This subreddit is a great one and if you read the announcement they are taking a very sensitive approach.
HN is obviously very pro-ai and many top-level comments mention that blocking AI submissions will leave r/selfhosted in the digital stone age. That's not at all what they are doing.
The vast majority of vibe-coded apps submitted lately have been simply either very low quality, inferior clones of existing apps, or just incomplete non-sense with a good readme. Redditors are rightfully rejecting that but the trend has been to reject it because it is vibe coded and not for the right reason: the low quality.
In a sense they are protecting ai assisted apps from being lumped in all the crap and auto-rejected by the community.
If you rephrase the announcement as Limiting low-quality/low-effort submissions instead of vibe coded, nobody would object.
I've noticed many posts hitting the hn front page in the last few years trending first on r/selfhosted so there's a good overlap between the communities. Before judging I'd encourage you to take a look. I've discovered many apps I use daily through it (immich, jellyfin, frigate-nvr for examples).
The recent influx of AI has lowered the barrier to entry to create your own projects. This development in itself is very interesting and we're curious to see how it'll change our world of SelfHosting in the future.
The negative side of this however is the influx of AI generated posts, vibe-coded projects over a weekend and many others. Normally, the community votes with its voice. But with the high amount of posts flooding in every day, we've noticed a more negative and sometimes even hostile attitude towards these kinds of projects.
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I wonder what HN's reception to a similar rule would be.
Nothing more disappointing than seeing a super cool project and reading the super long github readme, only to see right at the bottom "I vibe coded this application"
IMO, it goes against 'self-hosted' too. Self-hosting for your own data, control of it, and handling of it. Self-hosting to learn new things and scratch your own itch for a niche product. AI vibe coding doesn't have any of that. Literally an _idea_ that someone else implements and you the 'coder' don't really have any control or understanding of.
Why would I want to take ownership of that for my own security?
it’s respectful of everyone’s time if the “vibe coded disclaimer” is at the TOP of the readme, not the bottom. Why bury that in the fine print?
It’s also a very good indicator of how invested the author is in the repo. Is this a throwaway weekend project? Is it their “baby” so to speak? Should i even bother asking the author a question if i run into an issue, after all, they didn’t write any of the code so…
A lot of the personal projects posted there are immediately abandoned. There's obviously no guarantee that a project you advertise will be maintained, but before there was a likely chance that the submitter was going to. Now, not so much. A bit frustrating when going through new projects, so I get it.
Maybe many subreddits suffer from the same, also happening in r/homeassistant but the community seems to not mind it as much as r/selfhosted for whatever reason.
> In order to determine the difference (as going by code & commits alone can be a great indicator but by itself does not make a great case for what constitutes a vibe-coded or AI-assisted project) we've set the following guidelines: [...] With obvious signs of vibe-coding*
Gonna be interesting to see how deep those accusation-threads will go, people trying to determine the "obvious signs".
It will explain to me your thought process and why you might think completely controlling a community, down to the type of personal projects posted, isn't considered fascist. Especially when the community wasn't asked.
Private property isn't a fascist concept. Unless you can prove that the United States government is using Reddit as a corollary for consolidating power, Reddit moderators aren't behaving in a fascist manner here.
They probably won't reverse course, as the problem isn't the AI (or else they would've banned it completely), but instead the AI submissions crowding out all other discussion. There's lots of subs that do things like this; for example /r/games limits self-posts by indie game developers to Sundays
Some of it is pure backlash against AI, but there's still solid reasoning for not allowing it.
A lot of the little vibe coded self hosted utilities were made by folks with zero software development experience, over a weekend. These are apps where people need to be able to trust them to be exposed to the internet, and trust them with their data. Allowing zero-experience, purely vibe coded software in this environment is a recipe for disaster.
I've no problem with folks vibing their own little tools for use at home, but that doesn't mean it needs to be shared, and it a lot of cases, it probably shouldn't unless you really know what you are doing.
> These are apps where people need to be able to trust them to be exposed to the internet
Are they though? I'd argue the vast majority of even non-AI coded projects talked about on r/selfhosted are ones you would not want exposed publicly, even if they are in theory relatively secure.
This subreddit is a great one and if you read the announcement they are taking a very sensitive approach.
HN is obviously very pro-ai and many top-level comments mention that blocking AI submissions will leave r/selfhosted in the digital stone age. That's not at all what they are doing.
The vast majority of vibe-coded apps submitted lately have been simply either very low quality, inferior clones of existing apps, or just incomplete non-sense with a good readme. Redditors are rightfully rejecting that but the trend has been to reject it because it is vibe coded and not for the right reason: the low quality.
