Should we bring back megathreads?

[Peklo]

I regularly make threads on niche topics--by the context of this forum--that I fully anticipate will get few or no responses and interaction, and the "advice" that I can give for other people that feel anxious about opening up a conversation is simply to not give a shit, crass as it sounds. You can't apply wild expectations to a forum with a small and pretty set in their ways and preferences userbase as this, but it's also no reason to leave off if you just really want to talk about something you care about. It was largely how I approached things on TT2.0 too when megathreads roamed the earth and there were more active posters, so de-emphasis on them didn't really affect me much, but I recognize that's tied to their conversational, drop-in-drop-out nature which usually isn't my preferred way of posting anyway. The idea that they would "take away" from other thread creation opportunities or whims seemed like off the mark rhetoric. You ultimately can't externally impose motivation on people to communicate, and any "state of the forum" assessment is far more complicated than one set of guidelines hovering over the place tilting the pendulum one way or another.

 

[q 3]

We need like an equivalent of the Federal Reserve who regulates the number of mega threads to keep posting rates at a healthy level without too much inflation or deflation

 

[Yimothy]

few or no responses and interaction

I don’t often comment in your threads, Peklo, but I read almost all of them with interest and often wind up getting the games. I’ve just wishlisted Rusted Moss on steam, for example. I’d like to reply more often, but I generally don’t know what to say.

Regarding not expecting much response, I like it when my posts get responses, but as a rule if I’m making a thread or even just a substantial post in an existing thread I’m doing it for me. Otherwise I’d get too discouraged.

 

[Peklo]

Pretty much! You also don't tend to hang around a community for as long as I have been here and not pick up on the general interest vectors and tastes of the people around, at least for the recurring faces, and this forum is practically all regulars because of the context it exists in. So there's rarely an element of surprise in what might or might not resound with folks, and it doesn't affect my own motivation to open the conversation on my part. If I get interested in something and want to talk about it, I appreciate that a dedicated space for it exists, if someone else has started it before I have, and I hope that goes for others too.

 

[Beowulf]

Pretty much! You also don't tend to hang around a community for as long as I have been here and not pick up on the general interest vectors and tastes of the people around, at least for the recurring faces, and this forum is practically all regulars because of the context it exists in. So there's rarely an element of surprise in what might or might not resound with folks, and it doesn't affect my own motivation to open the conversation on my part. If I get interested in something and want to talk about it, I appreciate that a dedicated space for it exists, if someone else has started it before I have, and I hope that goes for others too.

I think it's great when there's a pre-existing thread for a topic that recently caught my attention. But I've also hijacked vaguely general threads for topics I wanted to discuss, like the "comics from before" which became all "Beowulf reads TMNT" for a page and then "Beowulf reads Nintendo Comics System" for another page. The line between a megathread and a not-quite-specialized thread is thin indeed.

 

[Peklo]

I recently dropped several write-ups on From's first-person dungeon crawlers in Yimothy's King's Field thread even though several of them aren't technically part of that series, so yes, it's not an exact science. Just felt like the most appropriate place to have that conversation.