Reddit is trash. It's full of bots, p0rn, bots, hate speech, and is largely unmoderated. I refuse to make an account there. It reminds me of IRC (if anybody remembers that).
Edit: did I say 'bots' twice? Meh. I'll leave it that way.
You're not wrong, but the reply voting allows me to sort by new or best and get what I need and move on. Most active Reddits have mods and even auto-moderation. That DSL forums replacement and the Vegas forum you mentioned once are the last couple forums I can recall signing up for in a looooong time - and never made a habit of going to either in part because of social media, Discord and probably Reddit. Facebook groups, Nextdoor, etc have also eroded the need for a site like this as well.
I even created a thread here for one of my new habits, the screen unseen movies. Naturally that program thrives in the reddits for those movie theater chains. No interest or activity here, so never maintained it in the way I thought about doing when I created it. Most of the stickies in the forum haven't been posted to in years and are about things like Blu-Ray release dates that clearly are not of interest or draw engagement.
Meanwhile I'm in 85 Discord servers, active in 3-5 of them (including the one I maintain for my friends group), and join/leave 1-2 a week, occasionally sorting / purging them.
Honestly surprised the movie / tv section isn't more active, it's one of the more directly adjacent topics to the core value proposition of the site. Threads get 3-5 replies, and anything that warrants discussion pushes that up to a dozen or so. If people aren't sticking around after finding the answer to their problem to talk about the content they're receiving over their chosen provider, that's a problem that has to be solved for more growth.
I'd say if people want the site to continue (and that's if we aren't already bailing water on the Titanic) then those who are long time, active posters should be asking themselves on any given topic -
is there a reason why this needs to be in the Pub. If it's because you're afraid of certain replies, or you feel it's the only way people will see your post or something, just know that you're choosing that reason over the future viability of the site.
I think a fairly significant condensation of forums should be considered again, too. ie - Equipment Zone and What to Watch sections should just be the forums under Hometown Discussions, not sections. Given how little activity there is and in an effort to create more collisions (a Zappos term for collaboration - it's why we had a single point of entry to our campus - so that people would run into each other) and more active topics, could even make a case that the Sports section is rolled into that single What to Watch as well - sticky the seasonal sports threads threads and until there's growth to warrant expanding it then it should be the catch-all for all the media people are consuming. An EV section makes sense, but if people already aren't paying attention to the threads in chit-chat on EVs, then it doesn't make any sense to peel those out and make them possibly even less seen. That's certainly a gamble as if you push away any number of active posters in those sections now it's a significant setback - but that just goes to illustrate the problem in general. We've seen that in the past, once SandraC? was banned, and Rey and Salsadancer stopped being as active / posting, a tipping point was hit and engagement tanked.
osu1991 is the one person band in some of these sections, playing for an empty stadium, with no engagement.
I can't help but laugh (and not at anyone, but how blind we seemed to have all been), glancing at the Pub to see the most recent / active topics, and the first one I click on is about
Ductless HVAC from
2013 which begins with:
I was going to post this somewhere else, but I think the Pub has the greatest braintrust...and the most activity of late! We've discussed this before but when I searched it, not much popped-up.
www.linuxsat-support.com
