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Anybody here who remembers the old days (pre-Playoff) /r/CFB?
I'm nostalgic for the old days, figured I'd stop by and see if anybody else was here!
EDIT: As a coincidence, I joined /r/cfb at about the same number of subscribers as Tildes currently has!
Yes! /r/cfb was actually the reason I joined reddit back in 2012. I remember it being one of the best maintained & moderated subs around. Huge breath of fresh air compared to using ESPN et al to follow other teams.
It went the way so many subs do when they get big enough: low effort jokes & takes in a race to the bottom for upvotes.
Right? I miss it so much! I have the same username over there as here - lots of high effort posts and the like from a vibrant community.
Actually, I joined at the same time for the same reason! I had a girlfriend in the Spartan Marching Band, and decided to get way into college football as a result. Michigan State here, you?
Oh nice! I went to a home game for Stanford where Kodi Whitfield made an absurd catch against UCLA and wanted to find it online (https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1ot4c3/ridiculous_1handed_catch_by_kodi_whitfield_for/). Now that I found it, I realize that was 2013. But in any case, someone there linked to /r/cfb and I decided to join to soak in all the football discussion I didn't know existed.
Probably blueboybob - a LaTech fan who was the founder of /r/CFB, and a long-time mod.
Of course! Lifelong Texas Longhorn and all-sports fan here - the sports subreddits are the main reason why I'm still active on reddit even though I spent 6 years as a default mod focused on music subs.
I don't know what I'm going to do without places like /r/CFB, /r/soccer, /r/reddevils, /r/USSoccer, /r/golf, /r/NBA, /r/baseball, etc. despite them being a bit watered down compared to 10-15 years ago. The low-effort jokes are almost a guilty pleasure of mine, but maybe it's because I know where to find the in-depth discussion in each sub when I want it (e.g. next-day discussion threads for matches in /r/soccer and /r/reddevils). They've all lost a sense of community over the years as they hit critical mass though, and now you have to go to certain threads to find that feeling (like the Free Talk Friday thread on /r/soccer). Pockets of it still exist.
I've spent some time thinking about how community works in online spaces. I joined when there were <15k subs to /r/cfb, and I felt like the most active ~2% all knew each other well, all the way up to about 100k folks. (Fortunately for me, that took three years.) When we passed the Big House in population...It felt like we had more folks than I could keep track of, like my fun space with friends was slowly disappearing. (As a Spartan, I, of course, blame Michigan.) I slowly trailed off my commenting and posting...My effort decreased dramatically as the population increased. Now, it's about once every ten posts or so I see someone I recognize from way back. Usually, they were good folks, people I understood, people who contributed meaningfully to the discussion. Now, it's a lot of spam and random nonsense. Things weren't always better way back. Things were smaller, way back. And that made a feeling of community.
I was thinking about a way to make big communities feel smaller, and I think I may have found a way. The answer to keeping a community isn't limiting growth (that's just shooting yourself in the foot), but it's finding a smaller circle within a larger community. If you could have an algorithm for sorting comments that puts "neighbors" near each other and higher in the ranking, you'd make more relatable conversations, because the same few hundred folks will appear first in your comments, so you can build up your jokes. If you had a community of (eg) 1 million folks, you could show those within 1k subscriptions of you (+-500 subscriptions) first, then 10k, then 100k - that way the top (assuming 1% participate) 5, 10, and 100 users appear in the comments before all else. You'd meet your neighbros (a typo, but one that I like) and build up relationships with them first. An alternative could be to match with new users as they join, to slowly and evenly build up the numbers of people in different neighborhoods, guaranteeing fresh ideas mix in, but keeping continuity. Taken to an extreme, you could super-deprecate or even totally hide those "far away" for you, so it's harder to see them without searching for them - that way, all can participate, but you get your neighbors first.
This idea is actually inspired by Michigan State, which has a "neighborhood" system, in which different sub-communities (East, South, Red Cedar, North, and Brody) have all the necessities (convenience stores, cafeterias, health stuff, classrooms, meeting spaces, etc), but you can still access the other neighborhood facilities. You naturally will spend more time in your own neighborhood because of convenience, and get to know folks there. MSU is a big campus, but they make it feel smaller/more accessible by having the neighborhoods. I lived in South and then East, and they felt different, but still accessible (even though they were at opposite corners of the campus).
I labeled your comment Exemplary because I've never heard this solution to the critical mass problem that leads to losing a sense of community. I think this is a thread worth pulling on - wanna share it as a comment here for more discussion? I'll respond in-depth when I have time over the next day.
