I haven’t really posted a lot to r/selfhosted (or Reddit in general), but whenever I did, there was always someone who voted my post down in less than 30 minutes after it was posted. Maybe because of this (or maybe because they were actually perceived as low quality posts), these posts never received a lot of engagement with their 0 scores.
Today I’ve made a little experiment and posted the same article both here and to r/selfhosted. On Lemmy, it received a few comments and some upvotes, but over at Reddit, it was promptly downvoted to oblivion.
I’ve never really used “New” on Reddit, but I’ve decided to take a look at it, and to my surprise it looked like r/selfhosted’s New page was full of genuinely helpful posts, but I’ve never got to see them as their scores were all zeroes.
What gives?
Well I think there should be a /c/selfhostingnoobedition where an answer (even if it is just a “Google search link”) is expected. The amount of plausible sounding BS from googleing and getting stack overflow copies with unhelpful info or thinly veiled ads that has cost me time and money is huge, and I simply get directed to buy products while I am exploring (I don’t know what I don’t know), so I have gone here as my “Google”. I normally try to include my due diligence in a paragraph labelled “source:”
I copied “Googleable” from the original comment but yeah, Google results have become horrible. I use duckduckgo as default search engine, it gives decent results most of the time, and is not infested with ads/SEO spam. Use quotes to search for an exact sentence/error message, etc.
I have no problem with posts that include a good amount of research, unless they are for a very specific piece of software (“how do I configure feature X in software Y”), in which case, why not ask on that software’s forum/support/issue tracker? I mean, I’m not here to read support requests all day, unless they are for an interesting/novel problem…
I think the idea of a dedicated /c/selfhostingsupport has value, but I don’t want to discourage all support requests, only mundane or uninteresting ones.
Other types of posts that deserve downvotes in my opinion are “What should I self-host?” (mods should just make one and pin it), “Here is my dashboard” (same, there should be a pinned post for this).