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?

    • NoIWontPickaName
      11•1 year ago

      They’re already accusing us of being thieves for not using their shitty app, might as well live up to it.

    • reflex
      4•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.

      • taigaman
        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.