this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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Edmonton

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Lemmy community for the City of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. We encourage posts with Edmonton related original content, such as stories, news, events, hot discussion topics, and discussions with like-minded others who may share your obscure interest or hobby.

Rules

  1. Racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination are not cool. Please report it, don't support it.

  2. Don't editorialize headlines. Please keep the original title of article submissions, don't editorialize.

  3. We are not Kijiji or Craigslist. We do allow buying/selling posts, job-seeking threads, or posts made to find companionship, but please keep it civil.

  4. Lost and found posts are allowed. Hopefully we can help you find your mitten, cat, car, or travel mug!

  5. No Low Content/Offtopic Posts A post to c/edmonton must be substantially awesome. Any post that is low effort, a repost, low quality, or irrelevant to c/edmonton can be removed without warning, but it will likely stay and we'll make fun of it.

  6. No Uncivil behaviour, Insults, personal attacks, and veiled insults to get around this rule.

  7. No Spam or Referrals Spamming a business, spamming a referral link, spamming an app, spamming coupons or "Free credit".

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[–] voluble@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I get the chicken/egg situation, for sure. Without material being posted, the community looks dead. I think the contentbot currently pulls things too far - with so many posts that are reddit links, with almost all of them having 0 comments on Lemmy, it kind of makes the community here look and feel like a proxy for r/edmonton. I see that you've put effort into making the contentbot bring over curated posts, and that's really cool, but I think it's bringing over too much.

I think an online community needs a few things to work well, and one of them is that It should be a water cooler, where people can talk about the news, share their views, & discuss. The news posts are brought here, which is great, but they get diluted by the amount of reddit links. Getting people to actually comment is hard, if they feel like they're speaking into a void.

The thread/comment format is amazing for people to ask questions, and get good answers. Like, "where can I find a jewelers hammer in Edmonton?". The sort of q/a that search engines deliver poorly on. But I understand, it's hard to get that q/a going, if nobody is commenting. And I'd be disincentivized to even post a thread with that question, if the majority of the threads have 0 comments - I wouldn't really expect an answer.

So, the goal would be to build on the existing subscriber numbers, and incentivize people to comment. There are already 425 subscribers, which is cool. And the users per month here is high for a city-centered community, so we know people want to be here. Maybe pinned weekly general discussion, and q/a threads would be a good way to get people talking? I'd comment in those, to try and get things kick started :)