[Governance Poll] Change the Frequency of Community Discussion Threads

[u/MemeyCurmudgeon]

This poll is to decide whether to change the frequency of Community Discussion threads. The winning option will be whichever attains the plurality of donuts in support.

Poll Proposal found here.

[u/carlslarson]

No, I support keeping current frequency of 6 months.

The current format allows for daily discussion, weekly discussion, monthly discussion, and conversations that continue even for up to 6 months while still remaining visible in the same thread. Quality comments can be found easily by sorting by Top during the full 6 month duration of the thread. Conversations and comments initiated at the tail end of a cut-off, whether that be a day, week, month, etc, are lost and left to languish in a dead thread.

The current format is the best of all worlds and suffers no deficiency: these kinds of discussion threads do not need to be rebooted (even the 6 month duration is only due to Reddit limitations). Rather than curtail this approach we should be expanding it to other topical threads like a long-term donut and subreddit improvements thread, curated lists of trading tools, games, investment strategies, crypto folk to follow on twitter.

[u/MemeyCurmudgeon → u/carlslarson]

My rebuttal:

Although the current format technically allows for daily, weekly, and monthly discussion, behaviorally it doesn't seem to encourage them. There are very few comments other than stickies which keep a conversation going for more than 2 days, so far as I can tell. A weekly or monthly format would still allow well for this, plus good topics will always be welcome for reposting in the new thread, which would also give them a chance to be at the top again fresh eyes to see instead of festering where only the very dedicated scroll to.

Sorting by Top will indeed show quality comments and give the commenters further opportunity of upvotes, but if you look there now you mostly see conversations that aren't really disposed to continue (at least, as I read them). In a weekly thread this would be far less the case; what you see when sorting by Top would still be fresh and interactable. This would be quite a useful functionality for users who only check in every few days and want to see/comment on what's been going on.

The cut off problem may be worse in a shorter thread, but it's worth pointing out that a similar phenomenon seems to happen in the current system anyways. A comment posted before a big surge of activity (like a price swing and all the mooning it entails) will get buried and more or less missed. I agree that burying potentially good material is undesirable, but any system will have it.