They have so many things to be blamed for these days, don't they?? I experienced Vince Young shred Michigan's D firsthand and love the rivalry part of CFB, but we actually met some really friendly Michiganders at the tailgate and hotel. Consoled a few others on the red eye flight back east too. The hospitality of CFB is really neat.
I've just been thinking about this issue over the last few months, so I'd have been pleasantly surprised if you had heard - it means others had the same idea as me!
Michiganders are lovely. Wolverines are less so (in my biased opinion) :P Then again, I've got Wolverine in-laws and colleagues, so they can't all be terrible...
Sure, I'll pass it along! You can find my comment here, in a slightly expanded format.
Well, I of course, blame you Spartans for no other reason than you wear green and I like blue.
I'm not sure about the exact implementation, but that sounds like a really interesting idea to a big problem! Having a fresh new site would be a cool way of testing out features like that to make a better platform. A couple thoughts: If you're not a fan of your neighborhood, would you be able to transfer or are you stuck with them? Since we're on sports, what if neighborhoods were divided by team affiliations, everyone still sees the same thread, but your own team's comments get prioritized? Of course, teams can still grow super large, but having it, so neighborhoods are based on some small similarity rather than completely arbitrary, might be something.
I'm a PhD, so my speciality is Philosophy. (Specifically in Chemistry, but hey, "Doctor of Philosophy" is applicable, right? XD)
I have no idea how to implement. The second suggestion (where it slowly grows around you, rather than having a locked in number of folks based on random subscription) perhaps could be the answer to this issue? Or perhaps, you could request to be randomly re-neighbored, putting you in a random spot around the subscription circle at least (width/2) away from your original spot? Perhaps there could be a "cooldown" period, where you can reseed twice to begin with, and then, every three months, you can re-seed up to twice again? That way, you have limited control over your ability to pick-and-choose, and thus have more incentive to work with your neighbors?
I don't think a strict "sign up for this fandom and get your circle of friends pre-built" suggestion is a good idea. To me, that seems like a tailor-made echo chamber, ala /r/T_D, and ready-built for conflict with other groups. In my mind, a mix of different perspectives is vital for good discussion, but finding the balance between the broadest possible (most diverse mix, least "neighborly") and smallest necessary (to provide a reasonable mix, but maximize "neighborliness") would be the challenge. The idea of basing neighborhoods on signing up was because it was pretty simple to implement with diverse opinions - it's basically whomever signs up next gets (or has) to be your neighbor.
I'd also suggest that, to minimize potential teamsmanship or rivalries from forming, the neighbors should be overlapping for the most part. If we have too firm of divisions between groups, it gets easy to have in/out group dynamics form, and that can lead to more conflict. In the simple signup model, you would basically have every person in common with the person right next to you, with only two people different (if we have a +-500 person window, then it'd be your -500th person would be absent from their list, and your +501th person would be present in your +1th neighbor's list, if that makes sense), so it's a smooth continuum. The first person you would have nobody in common with would be 1000 people away - everybody within +-999 would overlap with at least one nearest neighbor.
I would suggest that, until Tildes grows beyond a few hundred thousand subscribers (TOTAL, since not everybody will be active in every ~group), this is a solution in search of a problem. But, as we see the forum grow, it could get harder and harder to relate.
I'm right there with you.
r/cfb, r/soccer, and r/coys are big ones for me that I'll miss a lot because I started in each community when they were small and grew to enjoy them. Having said that, all of them have ballooned in size over the past 6ish years and the quality of content has gone down as people have turned to posting the same hot takes to get karma.
I'm on a fantasy premier league text thread with 5 of my best friends, and we're all trying to entertain each other with random content during the blackout and the rest of this month while we figure out the best sports forums post-reddit. One of them just opened up a soccer-related discord, saw someone ask what position Osimhen played, then immediately closed the app. Lol.
Yikes, there's a Spurs specific podcast that I've listened to for the past two(ish) or so years that has a discord channel that I sometimes frequent. One of the things that I've found with sports fandom is that it can turn from good natured to toxic when teams start to underperform. I've really avoided most Spurs related social media because this past year was miserable and almost all discussion around Spurs has been nothing sort of toxic.
Completely agree. I avoid /r/reddevils and my other team-specific subs after bad games. If we lose, we lose, but I don't need to spend time reading toxic/reactionary comments about it because it's just not good for the mental health. Plus I have zero control over it.
