The automated bot threads are suppressing participation
There seems to be an annoying assumption in Lemmy communities that the best way to grow is to duplicate how it worked on Reddit.
Reddit’s r/nba has hundreds of thousands or millions of readers. Their system can support lots of game-day threads because they have the numbers.
I log onto this community and I’m turned off. There are too many bot threads and not enough critical mass of discussion. Before the bots, it was better because there were only a few threads so at least people felt there was something worth participating in.
I guess I could block the bot, but this doesn’t fix the issue for the community. I suggest that these game threads can be merged into groupings. Perhaps just one thread for all the day’s games.
The point is to grow the community with the current audience in mind, not to assume that what works for Reddit is going to immediately work for Lemmy.
I've always found game threads useful as a scoreboard and as a way to see which games were interesting and worth catching up on based on the number of comments. I hope this community can reach that level of engagement.
For now, it probably doesn't make sense to have both game threads and post-game threads. Would it make sense to edit the game thread with the final score and stats once a game ends?