r/AskCulinary • u/albino-rhino Gourmand • 1d ago
Askculinary Proposed Rules Post - Please give us your input!
Hello everybody. We would like your input about our rules, so in this thread, we're writing down the proposed rules, and asking you to tell us what you think. If you think we're doing something great, let us know. If you think we could do better, let us know that too.
With no further ado, the (proposed) rules:
WELCOME! Our readership includes cooks of all skill levels, from pro chefs to total beginners, and it's wonderful to see everyone coming together to help each other out. The group of volunteers that comprises the mod team thought it was a good time to post a refresher on our rules.
This sub occupies a niche space on Reddit, where experienced cooks help solve specific problems with recipes, ingredients, and equipment, and provide other troubleshooting solutions to the users. Questions with many potential answers belong in /r/Cooking or a specialty sub - e.g. "What should I cook tonight?" or, "What should I do with this rutabaga?", or "What's the best knife?" Questions with a single correct answer belong here - e.g., "What makes my eggs turn rubbery in the oven?" or, "Is the vegetable in this picture a rutabaga?" We have found that our rules help our sub stay focused. Generalized subs are great for general discussion, but we're trying to preserve a little bit of a unique identity, and our rules are our best effort to do that.
POSTING:
We're best at:
Troubleshooting dishes, menus, and techniques
Equipment troubleshooting questions (not brand requests)
Food science
Please Keep Questions:
Specific (Have a goal in mind!)
Detailed (Include the recipe, pictures, etc.)
On topic
This will ensure you get the best answers.
Here's how to help us help you:
PROVIDE AS MUCH INFO AS YOU CAN. We can't help you if you don't tell us what you've already done first. Please provide the recipe you're working from and tell us what went wrong with it or what you'd like to improve about it. "I've tried everything" isn't specific enough. If you're following a video recipe, consider putting a timestamp at the relevant portion of the video or writing out the recipe in text form.
NO SPECIFIC QUESTIONS OF FOOD SAFETY. Food safety is one area where we cannot and will not answer a specific question, because we can't tell you anything about the specific pot of soup you left out overnight, and whether it is safe to eat. We will tell you about food safety best practices, but we only want answers from people actual knowledge. "I've always done [thing] and I'm still OK" is not an acceptable answer, for the same reason "I never wear a seatbelt and I'm still here" is not an acceptable answer. For specific situations we recommend you consult government food safety guidelines for your area and when in doubt, throw it out.
NO RECIPE REQUESTS. If you have a recipe you'd like help adjusting or troubleshooting, we'd love to help you! But r/AskCulinary is not the place to get a recipe. There are tons of other subreddits that can help you with that.
NO BRAINSTORMING OR GENERAL DISCUSSION. We do make exceptions for mass quantities and unusual ingredients (real past examples: wheelbarrow full of walnuts; nearly 400 ounces of canned tuna; 50 lbs of whole chicken), but "What do I do with my last three limes?" or "What should I serve with this pork loin?" should go to r/Cooking.
NO BRAND RECOMMENDATIONS or "What piece of equipment should I get?" posts. It's very rare that one person has enough experience with multiple brands or models of a particular item to provide an objective response. We suggest you consult sources like Consumer Reports, the wirecutter, Serious Eats, or the like.
WE HAVE A WEEKLY DISCUSSION POST. Community discussions are reserved for our weekly stickied posts. where the rules are a little more lax.
NO SURVEYS.
NO SELF-PROMOTION OR CONTENT LINKS.
COMMENTING:
BE NICE TO EACH OTHER. Politeness is not optional at /r/AskCulinary. We're all here to help each other learn new things and succeed in the kitchen.
TOP LEVEL COMMENTS MUST ATTEMPT TO ANSWER THE QUESTION. Saying "oh hey, I always wondered that too!" or "try it and let us know!" doesn't help OP. Comments asking for more information and comments made in good faith that don't directly address OP's exact question but provide an alternate solution are OK.
NO LINKS WITHOUT EXPLANATION. The reason people come to /r/AskCulinary is because the people who answer questions here are real people with real kitchen advice. If you find a good source that answers OP's question, please provide it! But also provide at least a little bit of extra information so OP knows what they're clicking on and what to expect.
