What's The Point Of A Game If Nobody Wants To Participate?
What's The Point Of A Game If Nobody Wants To Participate?
Please answer the question in the title. I'd really like to know. I was recently in the hospital for a few days and was sad to see that although the subscriber numbers here kept increasing, nobody was posting any challenges. So Please tell me what is the point of a game if nobody wants to participate?
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For what it's worth, my typical Lemmy habit is to pull up the "subscribed" feed in the morning, sort by "Top Day", and then scroll until I hit all of the posted content from my communities. After that point, I might transition over to "All" and sort by "active" to see if there is anything out there getting traction that I've missed. This is the first post I've seen from this community. It's an interesting concept, so I've subscribed today. As others have said, this community is still establishing itself. Keep generating content, and if what you publish is enticing (as it was for me today), and you'll attract others. Some subset of that population might also have the the drive to create content as well, but it wouldn't shock me if the proportions of lurkers to posters was 99:1.
When there were less than 300 subscribers, there were plenty of challenges being posted by plenty of different users. I even had some users complain there were too many posts. Then the posting stopped as if the community got a disease.
Is that really all that surprising though? Novelty is a powerful incentive. The folks that were bolstering your early numbers are probably those who are specifically hunting for brand new or small communities. I'd wager that these users typically post more frequently than the average. However, much like you are experiencing right now, once the novelty of a new community concept fades, if those posters don't get the engagement they wanted on their test balloon posts, they will write the community off as dead and move on.
As the person with the most skin in the game for this community, your steadfastness is what will provide the base upon which others will build, but you should be prepared to either suffer the grind until the community has built a self-sustaining ecosystem of posters, commenters, and lurkers who upvote. Alternatively, if you're getting burnt out from feeling like you're screaming into the void, you can walk away (intentionally this time, not because of a hospital visit). Return later if you feel reenergized, but you don't have to. It's just an internet forum.
Also, I do think you are underselling the difficulty of posting in this community a little bit. I've been toying around with Craiyon, based on the recommendation of your sticky post, trying to generate an image for Iron Maiden's "The Trooper". It's a fairly cinematic song, should be easy to generate an image that fits, right? Plug in a couple of the most evocative lines and you're off to the races. Not so much, I'm finding. Dumping the lyrics in raw gets me various depictions of horses and not much else. Okay, back to the drawing board. In my own words, I describe a 19th century cavalry charge. Closer, but it lacks any of the touchstones from the lyrics themselves. Also, the resulting images themselves are various degrees of janky in the way that the free image generators typically are. Sure, I could just throw it out there in the spirit of providing content for people to chew through, but I might argue that a tidal wave of low effort posts is more damaging to the health of most new community than few posts of relative high quality. And, again, this is all for a song that is very specific in the imagery it evokes. I'd imagine trying something more esoteric would need even more revisions and iterations to get dialed in to a point where someone has a shot at guessing.
Other than a very brief period of time when these sort of generators were first making waves in TTRPG DM communities, this is the only time I've messed around with these types of programs, so I don't really know how to best revise or write these prompts. It ends up being a lot of trial and error. Which, yeah, if I'm just throwing out a test post to gauge the response, no big deal. But I don't think it should shock you that someone may not be interested in doing that on a regular basis. It seems like you possibly have some degree of experience with these programs (at least looking at the quality of the outputs you've been posting), and I think you may be letting that cloud your perception of the time investment.
As a final point regarding engagement in this community, I'm not sure this is the sort of game that breeds huge amounts of comments and whatnot. Using your Journey post as an example, I posted a guess, you responded with an emoji, and now that post is now effectively dead unless things go wildly off topic in the comments. Not that that's a bad thing if you're okay with it as the community manager, but I'd guess it is probably the exception to the rule. In the reverse situation, if I come across a post which has stumped me, I'm more likely to just keep scrolling on to the next thing because I wouldn't want to ruin the chance someone else might have at guessing it "honestly" (so to speak) by asking for clues. That's admittedly silly, but I don't think the sentiment is unique to me.
I don't mean to bust your chops, I do really like this concept and hope it finds its footing. I just think you may have been overly optimistic with your expectations.
You should read the Welcome sticky. It's there for a reason.
What exactly from the welcome sticky do you believe I failed to understand?
I think perhaps you should reevaluate your communication style. I just provided a lot of honest feedback to your query in a manner that I hoped was constructive. If you feel like I misunderstood something, or that you've covered one of my points above in the welcome text, then you could respond to me in the same manner I responded to you. Because I did read the welcome post while I was composing that post. I even reference it directly in my post, which I'm not entirely sure you bothered to read, since you've not responded to any of the points I brought up. So I'm sort of sitting here wondering "What's The Point Of A Feedback Post If OP Is Unwilling To Receive Feedback?"
It appears you failed to see that there are many other AIs other than Craiyon that were mentioned and that it was also clearly mentioned that you may give weight to lyrics as you see fit which would eliminate the problems you mentioned having.
Here is an image from the first verse of The Trooper it took all of 5 seconds to create.
You really were having trouble?
Correct, I really was.
I did not fail to see that you had listed many different options. I selected Craiyon because you and your partner had listed it as the first beginner friendly option. I am, as I stated, a total novice. I listed my process for trying to generate an image. I listed the issues I was running into. Instead of providing suggestions for how I could have done things better (beyond "why didn't you try one of the other tools we've listed") you have A) referred me to a welcome post which contains no pointers for the issues I've told you I had and B) created an image trying to show me how easy it all is with no description of what you did to get the results you posted here.
As I said in my initial post, you are completely undervaluing what it takes to get the results you got, because you appear to be experienced with these tools. That's great, but you've posted something that is asking why people are not following your lead and creating content in your absence. I have no desire to jump through a half dozen different image generation services to make something I feel like is a guessable, but interesting post.
Now, you may say, "fuck you rando, it's not my job to teach you how to make these tools do what you want, Google it". However, within the context of this post, you could really stand to take a less superior, snarky stance towards the people you're asking for help in supporting this community and instead actually listen when someone describes the problems they're having. Even if you think I'm being a big dumb idiot.
Regarding the image you generated, I'll reiterate what I said initially, I got like 8 pictures of horses in various impossible poses when I put the lyrics from one of the verses in. I recalibrated by writing a prompt which evoked the lyrics of the song without necessarily directly quoting them. That did get me in the ballpark, but, like I said initially, most of the actual lyrical references were lost and I was left with a generic image of 19th century combat. Much like the image you just posted. And you might think that that image is perfectly acceptable as a post. I disagree. Sure, in this instance it would probably work (there can't be THAT many metal songs referencing the charge of the light brigade), but if it was a more generic song, it would be unnecessarily difficult to guess. Which, as others in this thread have said, is an impediment to people interacting in this space.