Community Announcement on AI posts
Hey everyone,
As many of you have probably noticed, we’ve seen a pretty significant increase in AI-assisted / “vibecoded” projects being posted recently. Some of these projects are genuinely interesting, thoughtful, and homelab-relevant, while others have felt fairly low-effort or disconnected from the core focus of the sub.
We’ve been discussing internally how we want to handle this moving forward, and before we make any major decisions, we wanted to get community feedback.
A few things we want to make clear up front:
- We are not looking to outright ban AI-assisted projects.
- We do want to preserve the identity of r/homelab as a community centered around homelabs, infrastructure, self-hosting, networking, experimentation, and technical learning.
- We also want to avoid the sub becoming overwhelmed with low-effort “I made this in 5 minutes with AI” showcase posts.
Some ideas that have been brought up internally so far:
• Mandatory “AI-Assisted” flair on posts
• A required questionnaire/template before posting, for example:
- What problem does this solve?
- What did you personally contribute/customize?
- How was it tested or validated?
- What practical value does it provide?
• Requiring a public GitHub repo/project page
• Requiring some project history/dev history (ex: ~3 months) before posting
• Time-limiting AI project posts (ex: one AI project post every 2 weeks per user)
• Community validation systems (ex: megathreads where projects receive community approval/+1s before being posted to the main feed)
One idea we particularly liked was using some form of community validation rather than relying entirely on moderators to decide what is or isn’t worthwhile. The goal would ideally be to encourage high-effort technical projects while naturally filtering out low-effort content through a megathread. Top voted comments can then become their own posts with a deeper dive into the inner workings of the application/tool. (u/MonsterMufffin will explain this further in the comments as it was his suggestion.)
That said, we also recognize there are tradeoffs:
- Megathreads can hurt visibility for genuinely good projects
- Flair filtering is limited/nonexistent for many mobile users
- Systems based on votes/+1s could potentially be gamed
So we wanted to ask the community directly:
- How would you like AI-assisted projects handled here?
- Should they remain allowed on the main feed?
- Should there be stricter quality requirements?
- Should there be separate megathreads or validation systems?
- What makes an AI-assisted project feel genuinely “homelab-related” to you?
As well as AI ‘projects’, we have also seen a sharp rise in posts that have been created with AI. Whilst it is impossible to know if a post was created by AI, in many cases it is plainly obvious unless OP has done enough to mask it/make it their own. For these types of AI posts, we want to draw the line and say, for better or worse, posts must be human generated, or at least 90% of said posts.
We understand there are situations where such posts are more necessary, for example, foreign speakers using LLMs to help them post, however, this was never an issue in the past and shouldn’t be going forward. For posts made using AI, we are thinking about adding a report reason and rule to this effect. We would rely on the community to flag posts they think are wholly or mostly generated, and if enough of these come through on a post we can ask OP for clarification, or remove the post if it is obvious.
We are aware that a portion of the community has expressed their opinion that any and all AI should be banned outright but we simply do not see this as being feasible from a moderation standpoint and generally with the way things are going/have gone with LLMs. Outright bans/harsh restrictions seems to make people hide LLM/AI usage with overall ends up being much more difficult to moderate. We ask that everyone please keep this in mind as we look for a suitable middle ground for the community.
We’d appreciate constructive feedback and ideas. The goal here is to find a balance that keeps the sub useful, technical, and enjoyable long-term without shutting down legitimate experimentation and learning.
When providing feedback, we ask you make it clear if your thoughts are about AI projects or AI posts, as we see this as two separate issues.
Cheers, your r/homelab mod team.