Jotting some quick notes I’ve observed so far from running /m/scifi for a couple of weeks and getting to 3K subscribers:

  • Even though most people will return to Reddit and it’ll be ‘business as usual’ - the seeds of destruction are already in place.
  • No one is coming to a place where there’s nothing to read / think about / interact with
  • The thing that made Reddit great is content - we came there for content. So when it comes to asking ‘how can we grow Kbin?’ the answer is simple: It’s the content, stupid.
  • Reddit has tons of free content - in the spirit of being a #chaoticgood, we can grab the best parts of that content and use it to make Kbin an interesting, thoughtful place to be
  • Creating spaces with well-thought-out rules to encourage inclusivity, collaborate, and mutual respect. It’s working out well for /m/scifi
  • Redditors know what’s up - they’re pissed at Spez but there’s not much they can do about it. They’ll vote with their feet if we give them a new place to come to.

Thoughts?

  • nicetriangle@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Would it be the wort idea to create bots to steal top ranked content on reddit and then cross post it to relevant areas of the threadiverse?

    Would at least help people stay over here more while the community catches up.

    • reflex@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      I feel like calling it stealing is too aggressive. Reddit is a link aggregator, so a lot of the initial content is a link to somewhere else. It’s technically not Reddit’s OC to begin with, no?

      Then, as far as reposting things like images, similar argument—there’s a lot of reposts of that content on Reddit anyway. It’s a grayer area than the former, imho. But as long as you don’t rebadge it like 9gag does, I personally don’t see anything wrong with it as a way to bootstrap activity.

      Hell, that’s what these massive AI companies did with their training days. Gotta play a little dirty I guess.

      • nicetriangle@kbin.social
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m not an expert on the topic but it could prob be done by a more traditional web crawler type vector. A few years ago I was able to configure this website zapier to scrape websites for content without API access to them and then take actions based on said content like drop images into a pinterest board. I think it’s still a thing

      • taigaman@kbin.social
        1·
        1 year ago

        Yes, but I think you could keep it cheap/free because you’re just polling for top posts once an hour/day/whatever, and not trying to rip every comment from every thread. The free tier API (100 calls/min) would pretty easily cover this per magazine.