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.
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.