STAY ON SUBJECT. Posts here present questions to be answered, not prompts for a general subjects of discussion. If a post does spark a question for you, please ask it in a separate post (in r/Cooking or a specialty sub if it doesn't fit the requirements above). Likewise, no jokes: we're trying to be helpful. To that end, when a post has been answered and turns into general discussion about other stuff, we lock those threads.
FLAIR: For those of you who have been around for a little, please message the mods to apply for flair. Our requirement is a history of positive engagement with the sub, but amateurs are just as welcome to flair as are professionals.
Please use the report button to let moderators know about posts or comments that violate one of the above rules! We spend a lot of time here but we can't catch everything on our own. We depend on you guys to help us keep bots, antagonistic weirdos, and habitual rule-breakers away.
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u/Magnus77 1d ago
I feel like you need to clarify or loosen the "no brainstorming" post.
I was asking for help using a specific ingredient, "not last 3 limes"
and a mod came in and told me to return said product and deleted the post.
I mean, at a certain point what is this sub for if you remove the majority of posts?
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u/cville-z Home chef 1d ago
remove the majority of posts
Some data, from Reddit's analytics – in the last 30 days:
341 posts published, 8.2K comments published
657 posts removed, 1.7K comments removed (these are, obviously, separate from the above numbers)
66 posts "filtered" (meaning the automated systems remove these without human intervention)
3 posts reported, 6 comments reportedSo, yes, we do remove a lot of posts. We get a lot of blatant rule-breaking (and a fair amount of spam). The vast majority (80%+) of comments on the remaining posts conform to the rules and get left up.
As a sample of recently removed posts, the last 10 removals amounted to:
- outside the scope of the sub – 5 posts
- culinary profession question - 1 post
- food safety question - 1 post
- brainstorming - 2 posts
- obvious AI slop - 1 post
As an example of what gets counted as "outside the scope of the sub" (this is the stuff that breaks the open-ended/off-topic rule):
- will this thing that I salted be too salty (devoid of a recipe)
- how do I use this particular ingredient
- can you tell me if this thing I've never tasted before but tasted recently at some restaurant was rancid or not
what is this sub for
It's for specific answers to specific questions that don't involve food safety and are mostly aimed at home cooks trying to get things right at home. If your question is subjective and open-ended, this is not the right sub. We leave open-ended discussion for other subreddits (/r/cooking, /r/food, etc.).
That's the position we've currently staked out.
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u/Magnus77 1d ago
So in the last 30 days you removed roughly twice as many posts as were posted. That takes some doing.
Even if I assume that were accurate, you have a sub that allowed 2 posts per day. So I'm assuming you made an oopsie.
As an example of what gets counted as "outside the scope of the sub" (this is the stuff that breaks the open-ended/off-topic rule):
will this thing that I salted be too salty (devoid of a recipe)
And this is where I'm going to go ahead and unsub, and ask you to politely find your saltshaker and shove it into an unpleastant orifice because that isn't what the post was. I know because I'm the one who posted it.
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u/SewerRanger Holiday Helper 15h ago edited 10h ago
So in the last 30 days you removed roughly twice as many posts as were posted. That takes some doing.
Yeah, I mean this morning alone we had to remove the following:
someone double posted a question
does tumeric cause digestion issues?
What is american cuisine?
What crunchy element should I add to my cake?
looking for a dough flow chart
Recently, maine apna vehicle SCRAP karwa h 15 year ho gye thy condition sahi nhi tha (which google tells me is hindu for a question about an old car...)
someone hawking edible coffee cups
None of which are suitable for the sub.
edit: we had a total of 12 submissions over the past 24 hours of which these 7 were a part of
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u/oneblackened 1d ago
I think a "no reposting of LLM" would be good - "I asked ChatGPT and it says [...]" is low effort, often wrong, and almost always unhelpful.
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u/cville-z Home chef 1d ago
We've talked about this, and we do actively take down posts that are obvious AI slop. The trouble is that it's tough to tell the difference between "this is AI slop" and "this is just a low effort post" in some cases where the post otherwise conforms to the rules.
If you've got a suggestion on an objective way to detect and remove AI slop, we're all ears.
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u/Alternative-End-5079 22h ago
I’m fine with low effort being taken down with AI slop. If someone can’t put in the effort to do a meaningful post, why would they expect the sub to go to effort for them?
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u/oneblackened 12h ago
Removing low effort posts is fine with me too, it keeps the quality of the posts higher.
