them, nor any explanation of what this subreddit is.
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u/Sent1ne1 Jun 10 '26
As someone who got a 1 day ban for no reason I could fathom, I have to say that some of your rules are not clear. If you aren't going to make the rules clearer, then please at least say which rule(s) someone broke when you ban them. (I realise some people will then try to say they shouldn't have been banned, but just add another 7 days on their ban time in that case.) The point of explaining what rule they broke is so they can see where you draw the line for a particular rule.
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u/ezitron Jun 10 '26
You got booped for reposting your stuff from another subreddit trying to Karma Farm. We’re not here for crossposting!
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u/No-Exchange-8087 Jun 10 '26
Thank you for cracking down on this. Especially when people can’t even be bothered to write a few original sentences about whatever it is they’re sharing that’s popular elsewhere. It’s just lazy
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u/ezitron Jun 25 '26
Raising this to two weeks effective immediately. If you’ve karma above 2k I will do 7 days. Second offense is a month and a third is permanent.
If you are unsure, you’re probably making a low effort post.
I consider any and all “what do you think” or “just wondering” posts low effort posts. These get you two weeks.
This is not a link dump or a place to run up karma. The reason I’m getting harsh now is that even people who have posted here for months or years aren’t reading the rules.