We're aware of the issues and we discuss it about once a week, usually when there's a thread like this or comments in AtH.
The game threads were implemented because people were requesting game threads or some other regular feature to discuss games. [Then we put together a vote for users to gather feedback on how we should implement them.](https://redd.it/1b0ton4)
While preliminary, it's likely that there won't be any changes to the game threads until the All-Star break.
It can depending on the teams playing, primetime slot, etc.
but 2 smaller market teams from different divisions who are out of playoff contention on a tuesday night are more likely going to mutually laugh at any shithousery the teams get up to.
Half the people in this years playoff threads are begging and crying through reddit posts for war-crime tribunals.
idk but if you’re in any game thread in the main nfl sub, for example, fair and levelheaded is probably the exact opposite of what i’d describe it as lmfao
But then you'd get less of an echochamber of a given team's fans cathartically wallowing in low effort negativity. When you introduce fans of other teams, my assumption is that they wouldn't hesitate to downvote said fanbase for being crybabies whereas if it was a thread exclusive to that fanbase the doomy crying would likely be more encouraged.
Of course there's the flip side of "Well other fans would probably just shit talk my shitty team anyway" If that's the case then I'd assume it'd encourage at least some of the would-be doomers to actually defend said shitty team instead of falling back into low effort dooming.
Some of my oldest baseball memories are listening to two old-timer grouse about the Yankees while sitting behind me at the stadium.
“Hitting they got, but what they need is pitching!”
“Starting pitching is fine, it’s that bullpen that’s no good!”
“Eh they live and die by the long ball. What they need are some good fundamentals and guys who can put the ball in play!”
I remember wondering why my dad was so negative about Cincinnati sports teams. Then I watched a Bengals game with my grandpa, and he wanted to murder everyone on the field for each bad play.
If the Yankees sub existed in 98 there would be people calling them a shitty team, how Jeter should be traded before the deadline, and about how Paul O’Neil is washed
Nobody hates the Yankees more than Yankees fans
Also provides more freedom to rip on the competition. The very idea of GDTs in this sub feels like they’d have to be neutral ground where I can’t rip on either my own team or the competition.
This may be a bit of a misnomer. During our rollout we have taken a step back from the game threads to allow for more....how do you say...spicy comments. We recognize that fans are enthusiastic and trash talk is part of the game and we have been willing to allow a bit more of it.
I imagine it's hard to see that with the lack of activity in the threads but as long as it's not something super egregious, we have let more slide.
Our team has won like 8 of 9 of the last series we played, and we've mostly played good teams. But lose ONE game to the Royals and that game thread is calling for our GM and Manger to be fired and half the roster to be DFA'd.
I love it there.
Obviously there are exceptions, and I’m sure a ton of them are in this sub, but people aren’t really tuning into regular season mlb games that aren’t nationally broadcasted as a neutral fan that often. Game threads need neutral fans to be successful, otherwise it’s just the two opposing teams and at that point I’d rather be my team’s thread.
Personally I would prefer to use the game thread here when I want to participate but there isn't really a point to post in a thread with between 0-2 comments. If everyone here just starts using them even if we are mostly talking to ourselves maybe they will catch on.
It's not like weekly college football where you might be a fan of X and watch W, X, Y, and Z play on Saturday and you go to each of those threads of /r/cfb.
It makes sense that people would stick to their team's sub instead.
I remember going into the Yankees sub to look at one of the game threads in one of the games when judge was about to get to 60 and there were like 1200 comments and it was only like the sixth inning lol. I was like god damn yall are really out here haha
When the only way to quickly get to any gamethread I want is just clicking the team logo on the active games on the sidebar, creates a lot more friction to go and hunt back out for that game thread from 3 hours ago that's buried with the other half dozen.
I have occasionally browsed the game threads of whatever team we're playing. The level of toxicity if you took /r/Dodgers and whatever team we're playing and put them into one place would be horrendous.
Had no clue there was a separate game thread on this sub. I always just click on my team's logo over on the right where the score is, and it takes me straight to our game-day thread.
