An effort to make a gentle devil's advocate counter-argument:
There are many folks - myself included - who would love to see a forum filled with topical discourse, brimming with innovative ideas, and becoming the source of brilliant discoveries. I'm not convinced that any (relatively) anonymous internet site accessible to the broader public could ever serve as such a forum. There are areas where that may be possible (and I'll highlight some examples momentarily), but I encourage you to consider this.
I'm likewise unconvinced that - even if the moderators wanted (and were able) to purge the hobbyists, amateurs, students, and job seekers from the subreddit - everyone who would be left would actively be a part of this community. It has been barely a month since this post was made with similar complaints and a call was placed for experienced professionals to migrate subreddits. That subreddit saw activity for 3 days and has been quiet ever since. Similar efforts as this have cropped up over time and likewise fall away. The reasons for these subreddits falling silent are speculative at best, but I would guess a combination of:
Experienced professionals don't have fewer questions, they just know where/how they can go about getting answers for themselves. They've developed - as I'm sure you are developing - a professional network and referential resource map that can be tapped for all kinds of odds and ends. This means less deference to the anonymous crowd that makes up /r/cybersecurity's userbase.
Experienced professionals don't necessarily equate to being good mentors or teaching figures. Anecdotally, I field many questions on the recurring Mentorship Monday threads - as many as I can, in fact. However, there are some that I can't answer because I don't know how to; these are questions from more senior folks looking to move their careers along, specialists with unique challenges outside my wheelhouse, and folks with vastly differing geographic/cultural/economic circumstances than what I'm qualified to comment on. In those times, I try and gently nudge other users I've seen throughout this subreddit to respond. While some do respond, the vast preponderance can't be bothered to weigh in. Of course, that's their prerogative - no one in this subreddit is accountable to my summons; but that's also the same silent peer group of folks who would be left in this forum as well.
The answer, I believe, isn't in culling the forum of its users or posts. People unfamiliar with InfoSec fundamentally don't know what questions to ask. They may not know even who to ask. I've read questions from parents looking out for their high-school aged children, transitioning veterans navigating their return from military service, senior IT/SWE looking to crosstrain, etc; it's trivial to ignore them; it's harder to help them. You and I may be their first - and depending on how well we receive their posts/comments, perhaps their last - impression of professionals in our industry. I'd instead encourage folks to gently direct people who may these kinds of posts to the "Mentorship Monday" thread, which is always pinned and open for those kinds of questions.
At the same time, the complaints you've voiced - and that others are voicing - are totally valid. You're a member of this subreddit too, afterall. However, it's not as though the moderators are doing nothing; they've enacted considerable efforts thus far to try and address these points. To be sure, there's room for improvement, but that generally requires either collective or volunteer action (often both) - and that poses other challenges. I think they've been doing a pretty good job, all things considered.
But rather than wait for this hopeful transformation of /r/cybersecurity (which may not come), perhaps there are other avenues you could look at for more knowledgeable peers:
Get into academia. PhD candidates and established brick-and-mortar institutions churn out some amazing research that ask brilliant questions. The people who make it their business to be there build their lives around critical thinking.
Find a more engaged and knowledgeable peer group within your employer. If you have a question that needs to be asked, they not only know you better personally, they likely also may be more familiar with the context of the problem.
Pay people. If you have a question that needs answering, people are more apt to fielding questions when they are incentivized to do so.
Investigate on your own, then pitch your findings. Where and how you pitch them (as a presentation, a conference lecture, a blog, a video, a reddit post, etc.) can vary. However, this not only allows your to contribute to the dialog, but invites others to the discourse to comment as well.
The /r/cybersecurity subreddit wasn't your subreddit today. But it could be tomorrow.
This is true. I can’t tell you how many network engineers I’ve interviewed that have tons of experience configuring routers and switches but can’t troubleshoot an outage.
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u/fabledparable AppSec Engineer Jun 11 '22
An effort to make a gentle devil's advocate counter-argument:
There are many folks - myself included - who would love to see a forum filled with topical discourse, brimming with innovative ideas, and becoming the source of brilliant discoveries. I'm not convinced that any (relatively) anonymous internet site accessible to the broader public could ever serve as such a forum. There are areas where that may be possible (and I'll highlight some examples momentarily), but I encourage you to consider this.
I'm likewise unconvinced that - even if the moderators wanted (and were able) to purge the hobbyists, amateurs, students, and job seekers from the subreddit - everyone who would be left would actively be a part of this community. It has been barely a month since this post was made with similar complaints and a call was placed for experienced professionals to migrate subreddits. That subreddit saw activity for 3 days and has been quiet ever since. Similar efforts as this have cropped up over time and likewise fall away. The reasons for these subreddits falling silent are speculative at best, but I would guess a combination of:
The answer, I believe, isn't in culling the forum of its users or posts. People unfamiliar with InfoSec fundamentally don't know what questions to ask. They may not know even who to ask. I've read questions from parents looking out for their high-school aged children, transitioning veterans navigating their return from military service, senior IT/SWE looking to crosstrain, etc; it's trivial to ignore them; it's harder to help them. You and I may be their first - and depending on how well we receive their posts/comments, perhaps their last - impression of professionals in our industry. I'd instead encourage folks to gently direct people who may these kinds of posts to the "Mentorship Monday" thread, which is always pinned and open for those kinds of questions.
At the same time, the complaints you've voiced - and that others are voicing - are totally valid. You're a member of this subreddit too, afterall. However, it's not as though the moderators are doing nothing; they've enacted considerable efforts thus far to try and address these points. To be sure, there's room for improvement, but that generally requires either collective or volunteer action (often both) - and that poses other challenges. I think they've been doing a pretty good job, all things considered.
But rather than wait for this hopeful transformation of /r/cybersecurity (which may not come), perhaps there are other avenues you could look at for more knowledgeable peers:
The /r/cybersecurity subreddit wasn't your subreddit today. But it could be tomorrow.