It is one of the most well known. We also aren’t what anyone would call ‘casual’ or ‘easy’.
This sub’s name is idiomatic and that is often confusing to newer visitors. I’ll make a comment below for anyone who wants to talk about rule 4 or just read about it.
For reasons that include a lot of luck, good timing and good fortune this sub is maybe the best known ‘questions’ sub. Certainly among newer users of reddit.
The problem becomes that a lot of people just know us as the popular sub for questions and end up stumbling into a whole heap of hoops to jump through to post.
**The TL:DR of this post is that r/nostupidquestions is the sub that many people are looking for when they come here. It is a place where no earnest question is against the rules (no question is stupid there). They have a thriving community and reliably produce timely answers.**
We want people to have a good experience and for a lot of people that might mean they want to visit our spiritual sister-sub. Both are good and we want to help people find the one that fits them best.
Various other comments below can discuss further.
(the automod auto-approves reports on mod posts so we won’t see those btw)
In: Other
TL;DR Please read the sidebar and search before posting.
Your post has been removed because ELI5 is not for soapboxing /s
Rule 4 discussion and questions I am happy to answer here.
I am a moderator of both subs, and I think this is fair.
The quality and quantity of explanations here is overall outstanding, but it is much harder to get a post approved here, and that’s not by accident.
I also regularly recommend:
/r/askscience
/r/AskHistorians
/r/AskScienceFiction
/r/AskReddit
/r/answers
/r/legaladviceofftopic
/r/philosophy
/r/OutOfTheLoop
/r/changemyview
My philosophy as a moderator is that we are not competing with other Q&A style subreddits. Instead, I am acting as a facilitator with the goal of making sure our users get the best response to their question that they can. This often means directing users to a more appropriate sub. The removal of a question here *does not* mean that it is a bad question, only that ELI5 is not the best place to ask it.
When those questions are not removed, it causes clutter and makes it harder for the best ELI5-type questions to stand out. As a facilitator, I have to consider the needs of *all* users, not just the one whose question I am removing. I want them to get good responses, which means clearing a path to ensure they get connected to the user who can give them a good quality explanation.
ELI5 is designed not just for specific kinds of questions, but also for a particular kind of response. When a user comes here, they should expect to get comments that are perhaps more detailed than in r/answers or r/NoStupidQuestions, but more accessible than what you’d expect in /r/askscience or r/AskHistorians. Part of my role is to maintain that expectation, so users can be confident that when they come here they’ll get an ELI5-style response.
**TL;DR** If you’re sick of being gaslit by a line of javascript with ideas above its station, or by moderators who seem to have chosen the life of a moderator as penance for some hideous crime and therefore resent every second of it, then bugger off to r/NoStupidQuestions where you can actually engage with other human beings and get good answers to questions, stupid or otherwise, with little to no interference from fungal spore-farming dogsbodies.
This sub, like r/AskScience, is too big for its own good. The chances of the automoderator silently disappearing your thread are so high in both subs that at least 50% of the time you spend writing one is devoted to trying to making it seem less spam-like or less repost-like. And then it disappears your thread anyway. It’s like your mental health gets elbowed in the temple every time that shit happens. Feels like you’re telling another person your life story for 2 hours then you realise it was shrub wearing a hat.
r/NoStupidQuestions is better, even if your thread is one which would be perfect for r/explainlikeimfive. There is pretty much no friction in the transaction, and the answers are just as good and as well-informed as those found here.
Latest Answers