Hello all,
I took over as mod for this community a couple of years ago. The old mod shut down the sub completely after Reddit corporate did something stupid... I don't even remember what it was at this point. When he turned it back on, he asked for someone to take over as mod, and left. At that time, we were seeing pretty reasonable questions with a post rate of maybe one or two a week. That pretty slow post rate continued until Artemis 2 launched. After that launch, the interest jumped an order of magnitude.
Lately, we've been getting a lot of posts that have me worried. A lot of people are posting a lot, and rather than asking questions, it looks like they are trying to drive discussion. Stuff like "what's your favorite?" or "what is the scariest?". To me, these questions seem a lot more like karma farming attempts rather than people seeking answers and learning like we used to see. I don't know if these are bots, or just people farming karma. I'm also not sure if these are coming from AI bots.
One of the things I think this sub has done really well is provide human answers to human questions in a way that really gets down to the root of questions. We get a lot of people who are young or just never studied physics asking questions that don't have answers because they are framed incorrectly, and the answers the community has provided correct the framing and teach in a way that chatbots really can't do. On the flip side, I'd hate to see all the work that people on this sub do in answering questions just be answering bots to feed training algorithms designed to replace the human conversations that used to happen here.
Basically, it feels like a new world, and it sucks.
I've found a setting to ban crossposting, which feels like it has been happening a lot. The OP dumps a question on AskPhysics, AskAstronomy, AskScience and a handful of others, hopes to pull karma from the posts, and usually never responds to any comments. Not sure if this is a new strategy for bots, or something else is going on, but it doesn't feel like it is having any positive effect on this community.
I've also tried to require the title of posts to have a "?" included, and the body text of the post to require some text. I'm unsure if those settings are working.
All that said, I'd like to hear any opinions on things from the community, particularly those who have been around and replying here for years. Are there things I should change in how I manage this community? Are others interested in joining the moderator team? Am I trying to hold on to a feeling that is now dead? Are there new rules or changes you'd like to see?
Open to suggestions here.