Greetings from the moderators, there are some things we'd like to discuss with the community and receive your input on, as well as any suggestions that you think are relevant to bring up right now that haven't been mentioned below.
Current topics include: Possible feedback & more megathread, clarification on AI posts as a topic and as content generation, discussion about political posts on this subreddit, a poll for making the subreddit english only or not and a request for more volunteer mods.
This post will stay up for a while before the proposed changes are applied to allow for users to discuss and provide input first.
Seeking Moderators
Moderating this subreddit has always been a volunteer thing much like most of the subreddits on this website, one would hope. As activity is dwindling between us mods because of our our own lives outside of reddit we would like to call for more volunteers to help moderate this subreddit. If you are interested in becoming a moderator send a modmail. Make sure to state how often you might be available, flexibility is of course implied so you do not have to come up with a precise time frame you can fully guarantee. Preferably you'd be around at least a few times a week to help deal with the reports that pile up and make sure we can attend to them more often throughout the day rather than the very few times we do right now.
English Only Rule
There aren't a whole lot of non english posts on this subreddit but they do show up now and then. A lot of the time they get downvoted and sometimes reported. The moderation team is split on whether or not it is our responsibility to translate and moderate these occasional posts in languages we do not speak. We decided to put it to a community vote and request for the users here to please vote in whether or not you'd prefer the subreddit to have an english only rule or not. This would of course not ban anything and everything that isn't in english, but is intended for posts that do not attempt to communicate in english.
AI Posts
There have been quite a lot of reports and downvotes on any post related to AI, in fact it's probably close to 99% of them. To be clear we do not intend to put a ban on or remove any post that is discussing AI as a topic. As much controversy as there is around the technology right now it is inevitably going to become a bigger and bigger part of the gaming industry and the media/entertainment industry as a whole and as such it needs to be open to discussion.
However, posts that are solely or almost entirely made up of AI generated text will be removed. It is likely that Reddit itself will be coming up with a solution to make sure their website doesn't get overrun with AI generated spam but until then or in case any slip through we want to be clear that these will currently not be allowed on the subreddit. There have been a few cases already and most of the time it is used to promote something whether a product or a reddit account. We feel that since it allows for easy low effort spam this rule has to be made.
Political Posts
Another topic that we really don't want to put a ban on as there are a lot of political issues that can be relevant to game development and the industry. That said most of these posts keep devolving into heated arguments with tons of comments from all sides breaking our rule on respectful behavior towards one another which derails discussion and hands us a mountain of reports to go through. We intend to start removing political posts earlier if they begin to show signs of derailing, we hope this is understandable as this place is primarily intended to be a game development discussion and knowledge sharing space before it is any sort of political debate forum. Unfortunately we aren't able to moderate these posts and keep them in check as we're not around 24/7 given that we have our own lives outside of reddit as well.
Feedback Megathread
There have been a few requests for this and we regularly get reports on standalone posts asking for feedback of which some break the rules and some do not but they often get reported the same. Some have asked for the weekly threads to return but they were handled by the older moderators who mostly left or became inactive after the API changes. Large part of the active moderation team now joined after and don't have the time to keep up with so many different threads throughout the weeks.
A possible alternative would be another megathread like the beginner megathread that stays up for prolonged periods of times before getting replaced but for feedback. As Reddit only allows two posts to be pinned at a time we're considering making it multipurpose if there are other kinds of posts that the community would like to have a megathread for as well. This would not include self promotion/show off posts however as the reason those rules are in place and people are directed to use other subreddits in the sidebar is because it quickly takes over most space in this subreddit and does not actually encourage discussion and knowledge sharing like asking for feedback does.
Thank you for reading and feel free to leave any thoughts in the comments below, we will make sure to read all of them before any big changes are made.
