A recap of my thought process: In the new year we're going to try a few initiatives to help figure out ways to improve the process of users discovering community threads so that there's more new blood. There are still a lot of underutilized community threads. The Steam thread is one of the largest so here it's not a lack of users, but still it'd be nice to have more people filtering in. We're going to try things like encouraging cross-promotion of threads (i.e. if there's an OT for a PC exclusive, for it to link to the Steam thread or whatever), things like temporarily moving community threads back for a "spotlight" tour in the main forums, and I suspect our next batch of moderators will include recruitment from some of the community threads that we currently don't have coverage in. This might ultimately involve not locking this thread when Steam related events are going on going forward. I think for the holiday season this year the thread will be locked, but I'll see about unlocking it a few days early to encourage the cross-pollination more. Or if the sale runs until January 3, having the January thread go up on Jan 1 and begin encouraging people to filter over.
One of the great things about GAF is not having thousands of categories dividing discussion, and one of the terrible things about GAF is that when you don't have categories to divide discussion, people's discoverability options and the ability to find a niche are negatively impacted. Moreover, there are no other venues of this size on the internet that have this problem, so there's no examples we can meaningfully copy from. We spend a lot of time thinking about growing pains issues.
If Steam sale threads ultimately end up not serving any separate purpose or audience, then there will probably be less ado about sale threads going forward and we'll probably keep this open and just not have a sale thread or just have an ad hoc "hey guys there's a steam sale" thread with none of the effort or info that goes into the ones we've done historically. If there's some kind of metagame, then it might be appropriate to have a thread for the metagame like we did this summer. I do still think there's value in our standard suite of sale threads--hidden gem recommendations are one I like a lot. This is something we're still working out. We can't react to what Valve is doing if we don't know what Valve is doing.
The main reasons for locking the threads,
as we have always done, is a) to avoid diluting the conversation by having two separate places for it, and b) to avoid the segregation of keeping out the riff-raff, because we want to encourage rather than discourage new users.
But it's also not a big deal. Right, you all have each other on Steam, you can start an IRC room, you can take part in the sale thread. There's lots of spaces to have conversations in the mean time. I'm reading all the feedback that doesn't seem to be just teeth-gnashing.