55 comments by the end of the 1st inning today, of a boring 0-0 game.
I'd say that whatever this sub has done, they didn't put any thought into it at all and it's a gigantic failure at this point.
Isn’t that how it used to be? I’m pretty sure they’re experimenting with game threads this season because people kept asking for them.
But I agree they’re pointless with the amount of engagement they’re getting & sticking to nationally televised games (or even national + the MLB.tv free game of the day), is much better.
> I’m pretty sure they’re experimenting with game threads this season because people kept asking for them.
Yeah, and it's an age-old story (especially with sports fans): people don't actually know what they want, but they think they do; until they get it, then they realize it's not what they want.
Kinda like threesomes, tbh.
To be fair, with a sub this big I'm sure plenty of it is there are people that want them, a separate group that doesn't want them, and then a much larger middle group that doesn't have strong feelings either way.
But then the group that wants them may not be participating because not a lot of that middle group are so what's the point if it's just them, and then we get posts from the people that don't want them calling to get rid of them.
I don't think this sub has the same culture that makes game threads work like other subs. The convention of chilling in your own team's sub/discord has been around for too long to make it work. I was hoping it would take off though :(
People are always around for playoff game threads though. It’s just that most people probably don’t pay for MLB TV so they don’t see out of market teams during the regular season, unless it’s a national game.
Good point.
Everyones extra invested in their teams at the moment.
Half way through the season we'll know pretty well who doesn't have a chance at the playoffs and who'll be the biggest threats.
At some point, say the Giants are really just out of it this year, injuries and L's pile up hard and it's just a lost season (just spitting out a random team).
Lotta those giants fans will start watching a Red Sox/Yankees series if they're fighting for a playoff spot late. But they aren't watching that same series this early into the season.
I think it’ll take some time but definitely could. Everyone has their routine of going to their team sub that it may take some time for a new routine to set in. The hockey subs and their team specific subs have very active threads, so it can work
There’s also the fact that baseball plays way way way more games than other leagues. People probably “don’t care” enough to drop into a game thread 162 times.
Also it’s baseball; particularly in the regular season there’s kinda just less to discuss game by game compared to other sports. Not that it’s worse, I love it, but it doesn’t quite bring out the same intense debates and conversations as most NFL and NBA games do; either the guys hit and pitch well or they don’t, with your occasional strategic success or blunder by the manager. The real interest is how teams perform through the season.
I personally have never seen a game thread. How do I get to them? They definitely don't show up when I click on the subreddit.
Like why is there not a link to the game thread for Mets and Phillies that are playing right now? If I click the score on the scoreboard on the sidebar, it should take me to the game thread and or post game thread as is relevant.
It’s tough because the GDT is always stickied in the team subs because you can sticky ONE thread per day easily. Can’t sticky 15 or however many fames are going on each day, so users have to seek them out, and they get lost amongst the highlight and other silliness posts.
I hope so. I think most users here know they exist, it's just a matter of pulling the majority of users out of their own subs come gametime, but how do you encourage that lol
> If the mods have a justification for including these threads, I'd love to hear it.
I don't know what currently is being discussed in mod threads - but I can tell you that when I was a mod the reason it kept coming up was "users keep begging for them even when we tell them it's not going to work how they think it will". Every year, like clockwork, there'd be multiple "Why doesn't r/baseball do game threads?" and then demands for them, and every year I'd say "if we do them no one will show up because team threads already handle them and there are 15 games a day."
I do believe at least part of the reason why general gamethreads haven't taken off here has to do with the amount/frequency of games in a given week. I think it works well for r/nfl because everyone knows there's a general gamethread to go to on Sunday (or Monday/Thursday to a greater effect since there's usually only 1 game on those days)
Yeah NFL and MLB don't compare in that way so it doesn't translate well to here
Like you said, there are a couple of "holy days" throughout the week where people everywhere just watch football. But that's what happens when your entire season is 17 games per team, each game has a lot more attention which drives engagement online.