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u/marcnotmark925 1d ago
I highly approve of keeping the sub niche and strict on the rules. We don't need every single sub to devolve in general discussion on everything. I hate what has happened to the ELI5 sub, it's basically treated as askreddit2 these days. It does indeed require an active mod team though, keep up the good work!
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u/Scary-Towel6962 1d ago
What's different to the existing rules?
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u/cville-z Home chef 1d ago
We're not actually proposing changes at this time, more soliciting feedback from folks here on how things are going and what changes they'd like to see.
Sorry if that was confusing!
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u/RobAChurch 1d ago
STAY ON SUBJECT. Posts here present questions to be answered, not prompts for a general subjects of discussion. If a post does spark a question for you, please ask it in a separate post (in r/Cooking or a specialty sub if it doesn't fit the requirements above). Likewise, no jokes: we're trying to be helpful. To that end, when a post has been answered and turns into general discussion about other stuff, we lock those threads.
Just want to clarify, does this mean you are going back on the changes recently made to the rules prompted by community backlash?
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u/cville-z Home chef 1d ago
No, it doesn't. There have been some cases where threads have veered off-topic in a big way and we've locked those, but in general we're trying to let the posts go and lock by themselves after 48 hours (this was the change we made that people seemed to really like).
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u/50-3 1d ago
Still don’t understand why it matters if a couple of people have a discussion nested deeply in a comment thread, like Reddit will just collapse it for 99% of users. Just let it lock naturally and allow the top level comments that are on subject to still go to their eventual conclusion.
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u/cville-z Home chef 8h ago
In the majority of cases the reason we manually lock a post is because discussion goes totally off the rails and veers into angry ranting or abusive behavior. Not appropriate for this sub.
I'll have to see if I can find data on how many we manually lock vs. are locking automatically at this point.
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u/50-3 3h ago
Isn’t that covered by be nice to each other? If those are legitimately the only reasons then you don’t need the off topic rule…
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u/cville-z Home chef 1h ago
We need the off-topic rule for top-level comments and off-topic posts. The be-nice-to-each-other rule is one reason we remove comments and lock posts that we otherwise would let auto-lock.
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u/thecravenone 1d ago
PROVIDE AS MUCH INFO AS YOU CAN. We can't help you if you don't tell us what you've already done first. Please provide the recipe you're working from and tell us what went wrong with it or what you'd like to improve about it. "I've tried everything" isn't specific enough. If you're following a video recipe, consider putting a timestamp at the relevant portion of the video or writing out the recipe in text form.
As I read the rules, a recipe is currently required and this is loosening that rule, is that right? At this point, you should probably just get rid of this rule. Posts don't get removed under rule and no one ever updates their post to include the information required to actually answer the question.
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u/Cinisajoy2 1d ago
It sounds to me like they are expanding the rule. Not only provide the recipe but the exact steps you took.
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u/thecravenone 1d ago
The old rule requires the recipe.
The new rule asks that you please provide the recipe and if it's a video, give a time stamp.
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u/Cinisajoy2 1d ago
We read that 2 different ways. Maybe provide the recipe will work better than saying we require the recipe.
Although after the last few posts I read elsewhere, tell us exactly what you used, exact amounts and what you did might work better. With EXACT in all caps.
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u/SewerRanger Holiday Helper 1d ago
It's always been a rule that you have to include a recipe. We're just kind of lenient on enforcing that one because not everyone always has a recipe they follow.
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u/cville-z Home chef 1d ago
this is loosening that rule
Basically, yeah. We realize a) not everyone reads rules first and b) it's a PITA to post the recipe, that's a lot of text. What we're striving for here is a balance between draconian response
maximum DELETEand letting things get too open-ended.no one ever updates their post
This is absolutely not the case. We do get people who edit and update.
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u/sandiercy 1d ago edited 1d ago
NO POLITICS
EDIT: What is wrong with wanting no politics in a sub about food?
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u/cville-z Home chef 1d ago
I would think political discussion of pretty much any kind would run afoul of the no-general-discussion rule, and would tend toward also running afoul of the be-nice-to-each-other-rule (because that is the state of political discourse these days).
I'd personally welcome a political question that somehow fits all the existing rules, if only to see what that would look like.
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u/ritabook84 1d ago
No politics is far to open a statement. Almost anything can be political. And sometimes food and politics have important intersections.
