Its rhe only thing I wish could change about my experience using Lemmy, for more active users in the communities like NFL or NHL and the affiliated team pages of those sports. I haven’t had any social media in decades, my main source for sporting news breaks up until 1-2 years ago was Reddit.
I love the small community that makes up Lemmy. As someone just posted, it feels like a small town community. I like the absence of corporate shills and ads and bots.
Back when I switched from Reddit to Lemmmy, I made an effort to upvote and comment on the NFL and Buffalo Bills communities. I eventually gave up because it was like months of posting, voting and commenting but when I would go back to check the communities, everything would still be sitting at like 2 up votes and 0 comment replies or if it was my own post, 1 upvote and 0 comments. For a majority of cases. Every once in a blue moon I would come accross a post where another user voted or commented but it was never more than me and one other user.
I know there is a certain demographic that uses Lemmy that is mostly driven by the required IT prowess needed to set up, use and even understand the federated concept. I also recognize that this demographic is traditionally disinterested in sports. Im not complaining about this or the users who are on Lemmy. Im also not wishing for any changes be made to aggressively expand Lemmy’s user base. Its just an impractical wish I have so I could get my sports news from the same source I get all my other news.
I will prolly spend more time this coming year settling on a 2ndary source for sports news from sources similar to sleeper app but it would be so nice if the Lemmy sporting communities blew up so I could keep everything aggregated to one source.
You know, Lemmy is powered by the users. The sports community will never grow if no one is here to grow it. Most people that jumped ship to build and grow Lemmy are techies, and likely not interested in sports all that much.
You just planted the seed, will you also be a watering can?
We are in at the ground level of Lemmy. A lot of people like OP are passive consumers, but now is the time to step up, get out of your comfort zone and start building the communities you want to see. You might have to hustle a little bit
If you do start up a community you can link it like this:
Here’s a totally random community about strength and hypertrophy training for example
Nah, I’m just gonna do what I’m doing. Commenting on stuff I like or am interested in and that’s it. I’m way too anti-social to do something like building a community.
you dont have to be social or even reply to commenters lol
Thanks for that link! I was almost gonna start one myself. Gonna try that one instead, at least for a while.
We are in at the ground level of Lemmy. A lot of people like OP are passive consumers
For real? Im replying to almost every comment I get a notification, I made this post, I’ve commented on NFL posts among other comments in non-sports comms. How you guna just blindly call me a passive consumer lol? Not hating just couldn’t believe you coulld draw that conclusion while I felt I was borderline spamming the thread with replies hahah 🍻cheers tho, to your commitment to motivating any and all users to be more active.🍻
Gotta give props to active participation, upvotes, comments are helping too, you’re right. I was just focussed on community building, it might not be as fun but it’s important also
A lot of people like OP are passive consumers
Passive consumers make up the largest number; the base of the pyramid. But you seem to be implying that there’s nothing between that and the tip of the pyramid, who create their own communities and post their own content into them.
OP seems to be a user in the middle. Happy to contribute to ongoing conversations by commenting, replying, and voting, but not as comfortable starting conversations. Which, to be honest, is also where I’m at with sport threads. I used to love popping in to a live game discussion megathread to comment on a particularly outrageous call, or to see the community’s response to something controversial. But it’s not a subject area I’m invested in enough to start the community myself, or to make enough comments to help start a lively-looking megathread.
This is so dismissive.
I spent a full year posting to !leagueoflegends@lemmy.world and interaction there is still minimal to dead.
It’s not really the starting of communities that needs help. We need more people to be the second and third person to join and help communities that someone else is trying to start.
I didn’t claim it would be easy or even a guaranteed success
This 100%, it’s even harder when someone puts a posting bot in a sub and expects people to show up. The best communities started by someone creating a sub and posting things they found interesting. Treating it like a personal link archive. Then people would add to the discussion after finding you. If you are posting for a few weeks and then just gives up. It just makes the problem worse. Since now people have to sift through a bunch of dead communities on multiple instances all named the same.
It has to be built organically it’s like people with video channels on YouTube or peer tube. Making your first video and if it doesn’t do well they quit. Most successful creators made tons of videos before they took off. They kept at it because they were making the videos for themselves for just the sake of self expression as their first priority and the views will come.
This is kind of a problem in the NFL Community actually. There’s one user, I don’t know if it’s a bot or not, who just shotguns like 10 to 15 post at a time. It washes out any discussion in the entire community.
