Call for posts!

[melannen]

So as you may have noticed, this community has been more active lately - for the past five weeks, I've been making an effort to put up some kind of open discussion or recs post every day.

I am happy to keep doing this (and unless y'all start telling me it's annoying, I'm probably going to do it for at least the next five weeks, because it's nice to have discussions happening). But I am starting to kind of scrape the barrel some nights, and I wanted to make it clear that other people are very welcome, indeed actively invited, to put up discussion posts or recs calls too!

There's nothing formal about this, everyone is and always has been welcome to make any sorts of fandom-y posts here, and there's no reason we can't have more than one a day, either (though if I notice someone else has put a discussion post up I'll probably take the day off.)

We had a couple of other people posting last month and they made some really great posts, and I'd love to see more of that.

For mine, I have been doing a really lazy version of the principles I outlined in my How To Make Discussion post, but the short version is: post about a fandom-related topic that pretty much everyone will feel like they can contribute to (so: not fandom-specific, no specialist knowledge, no hard work required) and then invite them to contribute. That's about it!

If you're having trouble thinking about how to be not-fandom-specific, the simplest way is to think about something you find interesting in your fandom, and then ask other people how it applies to theirs.

Also it helps a lot to build discussion and community if you reply at least once to all the comments you get but sometimes that just seems too hard, so I haven't always managed it either.

Poll #23875

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 74

Opinion.

You should keep doing daily posts.
67 (90.5%)

You should stop.
1 (1.4%)

I am totally going to try making one soon!
33 (44.6%)

Comments

[melannen]

Yes, but that sounds like work! And pressure! :P

I have actually thought it would be cool to host a formal posting-fest on this community, with like a schedule and prompt-claiming and stuff, and if anyone would like to do the work of organizing it and sending reminders to participants and so on, go for it! :D

In the meanwhile if it helps anyone, feel free to claim a date in these comments and treat it as a deadline for yourself.

[rosefox]

covidcoffeecorner asked people to claim days and followed up with reminders, which is why I'm actually going to remember to make a post there tomorrow. :) But it is work!

[melannen]

Yeah, I ran a meta fest in that style on a different community awhile ago, and it was fun, but I found that sending the reminders was a lot of mental overhead work for the mod, and if you didn't send multiple staggered custom reminders you had a *lot* of defaults, and then there keeping the calendar straight and scheduling for missed days and the deadline pressure for the participants (and the deadline making it seem like they needed to produce something extra substantial). I didn't really want to *add* stress to people! Especially me! :P

It would totally be worth it if we were trying something more formal, where you want to make sure there's only one post a day and you don't want to risk accidental duplicate topics, or something like that, but this is really just me trying to ramp up the kind of things I wish people were randomly posting here all the time. :D