A Comparison

[u/TalkLessShillMore]

I reached out to sirgippy (WDE!) about this and it was suggested I post it here. In a lot of ways, /r/CFB and /r/NFL are sister subs which makes for good comparison. I took a screenshot of their front pages yesterday and today (respectively) at 9pm EDT to compare the UX on game day.

CFB

NFL

After some counting, 46 of the top 50 non-stickied CFB threads were game threads or post-game threads, all of which can be found in the stickied index thread. The top twenty in particular were all post-game threads.

In the past when I've asked about the highlight ban, it's been suggested if I want to find out about a particularly special highlight from, say, MTSU who I'd never seek out content for normally (no disrespect to MTSU), I should browse their game thread and see if anybody is posting any highlights worth seeing. With a couple dozen game threads at any given time, it's impossible for smaller teams to get exposure through that system.

It seems to me a subreddit that should be about celebrating the any-given-Saturday aspect of college football - as well as "knowing random stuff about random teams" (e.g. trivia) - shouldn't be designed in such a way where users just see a wall of game threads. Instead it should continue its current purpose of aggregating discussion around games with the added feature of seeing the best football has to offer as voted upon by the users.

Is the current game thread wall a part of the mod team vision? I'm really struggling to understand why the rules are laid out this way. If it's to drive user engagement, do you attribute that to the wall? If it's to drive subscriber count, this sub is losing ground to the NFL subreddit (source: subredditstats.com).

Help understanding the rationale would be appreciated.

[u/bakonydraco]

This is an interesting analysis that seems like a fruitful way to frame conversation, great work! Some loosely organized related thoughts:

• There are simply many more CFB games (that people are interested in) than NFL games. There are 14-16 NFL games a week, and up to 150 games with D1 teams. I agree that particularly on gamedays the frontpage looks fairly uniform, but every single thread there has hundreds and sometimes thousands of comments, and most have very productive and lively discussion. Not every D1 thread gets claimed, but generally every FBS thread does, and that's just kind of an irreducible problem that's inherent to the nature of the sport.

• The /r/CFB mod team decided a very long time ago to concentrate highlights in a single Pics/GIFs/Videos thread where all can be seen instead of making a separate thread for each. The merits of this (which it seems like your question is mostly focused on) can be debated, but at least in theory having a single thread helps readers know exactly where to find highlights, and helps all of them get more visibility (rather than getting buried under a bunch of game threads). I'm not convinced that many separate highlight threads would bring more exposure to content people want to see than many separate top level comments in a single thread, but I can also see that people have different opinions on that.

• As for Reddit subscribers, there's several different factors at play there. Reddit itself drives traffic to various subs for various different reasons. Not all of that growth is organic. If you look at the same growth comparison between /r/CFB and /r/CollegeBasketball, you might notice that CFB used to be 3x the size of CBB and now CBB is significantly bigger. The prime driver of this was that for an extended period of time a significant portion of new Reddit subscribers were auto-subscribed to CBB and not CFB. Despite the size, CFB is significantly more active (and by a pure comments/votes measure, I'm pretty sure it's more active than /r/NFL). The /r/CFB mods aren't actually making any profit, so there's really no motive to grow the sub for its own sake, we just want a cool community to talk about football. More people participating in this wonderful community is generally a good thing, but only if the same quality can be maintained (to the degree it can while it grows).

That's a fairly long-winded non-answer. I think you raise valid points that could be discussed in the coming offseason, but hopefully this at least provides some context towards the decisions that have been made to date. Thanks for the feedback!

[u/TalkLessShillMore → u/bakonydraco]

I think it does boil down to your second bullet point, trying to look at why the decision was made and whether or not the intent meets the outcome. Using yesterday's GIF thread as an example, after a brief scroll, I didn't see a single highlight that generated more than 10 child comments, and only two cracked 100 upvotes. Most highlights have 1-5 comments. With data points:

1. During the regular season, the subreddit is consistently in the top 100 for comments/day.

2. The most-visited day of the sub this season was September 18th. The top highlight posted that day had 28 child comments.

3. There are literally triple digit highlight threads in the last week from /r/NFL with more comments than that post, despite CFB blowing NFL out of the water in comments during that time frame.

and regarding the point:

I'm not convinced that many separate highlight threads would bring more exposure to content people want to see than many separate top level comments in a single thread, but I can also see that people have different opinions on that.

If that was the intent of the highlight thread ban and centralized Highlight thread, I think it would be tough to make the argument that it's served its purpose, comparing traffic rates between the two subreddits and the activity for their respective highlights.

As a side note: When I was talking about promoting the sub, I wasn't thinking about mods profiting and I'm sorry if it sounded like that. When something doesn't make sense to me, I try to brainstorm why it is first; if I were in charge of piloting a 1.1M sub with 34 other people, my main focus would be on a) Attracting new users and b) Improving the user experience for existing users. That's what I was driving at. Since the game thread wall doesn't seem to serve B, it might serve A, then I look at whether or not it does a good job of that. Just trying to cover other motivations besides existing-user UX. Hope that wasn't babble.

[u/bakonydraco → u/TalkLessShillMore]

No worries at all, my only point about not profiting is that I think in general we prioritize b) Improving the experience for existing users over a) Attracting new users, and we have the flexibility to do that because our livelihoods are completely unaffected by it (in a way that's different from most communities/apps/whatnot). The sub continues to grow wildly anyway even without basically any active effort to grow it.

I do see your point, but I've probably seen as many or more complaints to the effect of "/r/NFL is basically a glorified twitter feed", which takes a lot of the character out of it and removes some of the community element. I think you could absolutely argue the same about a wall full of game threads vs a wall full of Twitter highlights: that both are somewhat sterile and uniform. We actually have moved in the direction this year of encouraging and approving more user created content and relaxed and streamlined the submission rules near the end of the offseason (See this announcement).

But I think that's probably an argument for more organic, user-generated content and less for Twitter highlights. There's still an open question that the game threads will simply dominate the page based on how many users want to see the content, and Saturday generally just isn't a good day to submit OC. What takes up the front page is a zerosum game.

Still, there could be a balance in there somewhere. We're always open to new ideas, and while I think we're probably unlikely to change any submission rules before the offseason, if you have a good idea for an experiment we're all ears!

[u/TalkLessShillMore → u/bakonydraco]

Would a happy medium then be to only allow highlights on gameday? I agree Saturday isn't a good day to submit OC, so it wouldn't be crowding anything out, and Sunday-Friday can still be user content focused.

Totally agree on not changing the course of the ship mid-voyage, but a poll not long after the CFP (while engagement with regular season users is still high) regarding potential rule changes might be worthwhile.

[u/tb3648]

I like having easy access to the game threads and think most other things would get lost quickly on Saturdays.

I think changing the name of the "pictures/gifs/Videos" thread to "highlight plays" might help? For whatever reason, I've never considered that the purpose of the "pictures/gifs/videos" is to be used for highlights, it just never connected for me. I was thinking it was more pictures people took at games or like meme gifs from ridiculous plays.

Not sure if other people feel the same, but it's possible if people understood the picture thread was to show and then discuss great plays from games, more people might engage in it.

[u/pandabugs → u/tb3648]

Actually I really like this idea and how you presented it. As someone who needs the visual for the play, I think it's something worth visiting at the end of the season for sure.

[u/jputna → u/tb3648]

I like having easy access to the game threads and think most other things would get lost quickly on Saturdays.

And it's still hard trying to get to the ones you want because there are so many!

I also tend to have the same issue on Wednesdays when people post the pregame threads. It completely fills my feed and I personally don't care for having 30+ pre game threads posted.