Technical discussions of new research seem to have mostly disappeared in this subreddit, because researchers became a small fraction of its immense readership of 3e6 members.
So I created a subreddit to host such discussions. A “safe space” for researchers, if you will, with strict standards for content^1 . I seeded it with posts about a few recent papers I thought were interesting and my own takes on them, to get the discussion started.
But then I said to myself: “You don’t have time to manage a subreddit. WTF are you doing?” and deleted it all. Nevertheless, I’d like to see someone else, perhaps someone with more time, try to do it.
^1: Its main rule was: “No low-effort or low-expertise posts or comments: If your average ML PhD student, or someone with a higher level of expertise wouldn’t have posted something, then it does not belong here.” Other rules dealt with the format of the posts.
No idea whether the current atmosphere in /r/machinelearning is temporary or permanent.
It could be the case after a year or so the newer people will trickle out leaving it to the usual deep learning hype train with a good post once a month or so.
I’m fairly certain it is permanent. Same thing happened with WallStreetBets. Occasionally browsing that subreddit was a lot of fun before the GME madness (and even in the early part of). Now the sub has lost a lot of the character it had before.
I imagine the same thing will happen here. Changes in the atmosphere of the subreddit will slowly push pre-ChatGPT members to look elsewhere for research / project related discussion and even after the hype dies down, they likely won’t come back here having founds / made communities elsewhere.