Yep people like that that use bots or worse AI to auto post think they are helping but are just bring the dead internet theory to reality.
I’ve noticed a couple of users doing this in the Music community recently, as well.
If it’s a bot, fuck the owner. If it’s a real person, chill the fuck out dude. Don’t bust a nut so quickly, it’ll be more fun that way I swear.
That pattern is 100% bots getting the posts from an RSS feed and it’s set to only refresh every x hours.
When it does and it has 15 new stories, it rapidly posts 15 times.
When those clog up my all feed, instant block. So it’s really having the opposite effect that the bot owner intends.
The shitty thing is that half the time they’re not even marked as bot accounts.
Well yeah I understand why bots are used for posting to communities, but at the same time it does have this effect of making people tip-toe around and hesitant to post themselves
You just planted the seed, will you also be a watering can?
Im not implying there is a lack of content just a lack of active users to fuel discussions. I leave a comment on every NFL post that I have some input or opinion on. Like I said to another comment in this thread there seems to either be a bot or a dedicated mod who is periodically supplying content in batches of posts. So maybe once a week or so (maybe once a month in the off seadon) the same user name will make a bunch of posts for all the news for that week.
Dude make an NHL community and I’m in
Lol there already is one. Just search NFL.
They said NHL lol
Hahahaha I totally meant to say NHL but I might be wrong now that I think about, it might be called hockey. Ill have to double check and will edit my NFL comment to include a link to the hockey sub.
Reddit was relatively niche, Lemmy even more so. Who the fuck do you think is gonna be here!?
Not sure if agreeing with me, but yea that’s pretty much what I was getting at.
Reddit was niche, but I don’t think so anymore. Fidelity bank, Logitech, Microsoft, and many many more have official accounts and support subs on there, and have for many years.
Yeah, that’s fair. I think Lemmy will continue to remain niche for the foreseeable future…
Considering Mastodon has been around for a while, but people still flocked to another corporate-structured platform after Twitter, yea. It probably will never not be niche.
Did you see that ludicrous display last night?
What was Wenger thinking, sending Walcott on that early?
(The original site, vectorbelly, is not loading for me, but fortunately I found this backup)
We tried our best but we couldn’t stop them and they outplayed us now we’re looking forward to next week and we’re not going to focus on this loss our defense just needs to make more stops and our offense needs to put more points on the board we’ve got such a great group of guys and this loss is going to make us work harder and we’ll see if we can’t get a win next week
We just gotta go out there and give it 10000000000% guys!
I did not. What’d I miss?
These are all nerds who don’t follow sportball most likely. They are quoting the TV show “The IT Crowd” where the main characters pretend to know about sports.
Every time someone talks sport I think of this.
It does feel like a small town. Most small towns don’t have pro sports teams, though.
Oh shit this reminds me of a discussion I had on here a while ago when I found out there are only 40,000 daily active users on average and realizing that it was less than half of th capacity of highmark stadium. So yeah, Lemmy does have that small town vibe but its more of a small geographic community like, for example, New England or Western New York. I can go to any Bills game with 80,000 other fans and I can take a piss or grab a beer without running into someone I know. Its exactly the same with Lemmy too.
!superbowl@lemmy.world is very active
When are the owls gonna play sportsball?
Hoot hoot, hike!
Hmmmmmm is it tho, WHO would be active there and WHO would only wanna talk about one game once a year? Lol im just assuming its a community dedicated to owls.
It’s pretty active with Superb Owls, just like you’d expect!
What’s this one-time sports game you’re talkin’ about?
deleted by creator
Lemmy is full of a bunch of older neckbeards, based on my observations. (Inclusive of me)
This is just one narrow view on things, tho.
And all I want is to never see sports related communities. So I guess I win there…
Unfortunately I also never want to see anything that mentions anime or manga and in that department it’s serious whackamole for me.
So learn how to fuckin filter and subscribe to take control of your feed and go piss and moan in those threads.
I can and I do. Its easy enough to block simple angry fuckers like you one at a time. Thanks for volunteering to sit down and shut up in my feed.
As an outsider looking in with only this thread for context. I feel like you’re gazing into the mirror a bit there and also need to chill.
Whatever you say man :).
I don’t do “turn the other cheek” on the internet, but you can if you like. I prefer to deliver a pique and block; it doesn’t raise my blood pressure any, but hopefully there’s a lingering rankle for anyone who doesn’t have anything nice to say and can’t keep their emotions in check. A little sprinkle of sand in the old underoos if you will.
