Hello Jays fans! Finishing touches are coming together for my bot rewrite, and the new bots should be taking over tomorrow if all goes to plan. With that finally out of the way I can start to focus on adding to the community. By far the biggest request is for in-game linescore updates and highlights to be added to the game day threads. So that is going to be my next main focus. Good news is I don’t think it will take anywhere near as long for those updates.
I wanted to create this thread as a centralized place for the community to suggest, well, anything relating to the community. Rules changes, bot/feature requests, banner/sidebar/icon photos, etc. I created this community way back when because personally I couldn’t support that other site anymore, but I have no desire to rule this place with an iron fist. I encourage anyone and everyone to drop their suggestions here, and if enough of us agree with the changes, then I will do my best to implement them.
So far everyone here has been extremely respectful of each other, with lots of good discussion, and there has not been a need to add any more mods to the team as of yet(I haven’t needed to perform a single mod action on any community comments/content). But as the need arises, if there are any volunteers feel free to list yourselves in this thread as well, and I can potentially draw from that pool of people first.
My thanks to all of you! We have started a great community here, I look forward to it’s continued growth!
Thanks for all your amazing work! IMO, the biggest thing this community needs is more users and active users. If I were modding, that’s what I would focus on. I’m not sure what those interventions would look like at the moment. Personally, I go elsewhere for in-game stats and schedules, and I would find anything more than a here and there bot comment in game threads (where there’re too few human comments) really annoying. I’ve seen on Fanaticus communities that bots comment for each run and/or hit. That, combined with zero human comments, is my idea of close to the least attractive game thread for me to participate in. We as Jays fans seem to have benefitted from the ‘unifying’ .ca Lemmy instance. Does any other team have what we have right now in terms of human-created posts and comments in a community?
(Edit: I thought of something in-line with my approach that you might consider [although I get the sense you enjoy automating things more than creating manual things, which is completely fair]: stickied prediction/opinion threads. I think this will only work given our small scale. But, for example, say you sticky a post that asks people to leave their playoff seeding predictions. I could see that generating quite a bit of interaction. Like, we can retrospectively laugh at our silliness or gloat at our omniscience :)
That is a really good point. I would love to be able to crack the active users code, but I’m not entirely sure how to entice people to contribute either. I think it’s just down to the 1/9/90% thing where 1% of a community will be active users who post, comment and upvote within the community, 9/10% percent will upvote and occasionally comment, and the remaining 90% will be lurkers just reading occasionally. We are now up to ~350 users here which is amazing, and the amount of daily active users is pretty close to that 1% mark usually with about 5-10 of us who comment here semi regularly. I would love to attract more people here so that statistically speaking we have more and more people contributing.
The thought behind adding bot replies, schedules etc, is to potentially lure in the people who’d prefer an all in one experience, and/or spur community engagement with those posts/comments. Although I do fully appreciate your point about that potentially creating an environment where there’s more bot activity than real humans, and that’s obviously not something I want either. We are one of the biggest if not the biggest sports and specifically baseball communities on Lemmy already, so maybe we should just let the community grow naturally and avoid polluting the space with bot content.
For me - and I don’t know how representative I am, the key turn-on or turn-off when looking at a new community on Lemmy or when I was window-shopping alternative platform before I left Reddit and was “are there people here?”, “Are there a decent number of active people here?”, “Is this anything like Reddit would be like in terms of interactions/community?” etc. Thanks for sharing the 1-9-90 rule, I’m not really familiar with this stuff. But I think, after reading 1 article lol, the key is content. As in, if there’s engaging content, people will come and engage; without it, they won’t. An important part of content creation here, I think, is lowering the effort to participate. Like, posts that will encourage someone to leave a 3-word comment versus no comment lol. The way I’m starting to see things, posts that the community wants to see is probably the best intervention. IMO, I don’t know that the standings is the best use of the side bar. I might put resources for following the Jays (like, I like Blair & Barker [minus the sponsored gambling content added this year]). Just an idea! I might’ve taken too much space up here (and dissuaded others from joining in). A “what kind of posts would you like to see in this community” might be a neat idea
I love the idea from your edit, and feel free to start a post like that yourself! I can always sticky others posts as well. You are definitely right about my preference for automation, and I am already envisioning a version of this that I could turn into some type of game/competition for a $20 gift card to the Jays shop, or something along those lines. I think something like that could be really fun too, and could entice people to comment where they usually wouldn’t.
Thanks! I don’t think I have time for that at the moment. I like my current level of c/torontobluejays participation. You and I both dislike reddit, but I think we have different community preferences besides that, which is totally fine but influences how much time I’ll want to volunteer here versus other communities. Your post made it sound like there’d be significant changes to the game thread bots and I waited with bated breath, “would bot comments be implemented?” I would have liked to know what changes you were thinking about/ were going to push. I’m in the Fediverse because transparency and user-first and -informed design are very important to me - perhaps a little more than other Lemmy users. I hope some of what I’ve shared has been useful. And thanks again for all you do for this community!!
By all means, continue to contribute in whichever ways you’re comfortable with! I wasn’t saying you need to post them, just that if you wanted to you could.
So far all the bot changes have just been QOL and code improvements behind the scenes, but the functionality hasn’t changed. I have no plans on implementing any automated bot comments polluting/diluting the discussion. The only thing I might consider at some point is user-triggered bot replies, such as the player stat bot comment I mentioned in another reply.