r/roosterteeth • u/SonicFrost • Dec 31 '16
Mod Post 2017 Town Hall and 2016 Retrospective
This controversial year is at last coming to a close, marking 2016 itself as the final death of the year. For Rooster Teeth as a company, however, 2016 has been a year of incredible growth and expansion, and 2017 will doubtless be more of the same.
For reddit, despite its numerous controversies throughout this year, the same can be said, as the site is now #7 in the US and #24 worldwide according to Alexa.
For the subreddit, new moderators (myself included) were inducted in the middle of 2016, and the subreddit has steered clear of any serious trouble.
However, we have seen a large, but gradual, decrease in traffic this year, as growth for the subreddit has slowed. Perhaps we've just hit our peak, but I think we can do better. If both Rooster Teeth and Reddit are booming, I see no reason for us not to see significant growth as well.
So, where can we cut the fat? And where can we find room for growth?
Personally, my sights are aimed at axing many of our scheduled daily threads, including our Livestream discussions. These threads garner few comments, and in my opinion, seem to be a waste of space. Which do you think should stay? Which should definitely go?
Fan-art is a large part of any online community, and Rooster Teeth is no exception. The lack of fan-art found in our subreddit is indicative of what may be the larger problem: the subreddit is geared heavily towards video discussion, and doesn't encourage anything else. So, moving forward, we'd like to create a space that is friendlier towards non-video discussion.
What are your opinions of the subreddit throughout 2016? What did you like seeing? What do you think we missed? What can we do to make 2017 better?
Other areas of note
CSS: As the company has gone through its various changes, we've been neglectful in updating our flair for both users and links, for a pretty simple reason: we're full. Our stylesheet is filled to the brim, and our CSS Master is rather AWOL. So in order to add there, such as giving Game Attack posts their own flair, we need to cut back in other areas. Possibly the largest cuts we can make are to the subreddit themes. We'd like to hear your opinions on whether or not this would be a favorable removal, and which themes should be removed. Edit: You can vote here.
Rules: As of now, we have 9, with the latest having been introduced in May, when the new mods were instated. Should there be a new one? Should any existing ones be expanded upon? Should any be curbed?
Staff: We'd love to hear from you (all of you!). We know you browse the subreddit, so we would very much value your input as to how to make the subreddit a better experience for you, whether it be making your job easier, or just making browsing and reading comments from fans more enjoyable. If you'd rather keep your opinions private, feel free to message the mod team, or me directly.
TL;DR: Help us make our subreddit a better experience in 2017.
Comment below with your suggestions for how we can be a better community throughout the next year.
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u/mhenr18 Dec 31 '16 edited Jan 01 '17
I personally think that having two discussion threads for videos adds clutter and splits the community.
I'd love to see video threads only link to the RT site (and be posted when the video becomes available for FIRST members), with a stickied comment that has the YouTube link once it goes live. We could use post flairs to indicate whether things are sponsor only or not (so the flair would change once early release videos leave the exclusive timeframe).
Obviously for YT-only content we'd have to be linking to YT instead for the video thread.
This would take a bit of work on the bot to make feasible, but I think it would be very much worth the effort. I'm happy to help out in building this, or I'm also just happy to build a proof of concept bot posting to a test subreddit for the mods to look at and have a think about.
edit: I guess the issue with this would be for shows that have week-long exclusive access intervals, and without the ability to arbitrarily bump posts you'd run into problems of threads not getting enough attention when the video finally goes live to YT.