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What to do about ghost magazines that have no content? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It seems like when the big reddit migration happened, a lot of new users claimed magazine names on kbin instances that were popular on reddit in order to have ownership of them, but they seemingly have no interest in posting content to them. This has unfortunately caused lot of otherwise useful magazines to remain dormant, vacant, and unused.

Would it make sense to have these ghost magazines expire or have a system for changing ownership of them if no one uses them? It's a shame if the good names are taken and immediately abandoned, and it's not a great user experience to look for communities only to find so many empty and abandoned magazines.

I'm curious what opinions are regarding this matter. Thanks.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Magazines for niche topics don't generally become self-sustaining through organic participation alone. A magazine needs users to add content to it, but it also needs content to attract users in the first place. Overcoming this chicken-and-egg problem usually requires at least one person to deliberately and regularly post interesting material, even if they wouldn't otherwise "want" to post.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Anybody can do that. Doesn't have to be a mod.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The person contributing the content needs to have some kind of confidence that their effort is going to be worthwhile.

On an empty magazine, not only do they have to start from scratch with no help, but there's also a nontrivial risk that the owner is going to end up being a tyrannical powermod (if they've claimed lots of names), or just abandon the magazine and let trolls and spammers have free reign. Given those risks, it makes more sense for a potential contributor to just create their own magazine under an alternate (though possibly less ideal) name, or just put their effort into some other topic entirely.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The person contributing the content needs to have some kind of confidence that their effort is going to be worthwhile

I really don't. I just post what I want without thinking about anything being "worthwhile" or needing "confidence".