r/slatestarcodex rules, stats, and what to post

This community grew around Slate Star Codex, a blog by Scott Alexander about human cognition, politics, and medicine. The blog itself was renamed Astral Codex Ten in 2021 and now lives on Substack, but this subreddit kept the old name and the same intellectual orbit. The people here like long form thinking, careful argument, and topics that sit at the crossing point of ideas, evidence, and how humans reason. The rules make the tone clear. Culture war content is sent elsewhere, personal attacks and flame bait are out, and low effort posts and comments are out. There is also a rule that comments and posts should be written by you and not by LLMs, which tells you this is a room that prizes a human voice. If you want to post here as a founder, think of it as a place to share genuinely interesting thinking, not a place to announce a product.

The rule that shapes everything here is “Avoid culture war content”, which sends any culture war post or comment to a different community, so keep politics out of anything you post. Rule “Not relevant to the subreddit” asks you to use your best judgment and only submit things that feel relevant, which is the rule most likely to catch a thinly veiled promotion. Rule “Provide a submission statement for any external linkpost with a non-descriptive title” means that if you share a link with a vague title, you must add a submission statement explaining it. Rule “Your comments and posts should be written by you, not by LLMs.” is a hard stop for anyone planning to draft posts with AI tools, so write everything yourself. Rule “Low-effort” removes thin content, rule “Personal attack” and rule “Antagonizing other users” set the tone bar, and rule “Call for violence” is the obvious floor. For a marketing adjacent post, the combination of relevance, effort, and human writing is what decides whether it survives.

A good post here is something you genuinely wrote yourself, on a topic that fits the blog's old territory of human cognition, politics handled carefully, and medicine, or adjacent intellectual territory. Write it as a text post where possible, with your actual reasoning laid out so people can engage with it. If you share an external link, give it a descriptive title, and if the title is not descriptive, add a submission statement that explains what the link is and why it matters to this community. If your work touches on something a founder might build, mention it plainly and briefly, and let the substance of the post carry the weight. Comment thoughtfully on other people's posts too, because the rules ask everyone to help maintain a respectful, intellectually charitable atmosphere, and that is exactly the kind of room where a thoughtful regular earns the benefit of the doubt.

The fastest way to get removed is culture war content, because rule “Avoid culture war content” sends all of it to other communities, and the survival advice says to keep those topics completely out. Never post text generated by an LLM, because rule “Your comments and posts should be written by you, not by LLMs.” bans it outright, so do not draft with AI and paste it in either. Do not post links with vague titles and no submission statement, since rule “Provide a submission statement for any external linkpost with a non-descriptive title” covers exactly that. Avoid anything that reads as low effort, because rule “Low-effort” gets those removed. Never attack a person, because rule “Personal attack” is a rule here, and do not pick fights, because rule “Antagonizing other users” asks you not to start flame wars. Calls for violence are banned under rule “Call for violence”. And if a post would not feel relevant to this community, rule “Not relevant to the subreddit” is the one that catches it, so a generic product announcement does not belong.

The rule banning LLM written posts and comments is the one that jumps out at me, because it makes this one of the clearest communities on Reddit about wanting a human voice. I also respect how blunt the culture war rule is, since it removes the exact temptation most founders have when they think a debate will get them attention. With no observed top posts to learn from, my honest read is that the safest path here is to write something genuinely interesting yourself and let the product, if you have one, stay in the background.