The recent Mod Drive/Comm Creation brought to my attention how many comms barely get used. Some don’t have any users at all. It’s a problem I remember speaking out about way back in the day and it’s still here. There are a few reasons I think can of.
Firstly, we just don’t have enough users to fill in every niche comm. It’s been a problem for a while and the only solution is the grow, especially focusing on the kinds of users that would populate those comms.
Secondly, and more importantly, when a potential post can be created in two or more comms, users tend to choose the one with more activity. So, if a post can be put under c/Islam or c/History, people tend to choose c/History. This is a basic flaw in the Reddit/Lemmy style of posting.
And with these two problems combined together, the small comms face a near-insurmountable obstacle. Creating new comms won’t change that. I’m not against new comms. New comms are good. But, in addition, there needs to be other measures taken, to ensure this doesn’t just result in more dead comms.
One solution is to look at combining some of these smaller comms into ones that can represent a bigger percentage of the user base. For example, the four religious comms - c/paganism, c/islam, c/judaism, and c/christianity - can be combined into a c/religion instead. This would have two benefits.
Firstly, it would have a bigger user base. Right now only c/christianity has more than 1 user per month. Most users just don’t join these comms, because they feel they are not a part of that religion. Again, if we had a big enough user base, with enough people of those religions there to fill them, this wouldn’t be a problem. As it stands, though, this results in dead comms. A c/religion would solve this by providing a central location for all religious discussion, making it appealing to people of certain religions and to people who are interested in religious content.
Secondly, this also solves the issue of there not being a c/shinto or c/buddhism or c/hinduism. There is no logical reason why these, and countless others, don’t exist when the four we have do. This means posts about religions other than the four get posted on comms like c/history or c/news or wherever. A central c/religion would provide a location for all religious content, saving us from creating even more dead comms for every major religion out there.
Another example. Right now we have a c/europe, c/oceania and c/latam, with c/mena being proposed. As far as continents go, this is a pretty awful spread. With a bigger userbase, it would make sense for us to have not just these, but also c/asia and c/africa. The purpose of these separate comms was for that to be the case. But the result is dead comms (except for c/latam) and once again no place for other posts about asia or africa except on c/news or c/politics etc.
One solution is the combining of these comms into something like a c/tricon representing the three continents - Asia, Africa and America. It is also a reference to the Tricontinental Conference held in Cuba in the 1960s, which was a major gathering of ex/colonised countries to overthrow colonialism, imperialism and capitalism.
The goal of the Tricontinental Conference was to merge Afro-Asian solidarity with Latin American solidarity and to develop a communist organization with the goal of international revolution. It was one of the largest gatherings of anti-imperialists in the world.
Pretty cool.
What happens to Europe and Oceania? Well, imo these are both just parts of Asia anyway. But if we want, we could create a separate c/colonisers for them and other settler-colonial states. This would also remove c/canada.
Just a thought.
The suggestion of a c/theory is a good one, but it can also be used to consolidate c/marxism and c/anarchism, in addition to providing a place for other leftist theories.
There are many other possibilities, that we can think of if this is an idea worth pursuing. Anyway, these are my thoughts.
I checked that comm creation suggestion thread, and frankly, most of them suck. We don't need so many comms that no one's going to use after a month. This reminds me of the internal IT service portals that have a million ticket categories and subcategories that endusers have to select for their technical issue. And speaking as someone who was both an enduser and the IT tech support behind the service portals, everyone just sees that gargantuan lists and sublists, goes "fuck it," and picks the generic "This issue is not listed" category. For Hexbear dot net, the "fuck it" comm is /c/chapotraphouse. Like carbrained people who think putting more and more lanes would somehow solve traffic, putting more and more comms won't solve this problem. If anything, it might make things worse because as the number of comms increase, the chance of the "fuck it" switch flipping goes up.
For IT at least, the correct way of solving this issue is to have two lists of categories: one for the endusers that's simple and caters towards the relative tech illiteracy of the endusers and one for the techs that's catered towards what particular team would be assigned to the support ticket. If the support ticket is about someone's Outlook being slow, you don't necessarily need an Outlook category if your org isn't large enough to have a dedicated Exchange team. And in my experience running reports for middle and upper management, it's far more reliable to run a query for keywords in the description field (in this case "Outlook") than it is to rely on people to categorize tickets correctly.
The main problem with this approach that can't be easily adopted by Hexbear is because the two-lists approach requires humans manually recategorizing tickets from the endusers list of categories to the technicians list of categories, an extremely laborious process. There's no good solution that doesn't require the admins being proactive in moving posts to different comms, deleting inactive comms, or merging different comms. However, I don't think most people here would want admins being this proactive since most people here came from Reddit where subreddits are seen as some mods' private fiefdoms and not just subsections of a broader website that can be simply deleted or otherwise tampered with at the admins' discretion. I also don't think the admins have the manpower to be this proactive.
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