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.
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.