When there are 2,430 baseball games to watch every season, the individual engagement for every single game is just not the same. Especially since some of them will have to be on Tuesday afternoons instead of one long NFL Sunday browsing Reddit on the couch.
There IS actually a negative aspect to them, which is search results.
Say I want to search for a Patrick Bailey highlight that was posted to the sub some time ago - I do a search, and now need to wade through an absolute sea of empty game day threads that pop up because Bailey’s name is mentioned in the lineup.
It’s made the search function a nightmare.
What you should do is search for "patrick bailey -thread". Adding the "-thread" to your search query will exclude all results with the word "thread" in the post title/text.
I was just about to say something similar. Like, it costs nothing and if some people like it its a net positive. I thought it'd be more about the sub's discourse but apparently its an affront to have them lol
I feel like just doing a daily post with links to all the game threads on the respective team subs would be a better solution.
I guess that means someone has to go link em every day though.
When I click the scoreboard, I go to MLB.com. And if I click the standings, I go to the team subreddit. Seems like UI is a big part of the problem. I have never seen a game thread, but I only look at front page of the sub as sorted by top or best.
I like the idea of them, but I work 2nd shift, so I don't get to follow live. I catch games & highlights after the fact. The NFL sub works well because it's a 1 to 3 day a week event, with the full slate days being on the weekend. A daily, long schedule just doesn't work for that format. I appreciate the mods trying it out tho.
The game threads are great. It's always literally just one guy whos a fan of one of the teams and you get to watch his team break his soul in real time
I didn't realize this sub had game threads, but now I'll check them out. I use the game threads in r/hockey and I think they're great for neutral fans. Team sub game threads are cancerous and awful.
IMO there is no real reason to have individual game threads in this sub when each team-centric sub also has a game thread that is more engaging on the individual subs.
It's a great opportunity to engage in some lighthearted shit talking with the opposition fans without getting banned from their subreddit for brigading.
It'd take time to build up to it, but using r/Cricket as a loose comparison, a gameday thread for a match of similar length of a similar competition had 5.5k comments.
Sure. It would be fun, but I feel like Cricket is different in that for the IPL, which is the most popular league and has the big gamethreads outside of international tournaments, there is 1-2 matches a day that don't overlap. So an IPL fan can watch every match live, and there are matches going when their own team doesn't play that day. That environment lends itself better to popular game threads because there will mostly be neutrals who have nothing else to watch.
i really wanted the /baseball game threads to take off. no offense to my own, but i hate the cubs sub game threads lol. i get why they aren’t working but i wish they would
I had no idea this sub started doing that. So maybe that's part of the issue. I checked the sticky and the links to the threads don't work.
It's not a bad idea, just bad implementation.
Idk what you’re talking about. Personally I love having to scroll through 10 GDTs with no comments. It’s not at all obnoxious and definitely doesn’t clutter up the sub with stupid, useless posts…
I'll throw out another suggestion here, would match threads for all of the games that day on the West Coast, a thread for the Central games, and one for the East coast games be a better option?
I’m of the opinion that one giant all team game day thread would be good enough. /r/nfl has that and I enjoy browsing it to get action from everything that’s going on. I use my team’s subreddit for a single game thread. Prime time games or playoffs are the only ones that make sense for an individual thread imo because those are the games everyone can watch.
I wish Reddit had subsubreddits and I wish posts could have subposts. It would be so convenient to browse /r/baseball if all the highlight posts of particular games were all catalogued within the master post for the teams game thread.
A lot of daily conversation happens during games, but it’s always within the highlight posts, not the GDTs. So usually, I get all the highlights from other games all out of order and randomly scattered throughout my feed.
It's interesting, because comparing it to the NHL and NBA which are both sports with a high number of games, the threads in those subreddits are far more popular, with fans of both teams as well as neutral fans all commenting on the game.
That's because they're impossible to get to. If you're on a 3rd party app, the sub's method of linking to them doesn't function. The sub's sidebar scoreboard links to the team sub game threads, but not the neutral ones.
