We (mods) noticed that the announcement category was getting more and more posts, but also the quality went down. This isn't just our subjective view, but also noticeable due to the fact that y'all don't really interact with announcement posts.
It was overwhelmingly posts about newly written crates, and that is after we filtered out slop and ads. I have now muted this category for everyone, but you can manually resubscribe to it. Please let us know about any announcement topics that aren't categorized, we'll put them in the right category so that the latest/new/hot sections can contain more things ppl actually want to see.
Thoughts? Opinions? Other QoL things we can do here?
Is it not more the "code review" category that gets so many posts, and often no reply? The categories "help" and "tutorial" as well? Personally for me, many posts in this forum look quite "exotic" still, so I can't really understand them. And for posts I do understand, there is often a perfect reply from the experts after seconds -- sometimes I wonder if the experts ever sleep
[EDIT}
One more remark: If the announcement category is blocked here by default, people might stop announcing here, and perhaps do announcement only at Reddit. Do we want that?
well, as a mod who doesn't have the time to read everything here, I mainly see the things that are reported to us, so I only looked into the announcement category's statistics.
Do you have any subjective insight into why some posts don't get replies? Maybe we can improve the category docs telling ppl how to get the most out of their posts?
I understand the idea is to reduce the number of notifications, but I'm not sure muting that category will improve interactions from the community.
I remember announcing a project I'd been working on for a long time and that I hoped might be useful, a few months ago (I'm not using AI). It hasn't received one single question or comment. Maybe it's too niche. Yet I've discussed similar announcements, even if the projects were made with AI, but I admit I usually don't interact when it's something I don't know much about, which is AI-related/-generated, or when I'm too busy.
So I'm not sure how "announcements" is considered. I finally concluded it was just a way to post a link and get some visibility, without really starting a discussion, though I see half of them get answers.
I have no idea how to improve that; perhaps it's fine and doesn't need to be improved? I think that there are increasingly more new projects, reviews, and questions due to and related to AI. I don't know about others, but that doesn't really motivate me to participate, so perhaps the lack of interaction is partly due to that, and partly due to the increased number of posts. I'm not saying it should be filtered out, and I doubt it's even technically or ethically possible. And maybe I'm in a diminishing minority.
I probably won't make another announcement there; I'll do it on reddit instead, even if it's not the healthiest place for discussions. See how it goes.
IMHO it'll be great to add some announcement template. On one hand it will help the authors to describe what they actually do and what problems they trying to solve, on the other hand, it'll be easier to understand what's the project about. I suppose it might increase announcement posts quality overall.
And one more my very personal opinion: it'll be really great to require people to mark their crate announcements or review requests with some kind of tag or something similar if their code is generated by AI. As a reference, we can take a look at how it works in rust discord showcase thread.
I've checked a few of the announcements that didn't get any answer. Some are very long or could be improved, but there are quite a number of well-presented ones. I don't really see a difference of quality between them and those that get replies.
Most seem to get 100+ views, too.
I'll grant you it's puzzling.
Maybe a series of badges for interacting with specific categories? (no, I'm not serious about that)
I do always enjoy the pure code-oriented posts as the primary content, and adjacent topics such as organizations that utilize code are nice to hear about too. Is post interaction something that should be tailored? I have no idea but +1 for hard to answer Rust questions that make me learn something new
Should we? The normal state of an announcement is "that's not relevant to me", whether or not I regret reading it to find out. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't click the heart for every post that I merely consider a net positive for the forum.
I agree that there may be an issue with announcement quality, but I worry that this is a too-drastic action (very few people will think to check default muted categories) taken on too little evidence.
It was a good faith thing, just posting to crates.io doesn't seem to welcome any discussion or feedback. I had just assumed my crate was too specific to my needs to bring about general discussion.
Tagging as AI or non-AI would be good. I feel less inclined to check out a vibe-coded crate, personally.
I like the idea of a template to ensure we're not missing anything important when posting, I kinda just did my best w.r.t. that.
I think the bigger problem is - not everything is going to bring about discussion. Maybe that's fine, so maybe just leaving it muted as a place for people to announce and curious eyes to browse if they feel like browsing? (Or well, maybe making it an explicit user option somehow - I don't know if that's possible.)
I'm a recent sign-up here, so take my input with a grain of salt.
I posted announcement recently too. 2 likes, 0 comments. But I suppose that's absolutely fine tbh. The project I'm working on is not something everyone need and I suppose that the vast majority of announcements are quite the same. Most projects has their small niche but it doesn't make them useless.
Also if announcement has good enough description, even if someone is interested, there's probably nothing to discuss. Basic questions already covered in description or docs.
