this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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[Meta] GDT post frequency discussion (dandroid.app)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello, [email protected]!

Great news: The GDT bot seems to be working great. It has been up for 4 straight days with no crashes. There were a few hitches that I was able to fix on my end. There's one outstanding one that rarely causes the bot to get stuck for about 15 minutes, but that is currently in the hands of the people who make the Lemmy python library that I am using. I created an issue for it on github, and it appears that they have agreed to fix it.

I hope everyone has had a chance to look at the posts that the bot is making and follow along while you watch your favorite team. But let's be real, how could you avoid the posts the bot is making? That's actually what I want to bring up. I know it is still preseason and interaction is bound to be low, but having 80% of the posts in the community just be GDTs seems like too much. I have been discussing with the folks that are interacting with the GDTs to see if it seems like too much to them as well. We have also had some people brainstorm ways to improve this, too. I just wanted to say that I have really appreciated the honest feedback from those of you that have had this discussion with me!

We have tossed out a lot of ideas, most of which will not work due to the way that Lemmy handles linking things, but I think that I have come up with one possibility that allows us to keep all of the content of the current format, but only have (wait for it) ONE post per day. Here's an example of what I am thinking. Instead of having one post per game, we have one post per day. And under the daily post, each comment contains all the information that each game post currently has. Folks can reply to the comments with the game details to have a discussion about the game they are watching, and the community won't get flooded with this.

But before we get ahead of ourselves -- because this will take development time, and I don't wan't to put time into something that the community doesn't want -- I want to know what you all want. Does this sound good to you? Would you rather keep it as is? Do you have another suggestion? Please let me know your thoughts!

Once again, the bot is open source, and you can contribute to it here. I even added a sponsorship button so if you so chose, you could help me fund drowning my depression in beer while I watch my favorite team, the San Jose Sharks, fight for last place again this season.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

One post per day probably makes mores sense with the low amount of use this community has. If it gains as much momentum as /r/hockey, it can be changed then.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did think the GDTs were drowning out discussion. I think as another alternative you could consider setting up a community dedicated to hockey GDTs and a permanent link stickied to this one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Having a link to the community is a good idea. I was originally thinking linking to the posts from the other community in a once daily post, but that won't work due to how Lemmy handles links to posts. But Lemmy handles links to communities just fine.

This is definitely a more viable option than what I was originally thinking for having the GDTs out of the community. I would ideally like to have it as part of this community if possible, so I'm thinking of this more as a backup if one post per day is still too much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for all the work you've been doing on this! My only hesitation with having all games in one post is that on busy days, I wonder if it would be hard to find the game you're interested in. The post you showed had only three games, which was totally fine. But days with 10 or 12 (or even more!) games might be tougher. I guess time will tell how well it works in practice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, I thought about that as well. Ideally I would like to have links to each comment in the post, but due to the way that Lemmy does links to posts and comments, I can't link to them or else people will be pulled to lemmy.ca, and if their account is from any other instance, they won't be logged in, so they can't interact, which defeats the purpose.

That said, you can minimize the comments for the games you aren't watching. lemmy-ui (the default web browser one) and mlmym (old.lemmy.ca) will unfortunately keep unminimizing them each time you refresh, but many apps don't. For example, I use Voyager on my phone, and that one keeps the minimized comments minimized on refresh. Hopefully that's an improvement or option we can ask for from some of the major UI developers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Thanks, that makes sense. I can't make up my mind between two Android clients: Summit and Boost.

Unfortunately, Summit doesn't appear to persist thread collapsing at all. Boost does temporarily, but as you said, if I refresh the post, it gets reset. Would be nice to have clients support that, but it's not the end of the world, either.

Edit: Just realized that saving the comment for the game I'm interested in would probably make a decent workaround.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's too bad. I guess Voyager is sort of the exception here.

Saving the comment does sound like a good workaround until Lemmy hopefully starts supporting instance-agnostic links to posts and comments. It sounds like a hard problem to solve, so I'm not holding my breath for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I do like the idea! Hopefully that will drive a little more engagement in the community. Maybe once there's more activity we can revisit individual posts for more targeted discussion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Maybe once there's more activity we can revisit individual posts for more targeted discussion.

Absolutely, that's what I'm hoping for. I'm even thinking about keeping it with the current format for the playoffs, when there are fewer games per day and likely more engagement.

Actually, if we want to talk about details, the way I was thinking about doing it was having what types of games were posted in which way settable in the environment file. So for now, we could have preseason and regular season set to comment posts, then have postseason games set to one post per game. The reason for that is maybe we grow and we decide we like having regular season and post season as one post per game and only preseason as comment posts, but another community, say [email protected] wants to use the same bot, but they aren't big enough to have enough interaction to want one post per game, they could find tune it for whatever works for their community size. And if they grow, they can easily switch it without needing to touch actual code.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The configurability sounds great! On the topic of configurability, I haven't looked at your source since it was first posted a while ago, so perhaps this is already supported. But having the ability to only post and update for a single team may be a feature worth looking into if not. I'm sure individual team communities may be interested in that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's a great idea! I'll definitely implement that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Love the idea of having an aggregate post like that. Super appreciative of the time you spent making the gdt bot and they have been awesome! But I figure having one place to discuss all the games of the day is gonna be nice and clean up everyone's feeds. Thanks for working on this!