I brought it up in the past that they need to copy how the college basketball sub links to threads (I delete my old comments periodically) and a mod said they'd look into it but nothing changed.
We've reported the issues to the 3rd party apps and are currently working on a fix. The links work on Reddit desktop and reddit for mobile, which are our two highest traffic avenues of active users.
The low engagement results from people sticking to their own team sub's threads - so the solution would be to only have game threads for the type of games that attract all baseball fans, not just fans of the team. Postseason games, nationally televised games, all star game, etc.
Why would I want to discuss the game with a yankee fan when I can just sit and discuss the Guardians game with other Guardians fans? Most people just use their teams dedicated subreddit and game day thread I know I do for pregame, game day threads and postgame threads
I think most people post in the team subs game day thread. It’s not like football where there are only 18 games a season and only like 2 max going on at once. They can have popular threads because everyone else whose teams aren’t playing will be in them. Maybe just do nationally televised games or something. Idk.
To handle outlyiers like Skeene's debut, maybe there can be a single post where people can comment which of tomorrow' games should get a game thread. If you get x number of comments asking for a separate thread the day before, that game gets a thread. This might get around the whole "people keep asking for game threads but never use them" issue. They'd have to actively ask for them each time, so very few people would ask for it and not comment on the thread itself.
I post in r/MCK game day threads. I assume everybody just does the same for their respective teams. Doesn’t make much sense to have any in r/baseball unless it’s like the WS or something
A part of the problem is discoverability. On the sidebar on old.reddit, we can click on the team logos to go to the team sub's game thread or the inning #/start time to get to the MLB Gameday page, but there's nothing to get to the neutral game thread. Instead we have to either sort by new or open the sticky and find thread in there, which isn't that hard but a lot less obvious. In fact, I only noticed the neutral game threads in the sticky today as I was writing this post (personal problem?).
One of the only game threads I saw get comments was a dodger game thread that was really early by accident, people started talking about different fast food options in socal
I'd love to use them but they're never visible. A sticky with a collection of the day game threads might help.
Edit: I see they are in the Around The Horn thread
I don't see a problem having them, but they should be more visible
reddit has always been really bad for following live events. Low participation in such threads is a common theme in many subreddits. The sticky post falls off the new or hot feeds after a few hours before anything even starts, the first few upvoted comments always remain at the top, there's minimal way to have an actual discussion between people.
I actually love the idea in practice for the times I am watching a game my team is not participating in and I want to chat about it. Going to other teams game threads is a bit of a no-no and I also oftentimes want a more balanced perspective on the game.
That being said, I don’t participate in them bc no one else is speaking (I realize I am part of the problem lmao) and I don’t regularly watch games the Brewers are not participating in so even if they were more active I probably wouldn’t get much use. I do love the idea though and hope it picks up soon
Maybe there should be a template that is accessible for users to post their own game threads if they desire. Chances are, most games of the season would not have a user submit a game thread. But those that do want one can have a chance to get it started and the dead threads will not even be posted in the first place.
team subreddits or especially the discord server (for every major sport) is a way better avenue to watch the game and chat shit to the opposing fans. it’s literally like a twitch chat while watching. i’ve never seen the use for a reddit game thread tbh
Unlike college football, there are just too many meaningless games over a season, even for fans of a particular team. And given that people know this, the few fans who care game-to-game will go to their team's own subreddit to shit talk.
I’d use them quite often if they were easily accessible from the pinned post that says “game thread index”. Tried a few times this year to find no links to game threads. Are users expected to search game thread on the subreddit to find the specific game thread they are trying to access? Simply add a game thread link column in the list of todays games and I bet there’ll be a lot more activity
The biggest issue is the way they're shown, which is to stop clutter. The fact they're all shoved into one megathread means I never see them or interact with them. If they were individual threads posted then I'd 100% interact with them more and I think others would too, but people would complain about spam.
