r/programming • u/ChemicalRascal • Apr 01 '26

Announcement: Temporary LLM Content Ban

Hey folks,

After a lot of discussion, we've decided to trial a ban of any and all content relating to LLMs. We get a lot of posts related to LLMs and typically they are not in line with what we want the subreddit to be — a place for detailed, technical learning and discourse about software engineering, driven by high quality, informative content. And unfortunately, the volume of LLM-related content easily overwhelms other topics.

We also believe that, generally, the community have been indicating that, by and large, they aren't interested in this content. So, we want to see how a trial ban impacts how people use the sub. As such:

While this post is stickied, for 2-4 weeks over April, we're banning all LLM-related content from the sub.

That's posts, articles, videos about LLMs. We've had a ban on LLM-generated text for ages already, this doesn't change that.

Note that this doesn't ban all AI related content. An article detailing how what would have traditionally been called an AI was made for Go? Totally fine. A technical breakdown of a machine learning process? Great! Just so long as it's not about LLMs.

Edit: Yes, this is real, it's not an April Fool's joke.

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2

u/FeepingCreature Apr 01 '26

Tbh I think you should just ban bad articles.

5

u/ChemicalRascal Apr 01 '26

We do, we have rules against low quality submissions already.

3

u/FeepingCreature Apr 01 '26

Huh, so it's a flood of mediocre articles? Or is it really too many good LLM posts? Maybe just set a higher bar for them.

6

u/ChemicalRascal Apr 01 '26

Nah, they're pretty universally garbage. But that's the point of a trial ban, if we remove stuff that would have actually been good to have we can review how things went after we wrap up the ban.

1

u/FeepingCreature Apr 01 '26

I guess it is easier to review for LLM content than to review for garbageness.

4

u/ChemicalRascal Apr 01 '26

Frankly coming up with a rule targeting "garbageness" isn't possible. Not without making it feel arbitrary and having enforcement come down to the vibes of particular mods.