I’m just saying that in this thread you seem to be the “angry fucker” you describe, rather than the other way around.
If you say so.
👍🏿
Dude. Sports is literally everywhere. It doesn’t need to reach its greedy tendrils into yet another corner of society.
Yeah, I try to engage on the sports posts because there isn’t much going on in these comms. But I’m hopeful we can get some growth eventually
Maybe making a sports related instance could help with making it more attractive to the fans. Or ask your favorite sports team to create an instance
forum.sparta.czor something and it’s a lemmy instance.There’s fanaticus.social already; it’s just not heavily used because nerds generally aren’t huge sports fans.
The Lemmy user base tilts alternative (queer, neurodiverse, subculturally niche, politically leftist beyond the mainstream centre-left and such), whereas sports fandom is coded aggressively mainstream, as part of what it means to pass the normality tests, so there’d be fewer sports fans than in a randomly chosen population. Maybe if there’s an influx of normies here, the sports forums will fill out.
That’s just ignorant. There are plenty of people in those demographics you listed who are very active fantasy football and fantasy sports in general fans.
Hey if you want to join me on !fantasyfootball@lemmy.world this season. The few of us that contribute would love it.
Fuck yeah!
You’re the only ignoramus here.
Watching idiots bash their heads against each other or chase after a ball is what a dog would do.
You realize that athletes are exceptionally intelligent in different ways than people pecking at a keyboard all day, right?
Athletes are not dumb. Take a look at a football playbook. You going to remember all of that, be able to recall it, and then also know all the audible changes to a play that you have to make? Are you able to make split second decisions for 60 minutes while wearing knives on your feet like a hockey player? Do you have the hand eye coordination to hit a 94 mile per hour fast ball, but know that the pitcher you’re facing also has a 35% chance to throw an 82 mph sinker?
Acting like you have one kind of intelligence and shitting on people who have different kinds of intelligence just makes you look like you’re jealous.
Take a look at a football playbook. You going to remember all of that, be able to recall it, and then also know all the audible changes to a play that you have to make?
Bet you every penny you ever made that I could do it in one quarter of the time that most of the pros do it. There’s a reason they have the training season.
Lmao. Sure thing bud.
Jesus christ, im sorry that I brought up fucking sports. I had no idea it would piss so many people off. Its not like I did it in a tech focused community. I have befriended other sports fans from all walks of life, so to say “x,y,z people dont like sports” to me is ignorant as fuck. Sorry I triggered you and I promise I will never make another comment or post regarding anything sports related ever again.
Thankfully our !nba@lemmy.world community is semi-active. Obviously not as much as r/nba, but we do have active mods and game day threads.
I like to pretend that all the Lemmy communities have a unique participants but in really it is just the same people on the same few communities.
I also feel like we need some Lemmy specific lingo. Reddit has subs I wonder what Lemmy has. Communities is just to long to type out.
People refer to them as coms or comms.
Commies! Oh, wait.
Lemmy moment
Theres lots of those here.
what about subs? lemmy subs
The Philadelphia ones identify as hoagies.
I’m actually down to call them that
There’s a comm on lemmynsfw, if you’re interested in subs.
Did y’all think I meant the sexy kind of subs?
Intentional misunderstanding for comedic purposes. “Sub” doesn’t have meaning on Lemmy, any more than it would on an old school phpBB forum. It’s a reddit naming convention.
Ah, i see
Does anyone else feel like these national leagues have become just as disconnected from reality as any other hyper capitalist enterprise?
I want more hometown sports. I daydream about leagues funded by local communities, starring local talent, with smaller local crowds. Is there anyone else out there who would give much more of a shit if things were a little more close to home, reality-wise? Am I alone?
Guys getting paid literally hundreds of millions to play a sport is unrelatable. A local star making $300k and being a part of the community feels better to me. Seems like we should be able to afford a lot of those for the money we are spending.
I know next to nothing about sports or the business around them, but I know I remember summer nights with cheap hotdogs and minor league ball that seem to have evaporated as the wealthy accumulated. 🤷♂️
There are still lots of minor leagues and they still serve cheap hotdogs tbh
That’s just a byproduct of how popular and in demand sports are for people to consume.
And here’s the kicker. For their worth, athletes are still underpaid for what they bring in the owners.
For their worth, athletes are still underpaid for what they bring in the owners
But that’s by definition true of any employee under capitalism, isn’t it?
Or are you saying that the percentage of the value they bring their owners that they see in pay is significantly lower than it is for other types of workers?
