This is a fanciful impractical vision of your ideal forum that ignores how people actually post. People had a chance to post about Mario games before, they haven't been magically granted newfound focus and posters, if anything they've been given less posters due to things being more spread out.
Your entire ideal model for this scenario involves a subforum that is so slow and barren of posts that smaller threads won't be pushed off the board just because of sheer lack of post variety.
But even so, your model maybe could have worked decently if it were a Nintendo forum and not a Mario one.
I get what you're going for here but how do you decide which games get a subforum, especially long-term as popularity changes? games that don't have a subsection will still be relegated to a megathread and it's pretty easy to get drowned out with all the subsections being shown in the parent
will sections be removed if the popularity dies out, or is the idea just to have many, many individual tags, with the front page sorted by popularity, in lieu of custom forums?
I want to make it clear, I do support more subforums and the concept that Garry wants to push does work, but not as a blanket policy. It's great for hobbyists and chat threads that were squeezed into General Discussion. These types of threads can benefit greatly from more subforums, but the megathread model exists for a reason for most video games. Trying to apply it as a blanket rule is misguided at best, self-destructive at worst.
There's only so much that you can discuss about any one video game unless it has an active community that supports a wide variety of threads without any of them slowing down, the TF2 community is a good example. Not a whole lot of games have this kind of community, you can't try to apply what works for one thing doesn't make it work for another. If you really want to push subforums for video games, just throwing a dozen subforums won't solve the problem you started with. Smaller games are not going to start getting more focus just because you fragmented the games discussion community into lots of little pieces. If a game or company gets a subforum it should be something that actually needs it.
Pretty funny that you mention threads getting knocked off the forum by 20 megathreads because that's exactly what's happening to every game thread that isn't in its own subforum.
It really seems like Garry is trying to emulate Reddit with the "small threads good, big threads bad" approach, but in the wrong way. At least on Reddit, you can filter out tags, you can sort threads by new or hot, you can downvote content that isn't fit, etc.
Reddit is a model that is completely incompatible with a conventional forum and ironically serves the polar opposite of what Garry wants. Garry wants everybody to look at as many subforums and threads as possible and broaden the average user's horizons, usually by attempting brute force methods.
Reddit is designed so that everybody huddles in their own little communities where you never have to look at anything you aren't interested if you don't want, and you won't really find new communities without seeking out something specific in mind.
I'm not totally happy with the games forum is set up now but I'm also willing to wait and see if I'm totally wrong about it.
I liked how I clicked the general games forum and it was 99% just other threads for other sub-forums with the occasional sprinkling of threads that are actually there. Imagine thinking that this was a good implementation of an idea that wasn't actually that bad on paper.
I thought that all of the threads linking to other forums was just a side-effect of the migration, not an intended design model until people mentioned it here. It's ridiculously awful and bafflingly short-sighted, I don't know what Garry is thinking with it.
This would probably work for the best. I love the idea of subforums returning, but having a unique one for every game feels excessive. It's not like Reddit where you have thousands of users talking about a single game.
That's why I don't see anything wrong with megathreads. They work well for smaller communities and don't clog up the forums.
At this point, they aren't even subforums, they just feel like a tag filtering system
Pretty much they way it should be looked at, we need to change our views of the traditional fourm system cause it's more then that now.
All we are missing is an "Other" tag/section/category/subfourm @garry
Why not just implement a post limit or 40 or so so you can stop all the megathreads in their tracks?
It also just kinda feels like there's zero idea as to what would actually garner a community or really be that active as a subforum
Like... Far Cry having a subforum because Far Cry 5 just came out, despite the fact that a megathread would suffice
And............... a Mario™ subforum.......... for some reason
because then chat threads will be eternally banished and facepunch will lose a lot of users over it
the subforum thing works for things like chat threads I suppose, but others like the games sub look like an absolute clusterfuck, kinda puts me away from even checking it, I guess it's a nifty idea but current implementation isn't very good, that's my grain of salt on it
This whole thing seems like how youtube doesn't want you to watch just a few subscriptions. TF2 general chat is getting the ax, how many more? The Fallout thread is pretty active, will that be a new subforum?
Seems like communication beforehand would have reduced the pain as always.
Communication is futile, nothing would get changed because people hate change and won't give things a try first
Quit trying to be reddit. You will never be reddit. You will only fuck things up by trying to be reddit. Reddit can barely even make it work and it is "The front page of the internet" as it likes to call itself.
I swear everytime i revist the new forum it gets more counterintuitive for absolutely no reason
General chats encourage more activity, some possibly lower quality posts, yes, but folks won't bother making threads for every small thing. And having tons of threads instead of GCs is a bit clumsy and bad for folks with bad internet or slow PCs.
I don't know what you have against megathreads, but the new set-up makes the games section look like a hot mess.
My horizons were plenty broadened and I checked tons of megathreads for games I didn't even have, just to check the news and banter. Now there's tons of irrelevant threads and tags everywhere making the entire section incredibly noisy to look at and hard to browse easily, effectively CONSTRICTING my horizons, not broadening them.
I feel like megathreads are the only possible way to keep a large forum organized without it turning into reddit or gamefaqs. If you have 20 subforums replacing megathreads each with separate threads, you end up seeing more than just 20 megathreads on the main page. The current system is what's kept me coming back here for so long, it's the right balance of megathreads and forum sections.
I think garry's trying to keep FP from turning into Something Awful, where each section is dominated by megathreads. I just don't see how you can possibly "fix" that without getting gamefaqs-tier discussions.
Like, right away the games forum has way too many threads and discussions that are separated among meaningless smaller threads.
one look at GGD right now will remind you why megathreads were invented
Xpost from TF2 general chat:
Closing general chats and throwing everything into GGC will make it really hard to browse GCC, to broaden your horizons and look at new things, the goal of this change.
no constructive criticism allowed on facepunch.com
Garry und Hezzy uber alles
With thr outspoken love of megathreads from the community its just baffling that we'd get rid of them for some reason?
Like, why the fuck does Fortnite or Overwatch need multiple threads? It's not like they're """"Subforums"""", they're just tags taking up the page, and it's not like there's thousands of posts on shit a day????
as of right now, there are two threads in general discussion that aren't from a subforum
why even have GD and GGD anymore if its gonna be entirely drowned out by a million tiny, endlessly specific threads?
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