There seems to be an annoying assumption in Lemmy communities that the best way to grow is to duplicate how it worked on Reddit.
Reddit’s r/nba has hundreds of thousands or millions of readers. Their system can support lots of game-day threads because they have the numbers.
I log onto this community and I’m turned off. There are too many bot threads and not enough critical mass of discussion. Before the bots, it was better because there were only a few threads so at least people felt there was something worth participating in.
I guess I could block the bot, but this doesn’t fix the issue for the community. I suggest that these game threads can be merged into groupings. Perhaps just one thread for all the day’s games.
The point is to grow the community with the current audience in mind, not to assume that what works for Reddit is going to immediately work for Lemmy.
(disclaimer - I’m the mod that created the bot)
First of all, I really want to thank you and everyone in the comments for taking the time and sharing your thoughts and feedback. I don’t take that lightly and truly appreciate it. I myself had similar concerns and thoughts and I would love for this to be a discussion towards the best solution for this community.
When I started working on the bot, I didn’t have any “uber plan”, I simply saw a few game threads created manually, a few post game threads and decided it could be a cool addition to the community if we could automate these. What I realized quickly were two aspects - One was that trying out the bot can only happen, well, when games are being played and that if I don’t try it out before the summer league ends, I won’t be able to test it until mid Oct-ish when the league starts. The 2nd one was that Summer League is a surprisingly busy period from a schedule pov, with about 6-8 games a day, every day. That meant that the bot will create quite a lot of activity (“noise”) in its first days, in a mostly (the most?) quit time of the year. Today’s actually the last day of games in the next few months so either way you won’t see too much from the bot for the next 2-3 months.
Taking that into account, I decided to continue working on the bot mainly so we (the mods) could get your opinions and your feedback. I wanted to see what works, and what doesn’t. What folks like, and what isn’t great. In a few days, we found a bunch of issues and made many tweaks to how it works. It’s much better today that only a week ago. As an aside, I’ve gotten quite a few asks to share the code with other communities, so I think all in all it was the right decision.
Having said all that, your key point I feel stands strong - we’re not as big as r/nba and shouldn’t try to mimic what’s working there. I suggest that when the season starts in a few months, we re-evaluate how we want the bot to work - as it is now, in a limited capacity (single daily discussion thread?), or not at all. The ultimate goal is to encourage discussions, and if we, as a community feel the bot is not driving that (even holding it back), there’s absolutely no reason for it to exist.
Hope this kind if makes sense? please share you thoughts as well
I might recommend we pin this post or pin a new post about this topic (maybe replacing the existing pinned thread announcing the bot). I worry your comment and ask for community feedback and discussion will get lost amidst the rest of the comments.
Hi, it’s late and just a quick response.
First off, I’m sorry for the tone in my original OP. I think I, too, forget that Lemmy more than Reddit is run my volunteers. So on Reddit it’s fine to go off on a rant about nameless people. But it’s different here. We appreciate all your work.
Second, in terms of a future format that would work, is it possible to have a daily pinned thread with the content? On r/nba what happened for post game threads was that there was a single post but with the bot establishing comments corresponding to each item. Then people can comment within each sub comment.
Thanks for the reply. I really like that option - it’s a good balance between having a place to discuss every single game and not creating a post for each. It should also be pretty straight forward to port from the existing implementation :) I’ll play with it in the next months and see how it goes.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Wow. What a great response. We all really appreciate your work on this bot and all the intention behind it too.
When the bot was first announced, I was quite excited. But OP’s points also ring true.
In any case it seems like there have been suggestions of putting scores into a single thread for now…
In either case I’m happy. I just think the situation will change as more users show up and then you can evaluate closer to the season start.
I used /r/NBA so much, so it’s nice to find a home here and have things similar.
Random idea; what about making a box score generator and letting users post the game threads themselves?