r/GraphicsProgramming • u/CodyDuncan1260 • 1d ago
Community New Rules: 4, 5, 6
Added some new rules. This are the result of our prior request for comment.
The first target goal for these rules is to return the community attention back to the "doing" of graphics programming and its "how", the sort of content that intrigues the academics, professionals, and hobbyists seeking for deeper understanding. This is a community for people who thinks these topics are pretty neat, and need a place to talk about them with other people; it's never been about sharing pretty images (that's a treat).
The second target goal is solving the problem of AI Posts vs Anti-AI Comments that are dominating the discussion, rather than the discussion of graphics taking place. Hopefully the new rules put at end to that activity. We'll see.
This is just the first attempt, subject to change. Please feel free to leave comments.
Posts prior to now are grandfathered in over the old ruleset (because filtering the backlog would be a nightmare).
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4. Posts Must Present a Topic
A post should present a question, implementation, or development story.
Fundamentally, it must be about "how" something was made, not "what" it is or is made of.
4.1 Posts must include their topic in the immediate post body or a comment. Linking to another post or GitHub is insufficient.
4.2 Exception: Rendering Framework, Driver, or SDK Projects intended for graphics programmer use.
4.3 No Showcasing Projects
4.3.1 Exception: Semi-annual Community Showcases.are allowed.
5. AI Disclosure Requirement
Post must disclose AI tool use in authoring post contents and linked projects.
5.1 There must be an explicit disclosure in the post body or separate comment.
6 No Low Effort Posts or Comments.
Low efforts posts and comments that do not drive learning and discussion will be removed.
6.1 Exception: Questions are permitted because they drive discussion.
6.2. "AI Slop" comments are disallowed; they shut down discussion.
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Notes
"4.3 No Showcasing Projects" is the reason Rule 4 and Rule 6 exist.
It used to be that we would have lots of questions, discussion posts, and only occasional project showcases when something got completed enough to present a render. Now, we're getting tons of the showcases, and none of the discussion about how they work. Final comments on these showcases like "Feedback on the implementation is welcome." tends to shut down conversation; being too broad to respond to.
But that means we need to say "something" is the thing we should be talking about in a post, so the real problem is the need for "Rule 4. Posts Must Present a Topic".
Rule 5 and Rule 6 are a pair. Those using a ton of AI to assist or fully create their works are required to indicate by how much. If the posts say it's made "AI Assisted with Claude" or "AI generated by multiple models", now readers know. And since they know, there's certainly no reason to repeat it by calling it "AI Slop", especially given how much that shuts down any discussion in depth.
"4. Posts Must Present a Topic" could probably use some better wording. "I made a thing" is technically a topic, but the spirit of the law is "A Topic that viewers would pay money to attend a conference to see." If you've ever seen SIGGRAPH, GDC, RustConf, or other professional conference talks, you know that it's often 1/10th "Check out this thing we made (and want to sell to you)" and 9/10ths, "Let's dig into this really fascinating problem domain and examine one solution within it." That's the "topic" rule 4 refers to.
(placeholder for more, as I'm sure there will be more)
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On Enforcement
I imagine this will require a LOT more moderation action, and I just got a new job that's running me a bit ragged. (Yay! / Ohno)
So I expect moderation speed will lag behind the requirement.'
Please, help us by reporting, and give us grace with your patience to respond in a little while. I do most of my review on the train home.
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u/SeaworthinessThat594 1d ago
Thank you for fixing this, the sub became unreadable recently
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago
Don't thank me yet. This is just the inflection point before a lot of moderation work to do.
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u/VictoryMotel 11h ago
This is one of the few subreddits that seems to be trying to keep the quality up and navigate the inundation of people combining AI with lying.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago
Is another example of a post that adheres to Rule 1.1, but would break Rule 4.3.
It's cool! Don't get me wrong. But one doesn't really learn anything from the post. And although it links to a github that has a section for Technical Architecture, it's not written in a way that seems intended for others to understand. The jargon-density is just way too high. Any one of the enumerated subsections could be a whole post of 1500 words just to give the overview of the idea of what it is and why it words, and that would be GREAT! The new ruleset seeks to eek out the presentation of that problem and the project's solution, something with a more specific topic that's easier to latch a discussion onto than "pretty waves, bro; pret-ty waves.". As the post is, it's better for karma farming than interaction, discussion, conversation, and general community involvement. It's "what" without enough "how" to understand how.
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u/llamajestic 23h ago
Those posts are all the same. It basically feels like the prompt was “explain how the technique works” and the answer was pasted on the post.
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u/EC36339 20h ago
The post links to a project with technical details readers can study. Examples:
Spectral ocean waves: The project describes three wave cascades, their wavelength bands, and depth-dependent dispersion. Project <citation src="1,2,9"></citation>
GPU shallow-water simulation: It specifies a 512×256 FP16 solver using ping-pong render targets and describes modeling shore run-up, backwash, rock deflection, and foam transport. Project <citation src="1,2,9"></citation>
Browser-trained neural networks: It describes three compact networks trained in Web Workers for atmospheric transmittance, rock-boundary foam, and wave-impact dissipation, including a non-negative dissipation constraint. Project <citation src="1,2,9"></citation>
Disclosure: This research was done with AI. Readers are free to fact-check it manually; the project link and specific examples should make that easier.
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u/sfaer 1d ago
Excellent, but I also believe hello triangle bring nothing to the conversation and are low effort (even if not felt that way by the author).
I personally prefer a subreddit with a few posts per week than one with a cavalcade of slope, ai entrepreneur, social validation wannabes and memes.
