Blog about r/functionalprogramming

[kinow]

[kinow]

A community for 6 years.

[kinow]

Nearly seven years ago I was looking into functional programming, especially around Java, as I was interested in contributing to Apache Commons Functor. At that time Scala was attracting a lot of new users, and Java 8 wasn't available yet.

So I started collecting links. First on one of those post-it apps. But then I wouldn't be able to access it from both home and work. Then started sending e-mails to myself, or keeping a draft e-mail on the server. This way I could access from both home and work, but it wasn't easy to search and organize the links.

Finally, I settled for Reddit. I used it pretty much every day, so I decided to start adding the links to some existing community and simply saving them for later. To my surprise, there was no subreddit for functional programming.

And creating one was extremely simple. That's how six years ago r/functionalprogramming was created.

Eventually after a while it got its first readers. And some of them started commenting on the posts, or - even better - posting content. I had no idea how to moderate a subreddit, so I started looking at other subreddits I was subscribed to, and that I liked the general environment.

That lead me to create some rules, guidelines for posting, flairs, and slowly it got more users, reaching the first 100 users. That was pretty exciting. I moved on to work on other projects, and even migrated to another country.

But the community had established itself pretty well. Getting close to 1.000 users, with very few cases where I had to intervene. These were cases were users would give their opinion in a way that could offend people. I believe that most times it was not intentional, but a cultural issue, where some words were used in a way that would offend others unintentional.

My approach was to remove any comments like this, explaining why. Unfortunately a few times I had to ban users. And, of course, there were a few spammers. These I banned immediately without explanation or thinking twice. Nobody wants to hear about your apartment complex, or magical medicines in a functional programming community.

The community started to grow more. With links being cross-posted from or to other subreddits like r/haskell, r/lisp, or r/programming. Whenever I saw a link like this, I would copy it into the sidebar. I've always enjoyed learning about a new subreddit, and being able to find similar subreddits in its sidebar.

The community is now at around 10.000 users. There are some users that are pre-approved. Meaning that their submissions do not need to be moderated by me. These were users that contributed both with comments and posts in the beginning. But I think they must have gotten busy with other things. Otherwise now I would be reaching to them and checking if they would like to become moderators.

Being the sole moderator is something that has always bothered me. But I think finding the right people to pass the baton would be great - both for myself and for the subscribers.

And finding the time to always moderate posts, review the spam list, as well as read the content and keep collecting the interesting posts I find about functional programming is quite hard now. But whenever I learn about some subscriber that could get his question answered, or that shares links to posts, I feel like it is totally worth.

And I am very thankful for the amount I have learned with others. If you are interested in moderating, drop me a message, or subscribe to r/functionalprogramming and check out the community.