IMO the most valuable thing about announcements is that people can note some projects and if someday face the problem this project can help to solve, there's a chance they'll recall that announcement and will try to find the project.
Announcement posts were interesting in the past, and also help motivating other to learn and widespread Rust. Today, when Rust already received wide recognition, I believe that announcements used primarily as a method of the 3rd part software promotion, and is often irrelevant to the main topic of the forum. Basically, they are just a loophole for free-of-charge advertisement, or worse, just spam.
I think we still need a category to announce and discuss updates to community-wide things. For example, updates to truly widely used tools such as Tokio, Rust Analyzer or lib.rs, but the ability to open such posts perhaps should be limited to certain trusted users only (e.g. to mods themselves).
In general, I think that the 3rd-party software promotional posts should go regardless of how they are written, which tools have been used to make them, and the quality of this software. All of them should be recognized as spam.
If we're going to have stronger policies against self-promotion, consider how they apply to the Crate of the Week thread. (I personally would like to prohibit self-nominations, but I also think that might effectively kill it entirely.)
Why is it bad? I believe that even now people can write new beautiful software which might become widely used over time. It believe this forum is a good place to at least get started sharing projects with community.
What can be considered as "community-wide thing"? Ok, everyone use tokio and serde. What about sqlx? It's audience is pretty wide too but not as much as tokio or serde. Where's the line? And who should draw it?
I really don't understand the problem with promoting projects if you free to unsubscribe from this category and don't see any of them at all.
Crate of the Week of course should stay. This is special thread dedicated for promotion. One thread is ok
Well, the main issue is that it is not on topic. When I open a forum about Rust I expect discussions to be primarily about Rust. 3rd party software even if it is written in Rust, is rarely focused to programming in Rust itself. There might be other places in Internet where particular software works might fit well, depending on the work's domain. Being written in Rust in my opinion is just too broad criteria.
For example, projects developed in C++ are rarely allowed on forums dedicated to programming in C++. There are just too many programs written in C++ to cover all of them in a single programming language forum.
I would leave it at moderators discretion. I agree it might discriminate some projects, but to reitarate my previous thought, I think that the forum should be primarily about programming in Rust. In practice, I would expect truly widely used tools not specific to one particular domain. For example, Rust Analyzer is a good fit, in my opinion. It is also an official part of the Rust toolchain.
Still can't get what is the problem with such kind of posts? You can unsubscribe from them and skip them entirely. I also can agree that it's discussible should you be subscribed to them by default or not. But which problem forbidding 3d party software promotion posts entirely should solve?
IMO restrictions is the last thing to do and restrictions should be applied to things which are harmful. I don't see any harm from promotion posts about rust-written projects.
Please note that a lot of promoting posts not only about utilities where the user doesn't really care in which language it's written but also about libraries which might be useful for the other forum participants.
I can see this perspective - I'm happy with whatever decision as long as it is easy to tell that it is not allowed. If this is trying to be a general forum about the language specifically, disallowing such posts makes sense to me.
The problem hiding/forbidding promotional posts entirely[1] is trying to solve is user engagement. If the landing page is full of poorly written announcement posts no one wants to read, people close their URLO tab and leave. My own subjective perspective, as someone who has frequented this forum for years now, is that at the end of last year, start of this one, this forum was flooded with low-quality announcements. Machine-generated text full of strange buzz-words linking vibe-coded projects from users that created their account minutes before that post and never showed up afterwards again were at an all-time high, whilst ordinary, engaging topics were declining. The combination felt rather dystopian to me. Lately it has gotten better and I am also more active again. I don't know what a good solution to the problem of low-quality self-promotional content is, but I do appreciate that we are acknowledging that there's a problem and are actively discussing it.
The real problem being high-frequency low-quality self-promoting announcements, not self-promotional content per se. ↩︎
Fair enough. Although I can agree with the problem of low-quality and especially fully ai-generated posts, I still believe that completely forbidding it is not a good idea either. I think people still share some useful projects too. Forbidding it will harm both - the creators and the users who could use those projects.
About increasing content quality I have some ideas to discuss:
AI-generated tag requirement. If the project has been developed with AI generated code, require people to mark it with some tag
Post template. Ask people to write what problem they're trying to solve, what the project is about in a few words and encourage them to include screenshots or code examples might increase post quality IMO
Repo stars/downloads/time gate. Allow people to post only projects which were released at least a month ago and still actively maintained/has at least 50 stars/500 downloads/whatever
I believe there might be other ideas for how to increase post quality without forbidding them entirely
(no, I'm not serious about that)
