I love putting things in boxes, it’s my hobby you see, so I’d like to hear other people’s thoughts and perspectives on this.
But my point is pretty straightforward: there is an overarching aussie.zone community, and as long as the sidebars are well-connected to aid discovery (and they’re already pretty good), there’s no point in having news and politics spread across three different communities, and we just end up with redundant crossposting creating parallel conversations.
It would be great to clarify the relationship between /c/australia, /c/news and /c/australianpolitics.
I found the auspol community on the old site great. It had a real community feel and had deeper discussion of politics than news in general. There is an argument to be made that all news is political, but really, there is more of a focus on political discussion.
I don’t know if there just isn’t enough people here to support the focus, however, I don’t find the duplication or cross posting and issue. Sometimes different angles come up in different communities.
I would think news communities should be topical but the Australia community would not need to be, being open to nostalgia posts or general discussion.
Is there a specific issue you are trying to fix or is the duplication the issue?
It’s mostly the duplication, but also that it would frustrate people who don’t want to see all the politics posts. (For what it’s worth, I think politics is important and people should be informed whether they want to or not, but there are valid reasons for wanting to block politics comms for a while.)
Nothing’s really broken, but this is something that can be nipped in the bud if other users think it deserves fixing.
I think seeing posts that are relevant but don’t interest you as a user are less of a problem than a lack of content at the moment. However, best to start as we would mean to continue.
I’d be more inclined to leave it to users to up and down vote as appropriate and mark as cross posts. Some people who browse all may be unaware of some local communities. Cross posting to relevant communities allows discovery. I would think that not all political posts should be cross posted but major ones could be.
Only if it makes sense. @[email protected] has a valid point about having smaller communities until there’s enough traffic to justify dividing it up, which I personally think is less critical on aussie.zone due to how the site is set up but can be make-or-break on forums with distinct boards, where it just gets filled with 3 half-dead communities instead of 1 active, inviting community.
Agreed.