In a sense they are protecting ai assisted apps from being lumped in all the crap and auto-rejected by the community.
If you rephrase the announcement as Limiting low-quality/low-effort submissions instead of vibe coded, nobody would object.
I've noticed many posts hitting the hn front page in the last few years trending first on r/selfhosted so there's a good overlap between the communities. Before judging I'd encourage you to take a look. I've discovered many apps I use daily through it (immich, jellyfin, frigate-nvr for examples).
> HN is obviously very pro-ai
mm i'd actually say its more moderated, lots of cynics/skeptics.
The recent influx of AI has lowered the barrier to entry to create your own projects. This development in itself is very interesting and we're curious to see how it'll change our world of SelfHosting in the future.
The negative side of this however is the influx of AI generated posts, vibe-coded projects over a weekend and many others. Normally, the community votes with its voice. But with the high amount of posts flooding in every day, we've noticed a more negative and sometimes even hostile attitude towards these kinds of projects.
---
I wonder what HN's reception to a similar rule would be.
You could create a poll :-)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
Reasonable response IMO.
If you ever want to see how bad vibe coded software can be. This subreddit unfortunately had been a gold mine full of it.
Hoping this turns it around.
Nothing more disappointing than seeing a super cool project and reading the super long github readme, only to see right at the bottom "I vibe coded this application"
Yes, it is not the cool idea that matters. It is the tools that are important.
IMO, it goes against 'self-hosted' too. Self-hosting for your own data, control of it, and handling of it. Self-hosting to learn new things and scratch your own itch for a niche product. AI vibe coding doesn't have any of that. Literally an _idea_ that someone else implements and you the 'coder' don't really have any control or understanding of.
Why would I want to take ownership of that for my own security?
it’s respectful of everyone’s time if the “vibe coded disclaimer” is at the TOP of the readme, not the bottom. Why bury that in the fine print?
It’s also a very good indicator of how invested the author is in the repo. Is this a throwaway weekend project? Is it their “baby” so to speak? Should i even bother asking the author a question if i run into an issue, after all, they didn’t write any of the code so…
A lot of the personal projects posted there are immediately abandoned. There's obviously no guarantee that a project you advertise will be maintained, but before there was a likely chance that the submitter was going to. Now, not so much. A bit frustrating when going through new projects, so I get it.
Maybe many subreddits suffer from the same, also happening in r/homeassistant but the community seems to not mind it as much as r/selfhosted for whatever reason.
> In order to determine the difference (as going by code & commits alone can be a great indicator but by itself does not make a great case for what constitutes a vibe-coded or AI-assisted project) we've set the following guidelines: [...] With obvious signs of vibe-coding*
Gonna be interesting to see how deep those accusation-threads will go, people trying to determine the "obvious signs".
Time for r/aiselfhosted to come up to fill the void.
[flagged]
Can you clearly and lucidly explain in your own words what you think "fascism" is, and why it applies here?
If you can explain why someone might think Trump is fascist.
What has Trump got to do with this? As far as I am aware, he's not an open-source developer.
It will explain to me your thought process and why you might think completely controlling a community, down to the type of personal projects posted, isn't considered fascist. Especially when the community wasn't asked.
Private property isn't a fascist concept. Unless you can prove that the United States government is using Reddit as a corollary for consolidating power, Reddit moderators aren't behaving in a fascist manner here.
This is a mistake, plenty of non-vibe-coded apps are quite bad as well.
No one cares though, as Reddit is steadily becoming trash.
This is similar to the rules of other subs.
It's a natural backlash of anti AI sentiment.
Eventually they will reverse course as living in seclusion like that often doesn't work very well.
They probably won't reverse course, as the problem isn't the AI (or else they would've banned it completely), but instead the AI submissions crowding out all other discussion. There's lots of subs that do things like this; for example /r/games limits self-posts by indie game developers to Sundays
Some of it is pure backlash against AI, but there's still solid reasoning for not allowing it.
A lot of the little vibe coded self hosted utilities were made by folks with zero software development experience, over a weekend. These are apps where people need to be able to trust them to be exposed to the internet, and trust them with their data. Allowing zero-experience, purely vibe coded software in this environment is a recipe for disaster.
I've no problem with folks vibing their own little tools for use at home, but that doesn't mean it needs to be shared, and it a lot of cases, it probably shouldn't unless you really know what you are doing.
> These are apps where people need to be able to trust them to be exposed to the internet
Are they though? I'd argue the vast majority of even non-AI coded projects talked about on r/selfhosted are ones you would not want exposed publicly, even if they are in theory relatively secure.