It’s significantly lower than other types of workers.
There are less than 1700 players in the NFL for all the teams. The NFLs revenue for last year was 24 billion dollars.
Total salaries for the NFL is like 5.x billion dollars, and in addition to that, the players are the sole revenue generating force in the league.
So yeah, even at their insane salaries they’re still underpaid!
the players are the sole revenue generating force
Is any of the broadcast stuff done by them, or is 100% of that done by other companies?
Refs are absolutely essential to a sporting league. As are coaches. Other positions are certainly important, but I think those I’ve named are essential enough to the direct revenue generation to merit a mention
Total salaries for the NFL is like 5.x billion dollars
Total total salaries, or total player salaries? Because if it’s the former, that can only make your claim stronger. If it’s the latter, well, it’s hard to say. One would have to figure out roughly how much they make to see the NFL’s overall salary costs and compare it to other businesses.
That said, the stats you’ve given mean about 20% of revenue goes to salary. This random website which happens to be the first to come up when I search for “what percentage of business’s revenue are spent on salary” suggests 20% is pretty much par for the course. That would seem to imply that footballers in the NFL are being ripped off roughly equal to the average worker, depending on the factors in the previous paragraph.
Are people going to watch the refs? They sure as hell aren’t getting paid the big bucks, most of them do it part time.
Coaches make money, but again, it’s a fraction of total revenue.
I find it funny you’re literally attacking ‘the workers’ in this case, just because it’s athletes and not traditional workers.
I find it funny you’re literally attacking ‘the workers’ in this case
I find it funny that you can take my attempt to engage in good-faith conversation and twist it in such a lazy and poorly-informed way.
And by “funny”, I mean disappointing. Be better.
Yeah; I’ve had that thought a lot the last few years. Especially where the team is based around people from the area so your team are actually representative of who you’re cheering for.
I’m not remotely social enough to make the connections to start anything like that, though.
The western new york community is just a large scale hometown community. Prolly where Buffalo got the name city of neighbors. I get what you are saying but I dont watch many national sports coverage media, im just looking for a source for news breaks from people like Rappaport, amd Schefter. As for publications i generally stick to The Athletic and our local WGR550. Im definitely not interested in watching any of the ESPN shows for the same reasons I bathing you outlined.
I want more hometown sports. I daydream about leagues funded by local communities, starring local talent, with smaller local crowds.
With pros, it’s just whichever fucker can get paid enough to bring them here. I don’t give a shit about their playing. I only watch because it’s someone I know, so I can go congratulate them later. Otherwise, I’d much rather be playing the damn game. The highest I’ll go is high school level sports. Those kids are still a part of my community. I know their parents, I probably know them.
Maybe, maaaaaybe, I’d watch other local adults play, but only if they’re my friends. It would be much better to just have more participation in adult leagues within the community. I’d play a thousand times against others in my area, getting my ass kicked if the good fellas join together, before I’d watch a game with people I don’t know.
As a sports fan (NHL, NFL, NBA, ATP) I feel lucky to have a bunch of sports fan coworkers. We talk sports and joke around at work all day.
I do wish the sports communities on lemmy were more active. It seems like lemmy’s left-wing community does not have very many sports fans.
Leftists usually love sports for supporting other cultures but hate commercial teams and sponsorhips. Enes Kanter was banned from NBA for talking about human rights as example.
Also most sports fans on lemmy are into computers too since it takes some messing around to setup so that might be why those communities are always big.
I am heavily into Atli Cirit and archery, martial arts look fun to watch too. But why would I search for those communities when I know there is a huge programming community that I can simply join.
It’s just been my experience that a lot of athletes and a lot of sports fans tend to be more right wing and that a lot of leftists don’t like sports at all, even when there are no pro teams involved (pickup leagues etc).
and that a lot of leftists don’t like sports at all
Is that your experience per se, or have most of the leftists you’ve seen been nerds, and you’re just noticing the much more well-documented trend of nerds disliking sport?
Personally I happen to be the kind of nerd who loves sport. My favourites are triathlon (and its constituent sports) and HEMA, but I also like professional spectator sports cricket and rugby league.
HEMA’s a bit of an odd one since it tends to attract nerds more than people who are fans of more traditional sports. When I skip training to watch a big game of league, I definitely get light-hearted but at least somewhat sincere “sportsball” comments from regulars who like doing HEMA but aren’t interested in other “normal” sports. But my other sporting interests are far more conventional. This, while being a software engineer by trade, and also having more nerdy hobbies like D&D (actually, even nerdier: I play Pathfinder these days), real-time strategy games, and…well, being on Lemmy.
