Hey folks (if folks there be)! I’m one of the new mods for this small community. I’m not by nature a huge poster of content (too many interactions with STRIVES, too many briefings on CUI/ITAR/Limited Rights 🤐)… but I feel like y’all are even tighter-lipped than me.
So. I’m going to throw this post out, looking for signs of life. Interested to know whether there’s a niche this community could be filling, interested to know whether the content creators have migrated back to Reddit. Interested to know if there’s a feature or element of the site that is hindering participation.
If this goes unanswered, I’m probably going to propose to have the community eliminated (is that even a thing?) or taken private and held in trust for the next group that want to have a go. A dusty, inactive channel is a bad look when the agency and the world of space in general is so vibrant.
Thoughts?
Yeah.
Regardless, small niche spaces do have their utility. Genuine experts generally don’t like hanging out with all the pleb fans, it’s just too much of a pain in the butt. Just go take a look back at r/space and look at some of the answers people come up with.
Orbital mechanics is just not an intuitive thing. Yet people think they “get it” without having to put the effort in. When there’s millions of them, it becomes overwhelming.
Here though, an expert can hang out, see one post a month, and actually engage if they want. I’d thus expect more actual NASA employees and experts to be found here than in a larger community. Because normal people are annoying.
It’s quite eye opening once you become experienced/ trained in something and listen to people talk about it on Reddit. There’s so many people that think they know what they’re talking about and are quite confident while being completely incorrect. I see it with things I’m familiar with, what about topics where I’m not experienced? It really makes you stop and think.
I’m all for a smaller community that has actual experts chiming in without the layer of edge lords that waste all their time on Reddit.
Yeah. It’s a fairly well-known thing that the larger an internet community gets, the more diluted it gets. There’s exceptions, like r/askhistorians was, but they’re rare, and often rely on something like utterly draconian moderation practices to even remain functional at a high level of quality.
The easiest way to find the best communities is to look for the small ones though. Places like this.
It wouldn’t always necessarily be this way either. If the sub exploded and acquired millions of users, the tone of the place would progress through several evolutions.