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.
The idea of creating a new comm to generate discussion on a subject should be abandoned, our numbers are too low for comms to function like subreddits. As comms are right now, they are likely silencing discussion on some subjects. Instead, the line of reasoning behind creating a new sub (or continuing the existence of an old one) should be one of the following:
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Some users would likely want to not see posts about the topic (doomer, anime, games, veganism, electoralism...)
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To create a space where marginalized voices are not drowned out by the majority (anti_cishet_aktion, neurodiverse...)
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Special cases where one might want to look at older posts (mutual_aid, feedback, announcements...)
All other posts should be put in a main comm, which should be named better than chapotraphouse so new users aren't discouraged from posting.
This is not a bad idea either, though it’s far more radical than what I am suggesting. We essentially operate in a similar manner anyways, but instead of one “main” we have a handful (cth, dunk tank, news etc). Most of the posts in one can easily fit in another already.
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we have /c/cars but not /c/bicycles and until that one is resolved you're all libs
It's just old https://hexbear.net/post/83791
But nah I sadly don't have the time to mod it
Just sub every user to every comm by default and make them all opt out. Then it doesn't matter what comms we have and more comms isn't a bad thing because everyone sees it all anyway.
And then if you don't want to see some specific niche content you can unsub from the comm that has that content. It's better for everyone this way until we hit some critical mass
A lot of these comms actually do have a lot of subs. But this doesn’t solve the issue of certain comms being too dead to have any posts. Even if everyone is subbed to c/Judaism, if there are no posts there, then the comm is going to remain dead, and anyone who would think of posting there would rather post to a bigger comm. For example, c/antifascism has more than 21,000 subs, but everyone chooses to post stuff on dunk tank or News or whatever other relevant community is applicable even if the content would be a perfect fit for c/antifascism.
I think the reason that consolidation approach hasn't been implemented is that it would lead to discussion of one subject drowning out discussion of the other subjects. If they consolidated Marxism and Anarchism into only one Theory comm, since most of the users here are Marxist it would lead to Anarchists having difficulty in finding discussion of Anarchist theory. Same thing for the religion comms, there's far more Christian users than any other religion so a consolidated comm would just end up looking like an alias of the current Christianity comm. Then consider what would happen if an unwitting user posted about a niche subject in these comms that have, for months and months, only been used for the "hegemonic" subject so to speak; they'd probably be ignored.
This would be a concern but with the comms in question, there is barely any activity at all. We have more Marxists than Anarchists, yes, but the comm activity levels are pretty similar. c/marxism is bigger but not by much. And a c/theory, which is being proposed, would add other tendencies to further even things out.
And this is even more true for religious comms. Despite most users having a Christian upbringing, c/christianity has barely any users, because people here just aren’t religious in general, nor interested in specific Christian history or theology. And all this is even truer for the other religious comms.
I’m suggesting this consolidation approach only because I’m confident what you speak of will not happen. The comms just aren’t popular, even the ones that, at first glance, seem like they should be.
The purpose would be to bring more users to the comms though, no? So if the solution is successful, that drowning out effect would still happen. It probably is still worth trying since worst case scenario we go from several inactive comms and one slightly active comm to a single, more active comm.
In the cases I’m proposing, the drowning effect would also be mitigated by the fact that we aren’t combining one popular + one unpopular comm, but one popular (relatively) + many less popular ones. The combined posting from the latter would offer a greater counterweight to the bigger comm than just merging two comms.
Yeah I think a significant number of comms should be outright deleted. And a few others archived to avoid losing access to posts. I don't think there's any reason to make any new comm until the unnecessary ones are removed and we can reassess what new comms there is actual demand for.
If you look through the mod log, many comms actually did get deleted. I’m not sure a single person other than me (and the mods, obv) has noticed that.
It's perfectly fine for comms to fail.
Without creating them you do not know if they will fail or if there will be interest in keeping them going. If they fail, it's not a big deal. If they do not then they become a useful space.
A simple culture to create is that comm creators should be active posters in their comm. A daily post isn't difficult, it takes 5 minutes. This by itself will keep comms active and if the creators can't do it then that's ok, it can either be handed off to someone who does want to keep that comm going or it can be closed for a time when more activity warrants someone else attempting it.
