I'd be interested to read it. You should post.
I guess it's no use just sitting there on a phone, especially now that it won't disrupt current discussion. Copy+pasted so there might be some stuff that's phrased wrong:
My (late) feelings, taking into consideration I've always leaned a bit pro-Community, and this is definitely not exhaustive as people like kirblar, Cosmo and Anne have made their points the most succinctly:
Pros of Community:
- Weeklies are kind of dead. At least for now until SFV comes out and rebounds some. NLBC will find its new home/stream, and Watson is seemingly on his way to solid footing, but if the SFV netcode is good we might just see a switch into the type of communities eSports games have focused on streamers as opposed to venues, and hopefully pressure remaining devs into implementing good netcode. Around the time The Break and Cross Counter Live began to fizzle and OBS tapped out temporarily, discussion became slightly more fluid and Community-like.
- I've gone into more detail/ranted about it before but as FGW grew the usefulness of the actual weekly elements of the thread plummeted. More users means less people reading OP. The weeklies were 98% streams maybe one person watched each and wanted in OP for representation purposes; and this is taking into consideration that we tried not to include every stream under the sun and be selective.
- Malice's event calendar is the best in the business and effectively puts the weekly event portions out of the business. Can't pimp this enough, it's fantastic.
- Ease of use for regular members. One sub, one thread, less searching by the virtue of one thread as opposed to many.
- Less drive by shit posts, but TBH this hasn't been a problem for FGW in a long time. People who feel a certain type of way just make Gaming threads to get what they need to say.
Cons of Community:
- Insularity problem is very real. Community forum encourages tighter discussions that promotes insularity and insularity then can lead to community death when people start going really off the rails and you face the fate half of the sports threads on GAF do. And if we go off topic already then isn't this even more problematic in Community which is easily the biggest enabler for that sort of thing (word to Halo threads)? Being in Gaming helps people self-police and these threads are a hallmark example of that. Regardless, I don't feel the off-topic point is a real thing considering how in depth conversation gets otherwise. Some relief is to be expected in threads with some of the most nuanced discussion I've seen on GAF.
- It might be hard for mods to see if they haven't kept up, but FGW exists in that odd place where we have members that go in and out over the years because it's in Gaming. They check the threads to see what's new the way you check Gaming threads for what's new, not like Gaming Community threads which are much more static in comparison. WesternHeretic immediately comes to mind as that sort of poster who's very much part of the FGW family but wades in and out for the news alongside other gaming news in Gaming. Say goodbye to those people (or perhaps, longer goodbyes), who aren't necessarily drive by or shitposters either. News aggregation is definitely the strongest point for Gaming, and IMO the biggest point of contention on both sides of the argument as to how much this matters.
- Exposure. Not sure if this is a con but I'm pretty sure it is. I mean, that is why Community threads got a grace period in Gaming before they got shipped off, right? Really does sound like a privileged position saying x community is doing fine in Community when that's not the case for all communities that get moved. If you haven't been a part of a community that pretty much dropped off a cliff after it moved to Community, only to see people posting in Gaming/OT actively about the topic wondering why there isn't a focused place to talk about it (and even after you link them nothing changes because their browsing habits are better served via the general forum), then you don't understand where the stigma stems from instead of being some sort of defense mechanism contrived by people who can't do an extra click a day. And you can't cite those threads because they're dead and you can just write it off as the users losing interest without needing to consider other factors. Historically I feel the mods have felt this problem isn't in the design of the site and blamed the users for the faults of this system and I don't think that will change anytime soon because it serves the best interests of the largest communities. Mid-size and smaller? RIP. And I think FGW might sit on that line, or find its way down there.
- We lose Spotlights, which are seemingly the best and most popular original content out of our community. IMO any other way you implement them won't be as accessible as being in the OPs of every new thread.
General notes:
- Weekly format in community makes no sense because nobody browses Community for news. If this is our graveyard, it should be in standard 200 page OTs. Switching it to monthlies makes no sense if the time interval is irrelevant and mods have done that with this switch.
- Pretty much every time we've polled the community over the years it's been far more pro-Gaming than pro-Community. I don't know how much this counts but I think ignoring the concerns people have raised and the fact that many of them only check it because they check Gaming is phase one of both death by insularity and death by alienation. Mods being unreceptive to the community's nature is more problematic to me than the actual location of the thread
tl;dr: This move is seemingly more in favour of keeping this community in line with others and not valuing the attention paid to current events which these threads were founded upon. I'm kind of with notworksafe with the notion that this is all falling on deaf ears because weighing these pros and cons with the community should have preceded the actual move, not afterwards, and that's kind of a crummy position to put the non-authoritative party in. Here's your new home, now you have the
opportunity to tell us we're wrong. Hard not for that to rub the wrong way, especially considering the history of discussions about Community here.
Maybe it's hard for mods to see the context or it's hard for us to see where the Gaming/Community line is drawn exactly, but the series of events is kind of strange, and Bish's replies didn't exactly inspire confidence or general acknowledgement of a lot of the big complaints/cons of community. FGC-GAF is definitely in this weird place where it's a weird blend of both Gaming and Community, and I definitely feel it has to be given special accommodation or attention because of its nature, but you can argue we have been getting that all these years up until now.
