/r/programming came back up two days ago and as far as I can tell everything relating to the blackout was wiped. I kinda expected it since spez was admin.
Another thing that surprised me was how much chatGPT bot spam there is (danm it is so so bad, wonder what the mods are doing over there… ah yes, spez).
I used to sort by hot so it was hidden away a bit for me before.
Anyways I hope Lemmy does not fall into the same pitfalls!
goes back into lurk mode
how much chatGPT bot spam there is
It doesn’t surprise me at all. The spam was already there on /r/programming and /r/coding way before the blackout. I tried to report all the posts, I asked to become a mod to clean all this shit (and was rejected), but nothing worked. They don’t want to clean the mess, and that’s another reason why I don’t care if reddit dies.
As for /r/learnprogramming, it’s still filled with spam or people who cannot do a proper google query, it’s as hopeless as the rest. I’m unhappy for all the newbies who want to learn something. I hope the “learnprogramming” of lemmy will be more successful.
I had some lengthy period of time where I enjoyed regularly helping folks in r/learnprogramming. But it got exhausting fast. For every person putting in a good attempt at learning, there was 10 people who couldn’t do the most basic level of googling and content was often extremely repetitive as a result.
The sub also faced a constant stream of people who just wanted to self advertise their own YouTube videos for teaching programming, as if the lack of such was the barrier to learning.
Oh, and soooo many people who clearly just wanted to be told the answer to their homework questions and weren’t even hiding that.
To be fair, new programmers generally don’t know enough to construct a proper Google query either. And yes there are some lazy people who just don’t try. But sometimes you know what you want to achieve but any query you try seems to be unhelpful. For example, if I want to learn how to store settings in c++ the first link for me tells me to use boost. Now I need to learn about linking libraries and 300 other boost-isms. While anyone with any basic knowledge could recommend reading strings line by line and splitting the string on the equal sign.
Judging by quality of Google search results I believe experienced devs have the same problems with Google as well…