After the 7-0 against Liverpool, I went straight outside to play with my kids. I only talk about losses within my fantasy premier league group (which is 1 Chelsea fan, 4 United fans, and 1 neutral) because people are reasonable and the mood is more incredulity/self-deprecation/dark-humor rather than toxicity/anger/taking-it-personally.
I'm right there with you. I love soccer because I used to play at a pretty high level and enjoy the escapism that being a fan provides, but I have no space in my life for toxic hot takes. Like you, I've got kids and a life that doesn't revolve around fandom so I take a loss as a loss and move on. That's become a lot more difficult to find online.
Even though /r/cfb is a shell of what it used to be, it's still lightyears better than the college football forums that preceded it. Occasionally I'll visit some of the ones I used to go on in the early 2000s and they're... something else.
Oh I'm not arguing that. On the contrary, I still visit it more than daily! I still miss the intimacy of the old group, and was looking to see if any other folks are over here too :)
As an Oklahoma State Fan, 2011 made me hate the BCS since it kept us from getting into the National Championship that year. However, I am not a fan at all of the 4 team Playoff we have now because it's still a popularity contest in a sense of who the best 4 teams are.
Frankly, there's no system that will make everyone happy, but I'm a fan of an 8 Team Playoff that features the 5 Power 5 Champs, the highest ranked Group of 5 Champ, and 2 At-Larges for your Independents or 1 Loss Conference Runner-Ups. Seeding would be based on final ranking in the Polls, and It would put a lot at stake for the Conference Championship games, especially if there's a 10-2 team who's only shot to make the Playoff is to win the Conference.
I sure do.
Are we going to get flairs here ever? That would help build the community a lot I think.
From what I can tell, no, but I'm not opposed to them. I think the philosophy is that, if you don't pre-judge folks based on their affiliation, we may take more seriously and/or holistically our fellow Tildo's perspective.
sounds good.
one of the defining elements of reddit's r/cfb was "jokes" that only made sense if you saw the flair. that was something that definitely added activity to the boards. so it might be worth considering.
That's true! I don't know if we can (or should) translate everything one-to-one, but it's a consideration for sure!
I too miss the old days of CFB. I'm active on a UGA related forum, but it definitely doesn't fill the hole that r/cfb used to be. I'm glad to see there are more CFB fans on here than I thought and maybe we can start to carve out our own little space on here.
I still (well, not today-weds, or after June 30) visit several times a day, but the close-knit family is gone. Still, good discussion remains.
Yeah, and I think I remember you from those early days, too! A Spartan fan willing to act reasonably, online, to my Wolverine self was a refreshing novelty, and having /r/CFB around helped turn me from a student who'd wander down to the Big House on game days to a complete Sickos Committee member who'll watch random Wednesday night games just because It's Football, and It's On. I can't actually tell when I first commented on /r/CFB, because my comment feed doesn't go that far back, but I posted a thread about the Dave Brandon mess back in 2015, and I was posting on /r/collegehockey in 2013, so I probably would have been at least lurking /r/CFB at that point.
/r/CFB definitely a very different place than it was, though, and not for the better. Game threads, especially Michigan game threads, are a toxic dumpster fire, and the on-season discussion outside of game threads is incredibly circlejerky. For all it's gone downhill, though, it's still a better place to discuss college football than anywhere else I've tried - hopefully, as the season picks up, we'll see more CFB content posted over here!
HOLY COW I do remember you! Man, it's hard to keep track of folks now that it's so big...
I agree that /r/cfb is still wayyyyy better than any other open discussion board on college football. I won't deny, it's not what it used to be, but the mods have done their very best. I totally agree that the old-time Sickos were pretty great. I miss it :'(
Do you remember MSU-Auburn being weirdly attached to each other ("Aub-Bros")? That'll help me date how long you've been browsing.
"War Damn Sparty" is definitely something I remember hearing on a few occasions, yes!
Edit: After some digging, I found a comment I left on /r/CFB in January 2013, on a thread about the 2012 Outback Bowl (the one where Vincent Smith got sent into low-earth orbit by Jadaveon Clowney).
Heyyyy 2012 season is when I began too! I'd love it if we could have our very own little ~cfb or something here, made it all our old friends and some new ones too! /R/truecfb was pretty great for a while, too, but it died.
I'm about to celebrate my 11th cakeday tomorrow (10th). It will be my last as an over-active redditor until RIF is back...so never. Looking over the last decade of life online...makes me kinda sad.
In my mind the reason /r/truecfb failed was that it went too far the other direction and was too serious discussion focused. A place needs to be lighthearted enough to be fun but still able to sustain the depth of discussions too.
Totally agree. It's a balance!