I did qualify my entire comment with:
It’s just been my experience that…
So yes. And most of the nerds I’ve met lean right, not left. The leftists I’ve met tended to study the Arts (English, sociology, history, etc) whereas the right wing types all studied math, engineering, computer science.
I do know a pair of right-leaning philosophy students though they claim to feel like outliers in a program that’s an outlier (the other way) at a school that’s mostly STEM programs.
The leftists I’ve met tended to study the Arts (English, sociology, history, etc) whereas the right wing types all studied math, engineering, computer science
Sure, maybe. I’ll point out that there’s a known statistical trend of more highly-educated people being more left-leaning, but I’ll leave that discussion there, because it’s not actually the point.
I didn’t actually say anything about nerds being leftists. I said that nerds are anti-sport. And that Lemmy is made up of nerds. Both of which, I hope, are not controversial statements. Not that Lemmy is made up of a representative cross-sample of nerds, but that of the users who are on Lemmy, most are nerds. My conjecture is that the reason you see a dislike for sport on Lemmy is not because Lemmings are left-wing, but because they’re nerds. And that if you were to control for political belief, Lemmy would still have a stronger anti-sport bias than the general public. While if you controlled for “nerdiness”, Lemmy’s anti-sport bias would be relatively weaker. Not an easy experiment to perform in practice, unfortunately.
I think even if you exclude all nerds, you’ll find that sports fans lean right. Nerds, left or right, tend to be anti-sport, though that’s basically by definition (a nerd being a person whose hobbies skew intellectual rather than physical).
That’s not the only way to define a nerd however. Another definition I’ve heard is based on the level of obsessiveness a person has with their hobby. In that world I would consider most of the biggest sports fans to be nerds. Think about how much time they spend looking at stats, talking about strategies, trades, drafts, listening to radio and podcasts, etc. All of that is very much in common with how video game nerds engage with their interest.
I consider myself a nerd who loves both sports and video games (RPGs, Roguelikes, fighting games, RTS). However unlike many sports fans and athletes, I’m not religious or superstitious. I think that latter group correlates with being right-wing (perhaps even more so than education).
also having more nerdy hobbies like D&D (actually, even nerdier: I play Pathfinder these days
pffffffffffffffft, those aren’t even nerdy. Those are like bringing kraft cheddar to a fancy cheese party and saying you’re a connoisseur. Let me know when you want to break out the real nerd braggadocio and start in on the fan-made white wolf spinoffs, or the burning wheel good times.
;)
fan-made white wolf spinoffs
Damn. I did buy a copy of V5 back before the pandemic because someone was going to start up a game that I was pretty excited to be in. Unfortunately that went by the wayside and I’ve so far never gotten to play any World of Darkness games.
The nichest RPG I’ve played was probably “End of the World”, where the premise is you play as yourself, arriving at your regular RPG night, and just as you get started, the apocalypse starts. Awesome premise. Fucking terrible mechanics. Do not recommend that system.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I did once play a home-made system someone else at my table created. But it wasn’t particularly inspired in my opinion, and didn’t do anything very interesting you couldn’t do with a little tweaking of PbtA.
d20 fantasy is my main thing that I keep returning to, but I’ve had plenty of other RPG experience ;)
Alright, I give you the nerd credit. I’m just depressed because I found out there was a group starting a game in my theater troupe, but they’d capped it at 5 and I was too late. I’d even take D&D right now.
The end of the world sounds fun. I’d bet it would be a blast to throw that wrench in ‘session zero’ of a fate game (which is my personal favorite, even the prometheus and werewolf games don’t match up).
The end of the world sounds fun
Yeah the premise of it really is. Our starting inventories were literally whatever we brought with us, plus whatever happens to be in the host’s house. The conceit we went with was that the person who’s gonna be GM is just “running late” when the apocalypse starts. It was just let down by some disappointing character stat generation methods and mechanics that weren’t very good.
Personally I have no love for sports but my partner does we are both quite far left so I don’t think that really has anything to do with it.
Lemmy is also primarily used by super nerds who don’t care about sportsball. Not enough normies here compared to Reddit.
Which is what I find odd because every gamer and nerd I know is also interested in sports or at the very least interested in fantasy sports leagues. Might just be my area tho where the whole community and all walks of life get together to watch the Bills and Sabres play.
