Moderators of r/opensource, a community of roughly 98,000 weekly visitors, have barred submissions for projects that use AI, are made by AI, or are intended for AI. The same rule change restricted posting by non-English speakers. A rival community formed within days.
The objection that landed hardest was a definitional one. As written, "projects that use AI" covers a great deal of mainstream open source - one member asked whether Linux is still allowed, given the AI-related code in the kernel tree and the tooling around it. A rule intended to filter low-effort AI-generated submissions reads, on its face, as excluding most of what the subreddit exists to discuss.
It is a small governance story with a larger shape behind it. Open source communities are absorbing a volume of machine-generated contributions they have no established process for judging, and moderation rules written quickly tend to catch the category rather than the behaviour. The non-English restriction, bundled into the same change, made the backlash considerably worse.
Sources
PPC Land · Kotaku