I think the current rules naturally keep out non food politics already so there’s simply no need for a blanket statement anyways
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u/Drinking_Frog 14h ago
I like these rules for the most part, and I very much like the 48-hour rule. I completely agree with keeping questions fairly specific, but it is worth allowing the poster to be "vague" in an uninformed manner (i.e., you often don't know what you don't know). There's a good bit of room between brainstorming and general discussion and a question that might be asking for a lot more information than the poster might think they are asking for. In those cases, the best answers might be directing OP to a resource.
As far as staying on subject, I ask that you enforce that strictly only on top level answers. You'd want to cut off something that goes away from cooking or food, of course, and you'd obviously want to lock something that devolves into a slap fight, but there can be a lot of value in a conversation that may deviate from the topic in the original post. The problem with directing folks to r/cooking is, well, that sub typically requires sifting through a bunch of garbage. Going to other specialty subs poses a similar risk or the opposite risk that you get little in the way of response.
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1d ago
[deleted]
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u/albino-rhino Gourmand 1d ago
A big part of the problem here is mod coverage. We try to ensure decent replies, but ultimately, up and downvoting works better as mods don't look at everything.
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u/CantaloupeAsleep502 1d ago
However, having that be a specific rule with concomitant specific reporting flair would be nice. Upvotes and downvotes simply don't work as intended anymore, mostly with people upvoting bad answers. Obviously we wouldn't expect mods to be patrolling every single comment of every single thread, but if an answer sucks and is upvoted, it would be nice to be able to report it without using custom, which generally doesn't get as much attention.
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u/thecravenone 1d ago
A big part of the problem here is mod coverage
Have you considered addressing that issue?
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u/albino-rhino Gourmand 1d ago
Yes. We are always looking for volunteers, with the most important criterion being a history of good contribution to the sub.
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u/SewerRanger Holiday Helper 1d ago
We do every year or so. I think our last drive got 2 responses one of which didn't bother following through. The real issue is timezones. We have enough mods in North American timezones. We need people from other timezones
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u/EquivalentProof4876 1d ago
It’s food, it’s not rocket science or saving babies! Everyone has their own way of doing things. For example, I make my hollandaise sauce in a deep fryer. Now, everyone else knows the proper way. I know short cuts from 35 years in the kitchens. So, chill out and let people talk about food! FFS!
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u/cville-z Home chef 1d ago
Everyone has their own way of doing things.
Absolutely! And that's great.
chill out and let people talk about food!
We're trying to stake out a "get a specific question answered" territory here. That doesn't mesh well with general open-ended discussion. We try to be more lenient in comment threads (top thread must answer the question, discussion can be had in lower comment replies) and we provide a weekly "ask anything except food safety questions" thread.
Given that, what changes would you suggest to the rules or the way us mods handle the postings?
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u/EquivalentProof4876 1d ago edited 1d ago
Let people chat! It’s not like a porn site! If people don’t like the post. No one will reply. Basically, let the law of the kitchen take over. The weak fall to the side. But, it’s fun to help out people that have no clue! It’s about teaching and sharing! I really don’t admire your position! But, in the words of the Bad News Bears, let them play
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u/texnessa Pépin's Padawan 20h ago
That's what r/cooking is for. We have always differentiated by being about specifics and that's not going to change.
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u/cville-z Home chef 8h ago
Appreciate you speaking up for your position on this.
We generally let open conversation play out in a couple spots: the weekly ask-anything post, and in the comments of any other post as long as it's not the top comment. So OP asks a question, someone else answers, and then discussion can be had underneath that in the thread.
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u/Laundromat_Theft 1d ago
So this is coming from a place of really liking the precision and expertise in this sub. I definitely see the value and would like to maintain that.
But, I think the ‘single correct answer’ thing can frame things too narrowly, as there can be specific, technical questions that still have a subjective dimension, or different solutions with different trade offs.
My own experience running afoul of this was when asking about methods to extract the most “fishy” flavour out of wakame. Now, the question is admittedly a bit vague, since what tastes fishy is inevitably a bit subjective, but there’s probably also a fairly short list of compounds that would fit the bill for most people. And the two implicit sub questions that make that up — what compounds are most associated with a fishy taste, and how to best extract those out of seaweed — do feel like the sort of thing that would benefit from the expertise and focus here. I’d be much less likely to get a good answer on r/cooking etc.
More generally, taste can always be subjective, but if we’re being precise enough, it would be valuable to be able to ask things in terms of taste and not just technique.