NBA

(disclaimer - I'm the mod that created the bot)

First of all, I really want to thank you and everyone in the comments for taking the time and sharing your thoughts and feedback. I don't take that lightly and truly appreciate it. I myself had similar concerns and thoughts and I would love for this to be a discussion towards the best solution for this community.

When I started working on the bot, I didn't have any "uber plan", I simply saw a few game threads created manually, a few post game threads and decided it could be a cool addition to the community if we could automate these. What I realized quickly were two aspects - One was that trying out the bot can only happen, well, when games are being played and that if I don't try it out before the summer league ends, I won't be able to test it until mid Oct-ish when the league starts. The 2nd one was that Summer League is a surprisingly busy period from a schedule pov, with about 6-8 games a day, every day. That meant that the bot will create quite a lot of activity ("noise") in its first days, in a mostly (the most?) quit time of the year. Today's actually the last day of games in the next few months so either way you won't see too much from the bot for the next 2-3 months.

Taking that into account, I decided to continue working on the bot mainly so we (the mods) could get your opinions and your feedback. I wanted to see what works, and what doesn't. What folks like, and what isn't great. In a few days, we found a bunch of issues and made many tweaks to how it works. It's much better today that only a week ago. As an aside, I've gotten quite a few asks to share the code with other communities, so I think all in all it was the right decision.

Having said all that, your key point I feel stands strong - we're not as big as r/nba and shouldn't try to mimic what's working there. I suggest that when the season starts in a few months, we re-evaluate how we want the bot to work - as it is now, in a limited capacity (single daily discussion thread?), or not at all. The ultimate goal is to encourage discussions, and if we, as a community feel the bot is not driving that (even holding it back), there's absolutely no reason for it to exist.

Hope this kind if makes sense? please share you thoughts as well

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.

I agree. I think they can just use the single daily discussion/game thread and leave it at that. eliminate the individual game threads.

Yeah, in general there aren't quite enough comments yet to need all of the threads.

All you have to do is block the bot, the same way you'd block a user. I definitely don't want my front page filled with that, but I would still like to see some c/NBA posts. So I blocked the game thread bot and the score bot.

Yep. Said it elsewhere but trying to force the fledgling Lemmy community to fit into the giant shoes of Reddit isn’t going to work.

Reddit had years of organic growth that started small and concentrated (user created subs weren’t even a thing originally).

A single game day thread sounds like a good way to get people in the same room for discussion. We’ll make more space when it gets crowded, not before.

I've never been a fan of bots either.

My vote is to split the difference.

I think post game threads should be all bot automated. Also makes cross posts easier for team communities.

Game threads aren’t well suited on Lemmy.

I am working on a community on a lightweight discord clone, much slimmer than discord, such that we can have actual live game participation linked to and from Lemmy, but let Lemmy do what it’s better at: asynchronous threads.

Matrix is not good and Discord is a bit much.

With this alternative, I’m thinking we can have a single chat community for synchronized discussion—and game threads/teams can be channels within the room. It will feel much nicer having everyone from Lemmy closer together. Basically /c/NBA chat with team rooms/game chats.

I don't particularly have any strong feelings as long as I can read game discussions somewhere.

But I do want to point out that while I watch a shit ton of warriors games in the regular season and most playoff games. I generally don't ever give a fuck about summer league. And only pay attention to the trades during off season.

I suspect that's true for quite a few and it's going to be pretty hard to get a good gauge on community engagement until the league starts.

Summer league ends today with the finals. You do have a point about making bot posts that aren't interest ing enough to the rest of the community. On Reddit there just wouldn't be game threads for certain teams because no one would make them and discussion minimal when made.

I vote for at least keeping post game threads for every regular season game.

I've always found game threads useful as a scoreboard and as a way to see which games were interesting and worth catching up on based on the number of comments. I hope this community can reach that level of engagement.

For now, it probably doesn't make sense to have both game threads and post-game threads. Would it make sense to edit the game thread with the final score and stats once a game ends?

I don't have a problem with a lot of Reddit content, but we don't need to be Reddit. I block all Reddit repost bots on sight

Yeah I agree. There’s far too many bot threads. Is it possible to just limit it to a single thread like update?