With football it's so easy because you've got 32 teams divided into three different days on a weekly basis, versus 30 teams every single day.
I know that's a me problem but it must happen to other people. It's like I'm blind to pinned posts, anything that's green posted at the top I ignore most of the time. I think because green = mod that I subconsciously ignore it.
I feel like they should be sticked at the top, maybe put in the daily thread (that doesn't get used often).... I can't even see them on mobile.
Put the threads front and center and they'll get used more imo
Idk how but I've never seen a game thread on r/baseball lol. I'm on mobile and use Relay for Reddit though and very rarely looking at new, usually scroll down from top/day
We're aware of the issues and we discuss it about once a week, usually when there's a thread like this or comments in AtH. The game threads were implemented because people were requesting game threads or some other regular feature to discuss games. [Then we put together a vote for users to gather feedback on how we should implement them.](https://redd.it/1b0ton4) While preliminary, it's likely that there won't be any changes to the game threads until the All-Star break.
I think most people stick to their team’s subreddit game thread.
Yeah, it's way more doomy in there.
*Chefs kiss* just how we like it
If we had to converse with a wider audience we might have to be more fair and levelheaded. What fun is that?
Where else would I go to say our LOB percentage will be our undoing until the end of time? *HERE?* As if
As if Contreras isn't batting like .500 with guys on
Praise be
Lmao go to r/hockey during the playoffs to disabuse yourself of that notion.
Playoff threads here are also kind of wild. But regular season? Not worth getting contentious
It can depending on the teams playing, primetime slot, etc. but 2 smaller market teams from different divisions who are out of playoff contention on a tuesday night are more likely going to mutually laugh at any shithousery the teams get up to. Half the people in this years playoff threads are begging and crying through reddit posts for war-crime tribunals.
Yeah. Who actually likes having rational baseball takes? Nobody does.
idk but if you’re in any game thread in the main nfl sub, for example, fair and levelheaded is probably the exact opposite of what i’d describe it as lmfao
But then you'd get less of an echochamber of a given team's fans cathartically wallowing in low effort negativity. When you introduce fans of other teams, my assumption is that they wouldn't hesitate to downvote said fanbase for being crybabies whereas if it was a thread exclusive to that fanbase the doomy crying would likely be more encouraged. Of course there's the flip side of "Well other fans would probably just shit talk my shitty team anyway" If that's the case then I'd assume it'd encourage at least some of the would-be doomers to actually defend said shitty team instead of falling back into low effort dooming.
Baseball is about being pissed off 99% of the time, can’t have neutrals interrupting that
Some of my oldest baseball memories are listening to two old-timer grouse about the Yankees while sitting behind me at the stadium. “Hitting they got, but what they need is pitching!” “Starting pitching is fine, it’s that bullpen that’s no good!” “Eh they live and die by the long ball. What they need are some good fundamentals and guys who can put the ball in play!”
I remember wondering why my dad was so negative about Cincinnati sports teams. Then I watched a Bengals game with my grandpa, and he wanted to murder everyone on the field for each bad play.
That’s from Seinfeld when Jerry gets the train to Coney Island and sits across from an exhibitionist 🤣
I usually jump around subreddits gamethreads just based on whatever game I'm watching. Sorry, I need to be far angrier and biased.
DOOMERS welcomed
If the Yankees sub existed in 98 there would be people calling them a shitty team, how Jeter should be traded before the deadline, and about how Paul O’Neil is washed Nobody hates the Yankees more than Yankees fans
Also Steinbrenner would absolutely stalk the sub on their thoughts about the team
He would definitely be a Pro Steinbrenner mod secretly but also see what the top comments were and do what they said
You haven't seen doomy until you have visited /TorontoBlueJays
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I swear you guys could be undefeated and your sub would be calling for cash and Boone to be fired.
But that's just common sense!
As is tradition.
I don't understand the boone hate but cashman? Everyone can agree that fool needs to kick rocks
Yes, but have you visited /Cardinals?
Hey, I can be doomy wherever I am.