While it’s fine for comms to fail, I don’t think we should be doing things that actively encourage it. This is the unintended consequence of the way we create comms.
For example, with religion comms - we created a c/christianity because some users wanted it. It got some activity. Now, though the question arose of what to do about other religions? So we created c/islam and c/judaism. But why stop there? Why not also create c/buddhism, c/hinduism, and many, many others? Clearly, if followed through, we would need at least a dozen (inc. c/paganism, c/animism etc.) And almost all of them would be dead on arrival, or near enough.
But what if we had a different approach to comm creation? What if, when the idea arose of a c/christianity, we instead said, “Let’s think a bit more broadly,” and create a c/religion?
I don’t think it would be a major comm, but it would definitely be way more active than c/christianity or any of the other comms individually, and also more active than them combined, because c/religion could cover so many more religions and it could cover the topic of religion itself.
I agree, it’s fine for comms to fail. But if there is a way to ensure they do not, then I think we should try it.
This is why I think a culture of expectation that comm creators actually post daily to their comms is good.
One of the main reasons these spaces sometimes fail is simply because they do not have someone posting in them. Over on reddit almost all subreddits that grow are initially started by one person who doggedly provides content in them as the main poster up until they grow large enough for a community of people to exist as other contributors.
Prior to recent drama Reddit incentivised this because it felt like you "owned" the space, so it was yours, so putting in the effort to grow it existed.
If we're going to keep comms as a request thing (instead of just opening it up for people to "own" them and for some people to put the effort in vs others that do not) then creating the expectation and culture of creators being a daily poster in their communities is the way to fill this gap.
Afterall, almost all of these comms WOULD have activity if someone posted to them. Others would absolutely comment on those posts. What you get from this state-mandated-posting approach is a simple method of making sure they have activity, solving the "please put the effort in" issue, and a signal that can be used for passing the space into someone else's care or winding them down.
Yeah, this is a good idea. IMO, we can marry the two approaches, too. Consolidate some and mandate posting on them. A c/religion would have more people willing to daily post/comment than one specifically about c/Islam for example, because I don’t think even Daily Islam Posting would make them super popular, but seeing someone post about their religion of choice might make someone else post about another one.
It's not so much about making the spaces popular but simply making sure they are active so that when people who will use them come along don't see an inactive space. People will subscribe to a comm if it is getting content, they won't subscribe to a comm that is not.
The correct way to look at subreddits (and by extension, comms) is that they are twitter feeds that many people contribute to instead of 1. Initially they all start with 1, who provides the value to become a subscriber to that content. Eventually more find and contribute to the space but not without that 1 person doing the daily post providing value in being a subscriber.
Once you establish in your mind that subreddits are collectively contributed to twitter feeds the whole concept of posting once per day to them as the primary growth tool makes a lot more sense.
Yes, I’m not against your idea. I even mentioned the thing about growth as the first point in my post. But we don’t need to do one or the other, when we can do both. Everything you said applies to combined comms, I’d argue even more so, as more people will be willing to daily and semi-daily post. We don’t have to combine everything either.
This would genuinely be a good idea if we had a “tag” system instead of comms. Tags are, imo, just better in general. The same post can have multiple tags, rather than needing to choose one comm or, even worse, cross-post. You get to consolidate all comments in one post, and you don’t need to worry about “dead tags” nearly as much as “dead comms”. Combined with a way of “democratically” generating tags, when a select number of users agree on a creation, would also get rid of the AO3 problem.
Ultimately the comms act as tags anyway. If everyone was subbed to all comms by default, then effectively unsubbing would be like hiding a specific tag.
The comms aren't communities (except for a few). But that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist when they do a good job of sorting.
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.
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.
Users will choose the more active comm up until the point that they feel that their post will be drowned out by other posts, then they will choose the more specific comm. Hence, new comms should be created when there are enough posts for them on an already existing community.
maybe comms should be tags rather than silos and that islam/history post could be tagged with both, and if i want to see all religion posts i can or if i don't feel like pushing anyone off a bridge and just want to see Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 posts not Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912 posts then i can do that too.
new comms
new communes