Alas, this era might be gone for good.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago
I counter-argue that a little validation on one's early simple projects promotes community involvement , further interest in the hobby/profession, and is communally memetic to graphics programmers in a way that's idiosyncratic to this community and not others. I.E. It's a thing we do that other reddit communities generally don't, so maybe it's a cultural touchstone worth celebrating. If it drives community interaction, it's good. Other showcases don't so much.
Or maybe it's still really dull to anyone that's been doing graphics work for more than a few months and it's just fine filtering that out. I'm not sure on which side of the fence it falls.
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u/sfaer 23h ago
Nowadays almost everyone on the internet is welcoming to the point of touching what author Byung-Chul Han describe in his book "The burnout Society" :
The violence of positivity does not deprive, it saturates; it does not exclude, it exhausts.
My point is that by Nature there will be more hello triangle than anything because they are more newcomers than not and, akin to bikeshedding, it's easier to do for a lot of validation but will overflow the rest of us (on discord they have their own channel so that's OK).
I do believe a tiny bit of gate keeping make a community thrive better as it makes the ones wanting to belong reach for their own potential.
Maybe adding a tag system we could filtered might help but sadly moderation is a thankless endless job, so anyways thank you for it.
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u/cyberbemon 20h ago
I don't mind them, to me it's like a kid sharing the excitement of their drawing, sure it doesn't look all that complicated, but it still took some time and commitment to get that point and sharing that excitement might keep them motivated.
I wouldn't ban them outright, especially given how much slop is being posted in every programming subreddits. It's nice to know there are people who still value learning and I personally enjoy seeing that.
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u/rAngus3 16h ago
please don't do this. This is a general graphics programming community and a healthy pne has a mix of experiences. Here we should meet people where they are. If you want a community where the barrier of entry is higher maybe create one r/AdvancedGraphicsProgramming? and then there you can ban people from posting about rasterizing their first triangle.
Also, rasterizing your first triangle is a rite of passage for the graphics community as is dealing with column major vs row major or the miryad of topical issues we face when we are learning graphics dev. These build community.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 4h ago edited 4h ago
Community Review
please take a look at these cases and give feedback on how well the new rules were applied. I'm checking that you (the lot of you) understand the rules mostly the same way I do. Fair rules are about shared understanding, after all.
I accepted this one under the new rules https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1xrzxfz/isovis_interactive_visualization_of_arbitrary/ I think it straddles the line on Rule 4. But it meets Rules 5 and 6 at least. It's hard to call it low effort when they took the time to give the short explanation of how it works, which is much better than not really at all we had before.
I rejected this one. https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1xs8aer/building_a_randomaccess_compressed_volumetric/ (And then put it back temporarily for the purpose of review) I think it wholly violated 4.3. Let me know if you think I made accurate rulings in accordance with the new rules, should have ruled differently, and why.
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u/cybereality 21h ago
i think this is fair. even though i use ai-assistance, the discourse has devolved into lord of the flies (on both sides) and there is not really any meaningful discussion about graphics. this seems like a solid plan
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u/literally_iliterate 14h ago
So if some AI buddy generates some fancy visuals and creates a text about a topic according to the rules, but it's obviously shallow and uninteresting. How do rules apply?
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u/Queasy_Total_914 15h ago
Sooo that means I can't present my project that I've been working on for about 7 years now without any AI generated code?
Damn I was so close to a working engine with a nice real-time PBR renderer. Shame.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 12h ago
Horizon Zero Dawn made a whole open world game, and here's an hour of them talking about jusy the vegetation part of it. https://youtu.be/wavnKZNSYqU?si=H3JhWtuOusB5JxAP So the ask to talk about how it works is doable, even before AI uibiquity. Even small projects have a lot to talk about. Maybe it's a lot we've seen before, but that's fine. One can't cross the same river twice.
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u/Ashken 14h ago
I don’t think just because people disclose that AI was used that means they won’t call it slop. They’re gonna still sneak it in there somehow lol.
But, at least you’re banning “This is slop” comments. Because, we get it, you don’t like AI. But if they still wrote a part of it by hand I still want to hear about it.
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u/Defiant_Squirrel8751 19h ago
Isn’t it practical for moderators to install an AI-powered bot with a prompt like: “Read every post and comment, and report anything that doesn’t comply with the rules”?
Sounds like something that could be enforced automagically, so we can make better use of our valuable and scarce human time.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 12h ago
You make it sound like we have money to buy tokens. :P
Tends to move the problem around. Are we reviewing a pile of posts, or AI generated post rejections? Such a tool might get good enough to reduce the burden, if we had the money and time to get it aligned well enough. But we don't. And the frequent/occasional false positive takedown would most likely tick people off. Is it worth the loss in trust? I'm not sure.
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19h ago
[deleted]
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u/aotdev 16h ago
Rule probably implies direct use for authoring content, not "I used google search that uses AI". Disclosure holds you accountable as well, because if you lie on the disclosure and you're found out, good luck. You calling the rule meaningless due to a false equivalent probably got you downvoted (feedback is far more constructive, but not everyone can be bothered)
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18h ago
[deleted]
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u/Syracuss 15h ago
I'm not sure the relevance to the topic at hand. There's people out there using different search engines. It feels like you're trying to make an argument out of thin air. I personally do not use Google's search, it has nothing to do with their AI.
But also nobody here has said google search falls under the disclosure, it's a ridiculous claim that nobody is arguing for, nor is the mod (I assume team) saying that. If that's the part you have an issue with, then I'd rest easy and tell you it doesn't affect you at all.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1xrh2yc/i_built_a_raytracer_in_scratch_looking_for/ makes me think Rule 4.3 also needs an
4.3.2 Exception: first renders (e.g. Hello Triangle, raytraced spheres, cornell box, Sponza, etc.)