The automated bot threads are suppressing participation
The automated bot threads are suppressing participation
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.
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.
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.
Random idea; what about making a box score generator and letting users post the game threads themselves?
Just to keep things balanced, I'll add that I think the mod did a great job building the bot, and I'm excited that it exists. As the community grows, it will play a really important role. The stats tables are great.
Perhaps we could use the bot to automate portions of a catch-all gamethread? Alternatively, have a Featured Game each day that gets its own thread? It's tricky right now, since most of us don't follow summer league closely.
Also want to +1. Really want to first credit the mods with getting such a bot up and running on Lemmy for the first time. I'm sure it's only the beginning of what will hopefully be a more robust set of tools for the mods team to leverage in keeping this community amazing.
I agree. I think they can just use the single daily discussion/game thread and leave it at that. eliminate the individual game threads.
Yeah, in general there aren't quite enough comments yet to need all of the threads.
All you have to do is block the bot, the same way you'd block a user. I definitely don't want my front page filled with that, but I would still like to see some c/NBA posts. So I blocked the game thread bot and the score bot.
Yep. Said it elsewhere but trying to force the fledgling Lemmy community to fit into the giant shoes of Reddit isn’t going to work.
Reddit had years of organic growth that started small and concentrated (user created subs weren’t even a thing originally).
A single game day thread sounds like a good way to get people in the same room for discussion. We’ll make more space when it gets crowded, not before.
Does a single game thread where the top level comments are similar to a game thread, then all regular comments regarding that game go under the top level comment?
From my perspective I was heavy user of the game threads on /r/NBA but can definitely see why there'd be too many here right now. But I also don't want to wade through discussion of a more watched game on tnt looking for my game I wanted to discuss that was only on the local stations.
This will probably end up being a community poll at some point.
Yeah that’s probably a great way to go about it! I think r/nba did something similar for certain games but I forget which ones.
My vote is to split the difference.
I think post game threads should be all bot automated. Also makes cross posts easier for team communities.
Game threads aren’t well suited on Lemmy.
I am working on a community on a lightweight discord clone, much slimmer than discord, such that we can have actual live game participation linked to and from Lemmy, but let Lemmy do what it’s better at: asynchronous threads.
Matrix is not good and Discord is a bit much.
With this alternative, I’m thinking we can have a single chat community for synchronized discussion—and game threads/teams can be channels within the room. It will feel much nicer having everyone from Lemmy closer together. Basically /c/NBA chat with team rooms/game chats.
dew it
I've never been a fan of bots either.
I don't particularly have any strong feelings as long as I can read game discussions somewhere.
But I do want to point out that while I watch a shit ton of warriors games in the regular season and most playoff games. I generally don't ever give a fuck about summer league. And only pay attention to the trades during off season.
I suspect that's true for quite a few and it's going to be pretty hard to get a good gauge on community engagement until the league starts.
Summer league ends today with the finals. You do have a point about making bot posts that aren't interest ing enough to the rest of the community. On Reddit there just wouldn't be game threads for certain teams because no one would make them and discussion minimal when made.
I vote for at least keeping post game threads for every regular season game.
I've always found game threads useful as a scoreboard and as a way to see which games were interesting and worth catching up on based on the number of comments. I hope this community can reach that level of engagement.
For now, it probably doesn't make sense to have both game threads and post-game threads. Would it make sense to edit the game thread with the final score and stats once a game ends?
I don't have a problem with a lot of Reddit content, but we don't need to be Reddit. I block all Reddit repost bots on sight
Yeah I agree. There’s far too many bot threads. Is it possible to just limit it to a single thread like update?