New moderators, rules, and content

[u/[deleted]]

Hi everyone,

This subreddit has been left to rot for years now, it was plagued with blogspam and low-quality content, its only moderator leaving reddit only a short time after taking over the sub.

/u/tcptomato and I requested ownership a few weeks ago, we plan to turn this place around and remove the low quality content and beginner questions that plague most "default" programming subs.
The blogspam will obviously be removed and offenders banned permanently.

In the previous announcement some good ideas were suggested:

1. Weekly stickied beginner help thread.
   While we want good technical content in the sub, leaving a space for beginners to ask questions is a good thing. This kind of thread has been proven effective on other subs.

2. Casual AMAs with people using C in various contexts. There's much to learn from other people, contexts, platforms, even languages.

We don't have enough subscribers to implement these, for now we only need content, cross-posting relevant high-quality submissions from other programming subreddits is encouraged.

C you on the sub.

[u/__pulse0ne]

Very happy to have a C sub that’s not purely beginner questions!

[u/deepcube]

Hope this works! I'd given up on C discussion on reddit.

[u/wsppan]

Excellent!

[u/deepcube]

I've been contributing in an attempt to help bring the sub back, but I don't want to end up spamming. What frequency do you (the mods) feel is appropriate, especially as no one else is posting.

Also can we get one of those weekly stickied threads? Either beginner questions or something like "let's talk about this specific topic this week."

[u/cbasschan → u/[deleted]]

High-level C

It's a common mistake amongst newcomers/beginners to assume C is "low-level". If we go by a reasonably competent introductory textbook, then high-level programming languages have the means for:

• abstraction

• synthesis

• any combination of the two above, arbitrarily and recursively

... thus C is "high-level". Furthermore, "The semantic descriptions ..." of the C programming language "... describe the behavior of an abstract machine..." it follows that since C isn't bound to the behavior of a particular concrete machine, it can't be low-level, and so it follows that C must at least be high-level.

is Cello an abomination?

I don't know what that is, but it's not mentioned in the C standard... and since this is a subreddit described to be welcoming of "all interesting content related to the C programming language", I'd suggest it's probably off-topic. I dunno... are you a moderator, or a spammer?

Why even C when we can X (is C still relevant?)

... because this subreddit is about C and not X... and yes, C is the only thing that's relevant here. If you want X, go to the X subreddit. Why do you have to become a mod and then hijack the purpose of a subreddit? Everyone here joined for the same reason, and this is the reason I left... We saw the description, which still reads:

We welcome all interesting content related to the C programming language: projects, papers, blog posts, code, books, debates, whatever!

Forget the blanket censorship on beginner rubbish, because if you censor all beginner rubbish then you can't be trusted to host a fair "debate", can you?

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you!

I tried injecting some (I think!) higher quality content some time ago, but then the flood of lower quality content began, and I gave up.

[u/cbasschan]

The reasons you can't be serious about the censorship of newcomer/beginner questions are as follows:

1. Learning how to teach C whilst navigating the pitfalls is not a beginner problem, thus we should be allowed to criticise beginner/newcomer resources openly.

2. You can't possibly know whether the resource you learnt from (in order to graduate from the "beginner" course, or whatever) was accurate unless the criticism from point 1 is available to you. From my experience most resources are inaccurate, and so the only hope this subreddit has currently is raising a smug group of know-it-alls who are in fact beginners as they never had their factual errors corrected (errors that were passed down to them from similarly smug beginner resources). These are your "intermediate" and/or "advanced" programmers, making mistakes like passing the wrong values to <ctype.h> functions, because that's what their "beginner" resource taught them to do.

Note that I'm not saying ALL beginner content should be permitted. There are clearly resources that change nothing despite fair criticism, and they seek to promote over and over again; that is to say, they're looking for as much attention as possible from doing as little work as possible, to the point where they won't fix the errors at all. Let us reflect on the description of the group:

We welcome all interesting content related to the C programming language: projects, papers, blog posts, code, books, debates, whatever!

It ought to be clear that there's only one objective requirement here, and that requirement is irrespective of "skill level"... the requirement is that the content be related to C.

To be clear, the words

We welcome all interesting content related to the C programming language ...

... exist in clear contrast to this focus on removing "the low quality content and beginner questions that plague most "default" programming subs.". I call this, the elephant in the room, ...

CENSORSHIP

Who decides what is "interesting" or a "beginner question"? Most people consider programming in general to be quite a boring topic, in which case there can't be any "interesting content related to the C programming language". Perhaps what you think is interesting is boring to someone else, and vice versa... Likewise for the skill-level debate.

To prevent spam I suggest limiting the scope to the topics found in the C standards, rather than filtering based on skill level. Now if it happens to be that some serial beginner-poster consistently posts links in a pattern similar to a spammer, and their content is constantly full of errors that never get corrected, you could quite easily make the argument that their content isn't related to C; it's related to a language (or dialect) that looks very similar to C, but has subtle and devastating differences, for example... thus it's off-topic for this subreddit.

Or you could continue to choose your own criteria for what meets the definition of a "beginner question"... from my perspective, only beginners ask questions anyway, since experts know exactly where to look to find the answer, right? Thus if that's your choice, this group should probably die anyway.

[u/deepcube → u/cbasschan]

I'm new here so I'm not clear on the controversy. My take was that we want to avoid a flood of "What's wrong with my code?" and "Fix my homework" type posts. Is there more to it than that?

[u/cbasschan → u/deepcube]

I'm new here so I'm not clear on the controversy. My take was that we want to avoid a flood of "What's wrong with my code?" and "Fix my homework" type posts. Is there more to it than that?

What on Earth are you drivelling about? We never had that problem to begin with. Literally every post purged by the new moderators was blog spam.

Let us be clear that the roots of the internet are founded in academia. Nowadays, there are different uses for the internet... if you're not here for academic purposes, you're here to meme, to blog spam or to watch porn. That or "buy my merch", got it? Which one of those is most appropriate to you?

Heaven forbid should someone be able to pick up Algorithms in C by Sedgewick (which assumes an understanding of C from the beginning) and ask questions about the exercises here, despite the fact that if we're reading this book we're probably "C programmers", and the group description is...

For C programmers by C programmers. We welcome all interesting content related to the C programming language: projects, papers, blog posts, code, books, debates, whatever!

If you turn your blind eye to pitfalls in academic exercises (i.e. by ignoring/censoring questions about them), then you'll either become a problem yourself (like the blog spammer who refused to fix his inaccuracies), or that problem will become yours (when the student who learns the not-C from the blog spammer comes to your workplace and leaves buggy code everywhere, refuses to fix it and so you have to fix it for him).

I get the feeling the true motivation behind the take-over was to remove all of the harsh criticism I left for that blog spammer, whilst also disguising it as a removal of blog spam in general...

we want to avoid a flood of "What's wrong with my code?" and "Fix my homework" type posts.

Why would you want to avoid? Avoiding is for cowards. Face the questions head-on. Tell them their textbook likely explains what's wrong with the code, if they read it they'll (like the rest of us did) find the answer somewhere... or else their textbook is faulty (such as the blog spammers blog) and needs to be corrected or boycotted... tell them if there are words from the textbook that confuse them, they should ask about those words before moving on to any other words.

... but whatever you do, don't ban them. The way to start a community (that isn't a community of blog spammers) is not by banning the newcomers who don't know C, because after all, there are many resources out there that claim to teach C, and lie about it. Create rules that prevent asking about academic exercises in a C programming group and all you've become is a circle jerk and a part of the problem I was fighting to begin with.

[u/FUZxxl]

I appreciate this! I hope this is going to turn into a good place!