Yeah, /r/Edmonton. Do better and get the fuck off of Reddit…
I had reached out to the r/Edmonton mods, and they were adamant about not moving to Lemmy.
I mean, that’s fine. Good, even.
Thanks to you for modding, and I appreciate your efforts. To speak honestly though, something that stops me from getting more involved here is that all the posts are almost exclusively made by a bot that links back to reddit posts. I think that’s kind of a bummer.
Thank you. I appreciate the kind words.
The bot brings in content from R, but it’s been set up to do so for a specific reason. In order to attract new users and subscribers, new content has to be posted. Kind of a chicken/egg scenario.
The bot pulls from the Hot category of r/Edmonton, allowing it to at least make use of preliminary user filtering from R. Without that, it would be pulling from New, providing much lower qualities of content.
If you have any recommendations or suggestions, throw 'em at me! I’m all ears (or eyes, in this case)
I get the chicken/egg situation, for sure. Without material being posted, the community looks dead. I think the contentbot currently pulls things too far - with so many posts that are reddit links, with almost all of them having 0 comments on Lemmy, it kind of makes the community here look and feel like a proxy for r/edmonton. I see that you’ve put effort into making the contentbot bring over curated posts, and that’s really cool, but I think it’s bringing over too much.
I think an online community needs a few things to work well, and one of them is that It should be a water cooler, where people can talk about the news, share their views, & discuss. The news posts are brought here, which is great, but they get diluted by the amount of reddit links. Getting people to actually comment is hard, if they feel like they’re speaking into a void.
The thread/comment format is amazing for people to ask questions, and get good answers. Like, “where can I find a jewelers hammer in Edmonton?”. The sort of q/a that search engines deliver poorly on. But I understand, it’s hard to get that q/a going, if nobody is commenting. And I’d be disincentivized to even post a thread with that question, if the majority of the threads have 0 comments - I wouldn’t really expect an answer.
So, the goal would be to build on the existing subscriber numbers, and incentivize people to comment. There are already 425 subscribers, which is cool. And the users per month here is high for a city-centered community, so we know people want to be here. Maybe pinned weekly general discussion, and q/a threads would be a good way to get people talking? I’d comment in those, to try and get things kick started :)
