The Reddit open-source community with nearly 400,000 members has announced a ban on AI-related content, rejecting projects maintained by a single person or from contributors who have no English proficiency. The moderator said: "Your tokens are worthless."

For the open source community, is AI-assisted development, or even the direct generation of entire projects, a new tool worth embracing, or content pollution that requires strict restrictions?

Different communities have given different answers. Some actively embrace AI, some choose to remain neutral, and r/opensource, a long-established open source community on Reddit with nearly 400,000 members, recently simply decided: no longer accept any projects that use AI, are made by AI, or are built exclusively for AI.

This is not all of the new rules. According to the requirements announced by the community, projects must be maintained for at least one year, have multiple contributors, and the publisher's Reddit account must also be registered for at least one year. At the same time, the community has also made it clear that users who cannot speak English are not welcome to post content here.

This regulation quickly sparked controversy. So far, the relevant announcement has received about 2,800 comments with a net vote score of 0. The announcement was posted by moderator Wolvereness on October 24, with a rather provocative title — *Your tokens aren’t valuable: No more AI.*

"AI in its current form is not consistent with the philosophy of this open source community." Wolvereness wrote, "Tokens are cheap, we don't care how many tokens you spent to build your so-called great project."

Founded in 2008, why did the open source community suddenly say no to AI?

Founded on January 25, 2008, r/opensource is one of the long-established communities on Reddit for discussing open source software, and currently has nearly 400,000 members.

In moderator Wolvereness's view, AI has lowered the threshold for generating code and creating projects, but that does not mean these projects are worth promoting.

He said that he receives a large number of private messages every day asking the community to make exceptions for certain projects, many of which involve AI projects that they consider to be of low quality, and some users specifically register alternate accounts to post content. Wolvereness estimates that there are about 20 such messages per day.

Faced with the growing number of submissions and promotion requests, Wolvereness chose to tighten the rules directly. In his view, how many tokens were spent cannot prove that a project is valuable.

"If it is obvious that your project uses AI, it is not welcome here. Tokens are cheap, we don't care how many tokens you spent to make your so-called excellent project."

According to the announcement, the new rules impose restrictions on the project itself, the qualifications of publishers, and the use of AI.

Specifically, to post a project on r/opensource, the following requirements must be met:

The project must be maintained for at least one year: It is not just that the creation time is more than one year, but it must also be continuously maintained.

Have multiple contributors, the specific standard is subject to the subjective judgment of the moderator, usually requiring 3 or more people.

Have an existing community: The project needs to have a certain user or community foundation, and cannot be a work that has just been created and has not yet formed a user group.

Cannot be a common graduation project or course project, such as note-taking apps, PDF readers, command-line music players and other school projects.

Cannot use AI, be made by AI, or be oriented to AI: Projects dedicated to providing tools and data interfaces for AI such as MCP services are also listed as unwelcome types.

The publisher's Reddit account must be at least one year old: At the same time, a certain record of community activities is required.

In addition, the project must still adopt an open source license recognized by OSI. The community will no longer accept posts looking for maintainers or recruiting contributors.

For users who post projects and then ask moderators for exceptions via private messages, the announcement even clearly states that they will be permanently banned directly.

This means that even if a project does not use AI at all, as long as it is maintained by a single developer, has been created for less than a year, or has not yet formed a mature community, it may not be able to be published in this section.

And this has precisely become the most controversial part of the new rules.

Not just banning AI: solo developers and new projects are also blocked

After the new rules were announced, many developers questioned that it is understandable to restrict low-quality AI-generated content, but why should the number of project contributors and the English proficiency of developers also become thresholds for posting?

A Reddit user pointed out that open source software itself is a global collaborative field. Developers participating in communication with the help of translation tools does not mean that the project is generated by AI, let alone judge the project quality based on this.

However, the new rules of r/opensource have clearly restricted English proficiency:

"If you don't speak English, please find another community. We cannot distinguish between English content written by AI and English content translated by AI. Since you don't speak English, you can't even verify for yourself whether the translation is accurate."

This statement has sparked more doubts.

If a developer completes the project on their own, and only uses AI to translate the project introduction into English, will it also be rejected? If a developer can communicate in English but uses AI to polish the introduction, how should it be handled?

Judging from the currently announced rules, the moderators have not given an objective and clear set of judgment criteria.

Compared with simply restricting AI, this set of rules actually excludes many independent developers and new projects.

Some netizens said that they have maintained a project for 9 years, received more than 300 Stars on GitHub, solved dozens of problems, and did not use AI at all.

But according to the new rules, since the project has only one contributor, this project still does not meet the posting requirements.

Another independent developer also said that the project he maintains has a history of 3 years and has received about 1,000 GitHub Stars, but now he may lose the opportunity to promote it in this community due to insufficient number of contributors.

These feedbacks point to the same problem: if a project must first have a mature community and multiple contributors before it can find more users and contributors in the open source community, how can new projects take the first step?

Some users also questioned that the number of contributors cannot directly represent software quality. Some important open source tools have long relied on a small number of maintainers, and single-person maintenance does not mean that the project is a low-quality work generated by AI in batches.

Will the Linux kernel also be banned? Moderator responds: it can be exempted

The controversy further extended to the Linux kernel.

Previously, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, also stated his position on the application of AI, which is not a one-size-fits-all ban, and Linux kernel developers have also allowed the use of AI-assisted development under the premise of meeting relevant requirements. Therefore, some users raised the question: according to the new rules of r/opensource, can the Linux kernel not be published here either?

According to foreign media The Register, Wolvereness responded that according to the community's discretionary standards, the Linux kernel can be granted an exception.

This response did not dispel the outside world's doubts about how the rules are enforced.

Some users pressed on how exactly the moderators distinguish between "vibe-coded" projects generated mindlessly by AI and projects that only use AI to find vulnerabilities.

Wolvereness's answer is: "There is no 'objective' enforcement standard for this policy."

In other words, whether a project can be published still depends largely on the judgment of the moderators.

It is worth noting that this policy did not even receive unanimous support from all moderators of r/opensource.

Another moderator, ssddanbrown, said that he did not participate in the policy discussion in advance, and only learned of the new rules from the moderator notice.

When talking about the English proficiency restriction, he clearly wrote: "I do not agree with this rule, especially the way it is expressed."

This also extends the controversy from whether the community should restrict AI to the issue of whether the formulation and implementation of the rules are reasonable.

Anti-AI or anti-low-quality content? Developers start new communities on their own

Overall, for some supporters of r/opensource, AI has reduced the cost of generating code and creating projects, but it may also expose the community to more low-quality projects and promotional content. Restricting submissions can reduce the burden on moderators to filter content.

But opponents argue that using AI for assisted development is not the same as generating low-quality software in batches. Instead of directly excluding all AI-related projects, it is better to judge based on the actual quality, maintenance status and contributor responsibility of the project.

As the discussion continues to ferment, alternative communities such as r/TrueOpenSource and r/OpenSourceAIAllowed have appeared on Reddit, hoping to provide new communication spaces for developers affected by the new rules.

At least from this debate, the open source community has not formed a unified anti-AI stance. For r/opensource, it remains to be seen whether the new rules can effectively reduce low-quality content.

However, this debate has put a problem on the table: when AI makes creating and releasing software easier and easier, should the open source community restrict the use of AI, or focus on project quality and developer responsibility?

This article is from the WeChat official account "CSDN", compiled by Tu Min, and published with authorization from 36Kr.