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
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
Thanks for that link! I was almost gonna start one myself. Gonna try that one instead, at least for a while.
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.
The problem there might be that people hate league of legends
Eh, the community is huge on Reddit so clearly the fans exist (and I’m one but just took a big social media break for awhile so that didn’t help). Lemmy just needs more people with more diverse interests.
This is so dismissive
It’s all the complaint deserves
We need more people to be the second and third person to join and help communities that someone else is trying to start
Sounds like you need to let your sports-liking associates elsewhere know about the platform to help with your problem, rather than whinge that the already existing userbase doesn’t like what you do
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 thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in.
Well, there ya go.
(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.
!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
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.
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.
👍🏿
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.
Dude. Sports is literally everywhere. It doesn’t need to reach its greedy tendrils into yet another corner of society.
I’m not a sports guy, I’m pretty anti-sports actually (I can go on absolutely unhinged TED talks about how the local teams are trying to drain the city for taxes… I want to continue, so feel free to ask but not doing it here.) But I agree with you on the niche hobbies and local flavor.
I still have to use Reddit because there hasn’t been a good community for local on Lemmy (yes, I know everyone going “it’s user generated” but I’m like 1 of 5 instead of the hundreds still on reddit) and small hobbies in a lot of the crafting world is non-existent on Lemmy.
I don’t have an answer on this one, just sucks. It’s the trouble of being one of the first ones in the door.
So this is the type of discussion I was hoping for. I honestly didn’t even mean to trigger so many people by bringing up sports when the whole showerthought started cuz I missed my local team’s subreddit.
I can go on absolutely unhinged TED talks about how the local teams are trying to drain the city for taxes…
Don’t even get me started, we are in the same paddle boat when it comes to the ownership and the league’s use of tax payer dollars. The fucking Bills just set some sort of record I think for the new stadium they built by the belligerently small amount of money the owners are going to be contributing. The fuckin thing is costing billions and its just about entirely funded by 2 channels from the same source, the people of our our community. 1 channel is thru taxes and the other is thru some PPE shit where if you want to buy season tickets you need to give them like $40,000 as a one time fee into of the season ticket cost and also commit to like 10 seasons to even be able to buy a season ticket.
I know your reply will be “then why are you a fan still” so ill bashfully explain why in one word, community. The WNY community is my favorite part of the greater Buffalo/Niagara region and being apart of Billsmafia is such a huge part of it. We’ve never been a champion, until 5 years ago there were no bandwagons of fans looking to become Bills fans, its something you are just born into here. We put up with 8 ft snow storms, 17 years of missing the playoffs, losing 4 super bowls in a row, Damar Hamlin going into a freak occurrence of cardiac arrest and needing 10 mins of CPR to survive, and thats just the big stuff. At the end of the day tho, it forms a bond in the community like I’ve never seen anywhere else. When Josh’s Allen’s grandmother died, Billsmafia raised millions of dollars for his charity which came in $17 increments (his jersey number), now today there is an entire wing at Oshea’s Children’s Hospital dedicated to his grandmother’s name all funded by fans and member of the community. When we got dumped on with 6 ft of snow in 2 days, Bills players drover around house to house in skidsters plowing out people’s driveways. When Andy Dalton beat the Ravens against all odds and made it so the Bills would go to the playoffs breaking a 17 year long drought, Andy isnt even a Buffall Bills player he plays for Cincinnati but that didn’t stop Billsmafia from raising hundreds of thousands if not over a million dollars for Andy’s charity.
The idiots who own teams and run the league can get fucked, ill never argue against that but the men and women within each and every organization who have their boots on the ground, they are all amazing humans busting their ass off to make theirs and our community the best they possibly can.
Oh I get it completely. There’s a bunch of subreddits I miss, my industry I work in which is very niche, leatherworking, heck even the motorcycle community in Lemmy is… lacking.
On the other part you brought in… OH BOY! Unhinged TED talk time.
