2y ago

What to do about ghost magazines that have no content?

It seems like when the big reddit migration happened, a lot of new users claimed magazine names on kbin instances that were popular on reddit in order to have ownership of them, but they seemingly have no interest in posting content to them. This has unfortunately caused lot of otherwise useful magazines to remain dormant, vacant, and unused.

Would it make sense to have these ghost magazines expire or have a system for changing ownership of them if no one uses them? It's a shame if the good names are taken and immediately abandoned, and it's not a great user experience to look for communities only to find so many empty and abandoned magazines.

I'm curious what opinions are regarding this matter. Thanks.

31 comments

then post 💀 the content wont spawn itself, and it's not necessarily up to the creator to provide 100% of the content, they just filled a niche. i mod a few mags and i have never left them empty, i post a lot, but it would help if other people would participate.
if the creators are abandoned accounts tho, that is an issue. however, making an empty mag expire makes 0 sense, recreating it doesn't guarantee it will have content if no one posts, same as the first time
- then post
  That's an option, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence when someone creates a magazine (or several) and then just leaves it empty. Why would people want to invest time and effort into building up a magazine that's under control of a name squatter? Even if they don't abandon their account, they're signalling that they probably won't put much care into moderating or selecting good moderators.
  however, making an empty mag expire makes 0 sense, recreating it doesn't guarantee it will have content if no one posts, same as the first time
  An empty magazine under control of a name squatter isn't desirable to post to, and ownership can't be transferred without admin intervention. This means there's an extra hurdle in the way of anyone who actually wants to take ownership of the magazine and put it to good use. If dead magazines are periodically culled, those names are made available again without the hassle of getting an admin (who may be very busy) to transfer them.
  
  An empty magazine under control of a name squatter isn't desirable to post to
  Who cares who the mod is? If you want to post than post. I never think about whether it is "desirable" to post somewhere.
  
  Why would people want to invest time and effort into building up a magazine that's under control of a name squatter?
  I think you (and OP) are rewriting history a little bit. People enthusiastically created many magazines in the first days of the migration so that they would already exist and people would post to them. I do not think many people (if anyone) created magazines because they wanted to own them. In fact, if you look at many of the descriptions they say things like "reddit mods contact me if you want to take this over."
  So yes, post to them.
- I feel this. I've made attempts to generate discussion by making posts, utilizing microblogging to engage with those on Mastodon, and laid down structure for a magazine and I've seen some steady growth. However, engagement is sparse. At times it feels like I'm talking to myself. There's probably things I could be doing better to foster a healthier community. That said, I understand the gripes OP has, and believe this will be remedied over time thanks to the existence of federation.
  edit: These upcoming changes might help ease your mind, @DarkGamer https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/1002621/Hi-in-this-and-probably-the-next-week-I-will
If there's no content in a magazine you like, why not simply post some content?
- Become the change you want to see in the world.
- Personally, I'm not a fan of shouting into the void. When I post something I do so with the expectation of getting some sort of engagement on it, and when it gets none, it's demotivating.
  Now, understandably, if everyone was just like me the internet would be a barren wasteland with no content. So this isn't exactly a good thing. But that's my personal reason for not just spamming half-interesting content into an empty community. I like to have some sort of community already in place to engage with.
  Though that also has to do with the fact that I'm overwhelmingly more of a commenter than a poster. But that comes with its own share of problems.
  
  Every magazine has a first post. You don't know what engagement you have until you being engaging. If it you get engagement from the community, good! If you don't get engagement, at least you tried. It's not screaming into the void until you have a wall of your own content staring back at you from the magazine.
- Yup, become the agent of engagement
Completely empty magazines could probably be automatically deleted after a month. Anything with actual posts should probably be reviewed by an actual human, and only deleted manually. Even if there's only one post, it could be a very useful post that shouldn't be deleted. Or maybe the magazine is being used as a "signpost" to direct people elsewhere, like r/traa pointing to r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns.
The process of flagging magazines for review could still be automated. Maybe each post made delays the review flag by a week, that way active magazines won't come up. Admins could also "snooze" the flag for a set amount of time, or disable it permanently for some magazines.
Magazines that are abandoned but still have useful content should be actively advertised somewhere as "available for adoption". The same goes for magazines that are reported by users as unmoderated.
I try, but there’s only so much time and I’m the only one who actually posts things in my instances.
Sometimes all it takes is one other person posting content to provide motivation to keep going.
- You're not part of the problem we're talking about here. You create and engage.
- Keep sharing contents, eventually readers and participants will come
I'm also concerned with magazines that have absentee owner/moderators.
- Yep - great example, @maxrebo is squatting on @Starwars, @LEGO, and @Marvel - but they have had no activity for over a month now, and it's quite possible they've abandoned their account.
- This really bothers me too. There are a couple of quite active magazines I'm subscribed to that have an inactive mod, no active moderation and completely empty mod logs.
  @DarkGamer is talking about things that sit empty but things that fill up with effectively no mod presence are potentially going to become another kind of problem.
Ernest is aware of this and will be working on it at some point, his comment is here.
- Awesome! I suspect Ernest is the hardest working man in open source social media right now.
  
  Definitely!
Try reaching out to the owner to see if they are active and what their intentions are. So many people came during the black outs and so many posts were floating around saying "I claimed X magazine to protect the name, if you're interested, I'll pass ownership". Do definitely worth reaching out.
Try posting content yourself and generating discussion. If it's empty but there are subscribers you can try and brute force engagement.
Make your own magazine/community and get it started. Spread awareness in all the find a new community magazines.
Spin up your own instance? Or make a new magazine on somebody else’s? Admittedly I’m a lemming so I’m not too familiar with kbins structure. But this is exactly why federation is a thing, no?
- Spin up your own instance? Or make a new magazine on somebody else’s?
  I suppose I could, but I don't really want to run my own instance right now. I'd rather add value and content to the main kbin instance in order help it get off the ground and keep growing, so I moderate a couple of magazines there. I imagine if I did spin up my own instance ghost magazines would be an issue there as well and would require manual culling.
  Admittedly I’m a lemming so I’m not too familiar with kbins structure.
  I believe magazines are equivalent to communites on lemmy, except they can have a list of associated hashtags in order to automatically include posts from mastodon-style microblog content as well.

31 comments