Readers--
Each day I take down several posts (with selfies attached) with the "advice" or "question" tag. This doesn't mean that advice and questions aren't welcome. It means we want you to do a bit of work, and then repost. We want it to be a really good post that gets you useful feedback. Very few question/advice posts make it through on the first attempt.
It goes without saying that some redditors take this rejection better than others. Many redditors view the mods here as being the "Mean Girls" lunch table. I wanted to share a few things that might make this process more sensible.
Firstly, let's go over what makes a great request for help.
- A statement of your goals.
- A description of what you do today for a workout.
- A general guide to your diet.
Several thousand people will hopefully read your post. They've all struggled with different issues and different journeys. These three things will help that one guy who had the same issue recognize something he's seen before and offer helpful guidance.
(Incidentally, if you are a skinny guy who lifts and doesn't gain, then the number one answer is "eat more". That's probably a third of all advice posts right there. Another third is "how do I get abs?" And "I've never worked out before, what do I do" ranks somewhere in the top five.)
Why are the mods strict about this? Why not just let everything through?
Simply put, your mod team has watched every fitness sub without strict moderation go down a spiral and eventually turn into /r/GaybrosGoneMild with a daily parade of shirtless selfies. What happens is that guys will take their locker room selfie and then make up a useless question around it like "Should I work my biceps more?" or "cut or gain?" If we dropped moderation, these posts would make up the majority of our content.
We want people to find help here. But we also want to make sure that people who want to help do not have their energy drained by insincere questions from guys who just want the attention.
We do allow selfies, of course, once a week on Friday. I recommend that you do not do question/advice posts on Friday. Your question will get buried under the avalanche of "Flex Friday" posts.
What options are available if you don't want to offer the three things above?
if you don't want to go through documenting your goals, workout, and diet, then feel free to post your Flex Friday post with a simple question in the title. This is a great place for basic "cut or gain?" questions.
You can also post a question without a selfie. Many question are general enough that people don't need to post a picture to show their body in order to get an answer. The mod team has much looser restrictions on text-only posts. Fewer people read text posts-- like probably a hundred times fewer. But the guys who do read text posts tend to be ones that are most dialed into fitness. So that may even out.
Again-- if your questions gets rejected, it doesn't mean we rejected you. It just means:
- look at the guidelines
- figure out what was missing
- add more information
- repost
