r/opensource • u/Wolvereness • 3d ago
Discussion Your tokens aren't valuable: No more AI.
/edit2: Adjustments will be made.
The long story short, if your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource. AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community.
We're going to be implementing a few new enforcement criteria to this end to discourage those projects:
Projects advertised here must be all of: 1 year old (not just age, but actively maintained), have multiple contributors (subjectively 3+), not be a common capstone project (school projects, such as note-taking, PDF viewers, cli music players, etc), not be intended for AI (such as MCPs), and have an existing community. No, we can no longer field requests asking for maintainers or people to contribute. Of course it still needs an OSI license as it's always been.
Though not "new", 1 year account age minimum, with significant Reddit contributions. You should not be creating a Reddit account to come here; we're a community of existing redditors. If you send us a message in modmail about this after having attempted to post, you will be permanently banned and muted. If this seems harsh, know that I estimate 20 messages a day from people expecting their slop projects and burner accounts to get an exception.
If it's obvious you're using AI in your project, we don't want it. Tokens are cheap, and we don't care how many you spent to make your amazing project.
If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community. We cannot distinguish between AI-written and AI-translated. Since you don't speak English, you can't even verify yourself if it translated correctly.
Temporary bans are only for community members that made temporary lapses in judgement, such as when getting agitated. If you post (or comment) things we don't want, such as the result of your LLM output tokens, you will never be welcome back.
If you want to be a part of the cleanup crew, be sure to reach out. If you don't like keeping this community for the humans, let me know so I can make sure you see your way out; maybe go try r/opensourceeai (sic).
If you have suggestions for anything I missed, please do let me know. Organizations that are officially incorporated under 501(c), or (d) (e) (f) (k), or 521(a), or the equivalents in their country, are exempt from project and account minimums, provided they reach out in modmail and get approval ("approved users") prior to their first post. Note that isn't limited to just 501(c)(3), purposefully so.
/Edit: Shout out to these communities. Let's cheer them on! Hopefully they will be an great refuge for those affected by this policy.
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u/bikes-n-math 3d ago
Cool, cool. So my project/package I've actively maintained for nine years, has 300+ stars on github, resolved dozens of issues for, and uses exactly zero AI is no longer welcome here because I am the only contributor?
I'm all about banning AI slop and can get behind nearly all of these new rules. But single maintainer projects not being welcome is a big turn off for me.