So I live relatively close to the Royals and the Chiefs stadiums. John Sherman, gas magnate, the owner of the Royals decided he wanted to move the stadium to downtown, where things have been picking up. Specifically he wanted it in the Crossroads where there’s a lot of local community shops and everything, because he wanted it near Power and Light district where there’s bars and the like which… oh right, he owns a lot of. Troubles came up that the stadium proposals took foooooooorever to even come up, looked like it was drawn on a napkin instead of anything serious, and wanted a tax levy to be put on the city to continue one that still hasn’t been paid off for the last time the two stadiums were built. The whole time saying “Look how the stadiums bring business in!”… the area around the two stadiums have managed to keep a Denny’s and a Taco Bell alive, the big resort hotel couldn’t even survive. Yea… real great for business.
Another trouble is… as I say, I am one of those who actively detests sports… I wish I could find the post, there’s an old Reddit post describing what not liking sports was like and used archeology in how it invades everything around you so it’s easy to go from “I couldn’t care less” to “Okay, I hate this thing now. It is insufferable.” I say all that to say, just paying any attention to the news I knew at the time the Royals was the second worst team in the MLB, they were that bad. So they knew they couldn’t get this move off the ground so they went to the Chiefs who was the most recent superbowl winner which of course was happy to get money their way, and the ad campaign went out. And despite the Royals/Sherman being the push on getting this going, it was all Chiefs all the time. I literally even got a flier in my mail “The liberals are trying to take away our teams!” paid for by the team push, so yay politics even drug in. The whole time threatening “Well if you don’t vote it in, we’ll move. Maybe to Kansas (right over the border) or hey, even Tennessee.” Thing is, the state remembers St. Louis on the other side had the rams, built them a stadium and whoopsiedoodle they packed up and moved to California leaving a city with a stadium and fuck all to do with it.
So we’ve got all sorts of issue in state and local level, but holy fuck all the political pressure since the voters turned down the tax is “How can we keep these teams in Missouri!” And it’s funny, I said I’d be more okay paying for it if we got ANYTHING out of it… I don’t mind paying taxes to keep our zoo going and it’s nice I get a hefty discount when I go, but the Royals and Chiefs are giving a nice hearty “go fuck yourself” for us paying taxes so the billionaires have their teams.
On to the “Why are you a fan?” question you brought up. I don’t question it… but I’ve never understood it. I grew up in Arkansas that never had a pro team so college sports was big… I got to hear the “calling the hogs” my entire life and never comprehended the why. Probably because dad was not a sports guy and had the opinion “Why do I want to watch people play a game?” even though he played in high school and I’ve been pretty much the same. I get the community stuff, and that’s fantastic. I’ve just found a community outside of sports so it doesn’t resound to me. The reason I’ve become so against sports beyond it’s completely impossible to ignore it it’s so inundated in culture, is the sheer amount of money that goes into it in all levels. High school, if you’re one of the “football” schools, your school only has 3-4 sports, all the big stadium ticket getting team sports, the smaller less prestigious schools get more sports like wrestling and the like… guess which situation I ended up in? And watching schools dump money into the sports above all other things like theater, labs, etc. “But it brings in money for the school.” Cool cool… so why are we getting asked for a tax levy so the school can build yet another stadium? Repeat this for the college level so the “Hogs can have a proper place to play!” and now the city with pro teams level. And I hear the ticket prices and think I wouldn’t pay those prices to see my favorite band… and again, those ticket prices and yet we have to pay for their shit?
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.
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.
It takes time to adjust to that
Coming from Reddit I was used to that level of crow anonymously and here people be remembering what you said in that other posts.
I have find out that since noticing that I tend to be more careful with what I post.
what about subs? lemmy subs
The Philadelphia ones identify as hoagies.
Connecticut will identify as grinders
Is there a sub for subs on grinder?
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
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.
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.
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.
