There are a fair number of totally empty magazines created during rexit, with no threads, yet a fair number of subscribers (because the name matches a popular sub from Reddit). I clicked on one this morning, because I saw it in random magazines side bar section. No threads. Created a month ago by a user who hasn’t posted a single thread or comment on Kbin.
This is like obvious scammers during a gold rush. Some people just wanted to reserve magazine names with no intention of doing anything helpful. Maybe they just wanted bragging rights by claiming to be a moderator. Maybe they think they can sell control of the magazine later. It doesn’t matter to me. I just think an admin should delete these sorts of magazines. Anyone who starts a magazine should at least post a few threads. Absolute ‘no effort at all’ owners contribute nothing.
I just think Kbin would seem more functional and positive if the magazines that exist actually had some content.
Edit: based on a comment below, it seems that Ernest has a tentative plan in place for this sort of situation, which is great :)
Well, I would be hesitant to post to a mag that had no effort put into it at all, but I wasn’t planning to post on the mag I came across this morning. To help out the Fediverse a bit, I’ve been commenting much more than usual since joining Kbin/the Fediverse, and recently I’ve been posting every couple of days to a community elsewhere (a smaller lemmy instance) to help it grow. I currently don’t have plans to set up or moderate any mags/communities. It seems like there are plenty in the Fediverse already, including tons where the person who set them up seeded them with a few posts to help get them started.
I’ve started 1 magazine. Mostly because as far as I knew, nothing like it existed at the time (might still be the case now that there’s none like it on other instances), but also because something I wanted to post wouldn’t fit elsewhere.
So far, my post is the only one in there, but I don’t have more posts that would fit (it’s about sharing a specific kind of experiences/memories). I didn’t go to the trouble of coming up with an icon, but I did write down a list of rules.
Would that make you consider me part of the problem?
Not at all. Your situation is completely different. I mostly think it’s problem when a mag duplicates the name of a popular subreddit, yet has no effort put into it, especially if the creator basically is not even a member of the Kbin community. Your mag ‘harmless pranks’ I think is more a case where it’s probably more suited to just being a single thread somewhere, rather than a whole magazine, given the small population of Kbin and the Fediverse overall. If I was you, I might consider deleting the mag at some point, if more people don’t post to it.
You were not trying to game the system or trying to leech off of something popular that existed earlier.