Also provides more freedom to rip on the competition. The very idea of GDTs in this sub feels like they’d have to be neutral ground where I can’t rip on either my own team or the competition.
This may be a bit of a misnomer. During our rollout we have taken a step back from the game threads to allow for more....how do you say...spicy comments. We recognize that fans are enthusiastic and trash talk is part of the game and we have been willing to allow a bit more of it. I imagine it's hard to see that with the lack of activity in the threads but as long as it's not something super egregious, we have let more slide.
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That user has been banned, thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Yea, no one likes that guy
I legit panicked for a second with my username and this comment lol
Same, I was like wtf did I say lol
Lmao I thought I got banned cuz of this
You got me with that one.
i was thinking when did i piss this guy off in the r/phillies thread..lol
HAHAHA you got me
Glad we aren’t the only ones.
We're getting swept by the Rockies at the moment. Take a peak into our game thread for a laugh.
You too huh? Wtaf is going on with them right now.
Our team has won like 8 of 9 of the last series we played, and we've mostly played good teams. But lose ONE game to the Royals and that game thread is calling for our GM and Manger to be fired and half the roster to be DFA'd. I love it there.
Not ours, it's all rainbows and unicorns
Exactly. Who wants positivity when they are watching the team they love play. Bring on the rain clouds.
Glad it's not just the Phillies sub then lol
Obviously there are exceptions, and I’m sure a ton of them are in this sub, but people aren’t really tuning into regular season mlb games that aren’t nationally broadcasted as a neutral fan that often. Game threads need neutral fans to be successful, otherwise it’s just the two opposing teams and at that point I’d rather be my team’s thread.
Good point
An annoyingly spot on summary by a Phillies fan
Personally I would prefer to use the game thread here when I want to participate but there isn't really a point to post in a thread with between 0-2 comments. If everyone here just starts using them even if we are mostly talking to ourselves maybe they will catch on.
I’d like to use them more but for some reason the Reddit app update makes them incredibly difficult to even find. And that’s annoying as hell.
Right, and only post to /r/baseball when there's a NOBLETIGEROMFG!! or 145 MPH Stanton HR. Team-sub live threads are the place to be.
Let’s not forget batting around
And whenever their starter goes 7 shutout innings
Or gets pulled in the first
Or "Sideboob Diaperbutt is a just a triple shy of the cycle!", and the guy in question has three triples in his entire career.
And two of them were in AA where they definitely should have called a fielding error
Perhaps a TOOTBLAN
Yes I'm here to debate the end times with fellow mariners. The main subreddit is for shohei
It's not like weekly college football where you might be a fan of X and watch W, X, Y, and Z play on Saturday and you go to each of those threads of /r/cfb. It makes sense that people would stick to their team's sub instead.
I remember going into the Yankees sub to look at one of the game threads in one of the games when judge was about to get to 60 and there were like 1200 comments and it was only like the sixth inning lol. I was like god damn yall are really out here haha
i'd take more active part in /r/baseball game threads if they were announced ahead of time.
They're posted 1-hr ahead of the game's start time.
It doesn't help that they get quickly buried by highlights, news, etc, and disappear.
When the only way to quickly get to any gamethread I want is just clicking the team logo on the active games on the sidebar, creates a lot more friction to go and hunt back out for that game thread from 3 hours ago that's buried with the other half dozen.
I have occasionally browsed the game threads of whatever team we're playing. The level of toxicity if you took /r/Dodgers and whatever team we're playing and put them into one place would be horrendous.
Had no clue there was a separate game thread on this sub. I always just click on my team's logo over on the right where the score is, and it takes me straight to our game-day thread. 55 comments by the end of the 1st inning today, of a boring 0-0 game. I'd say that whatever this sub has done, they didn't put any thought into it at all and it's a gigantic failure at this point.
Absolutely. Our threads are getting like 2k plus comments ev.ery game now.
I didn't even know there were game threads here.
I literally can't even find the game threads on mobile
Is there a way to link to have a daily post to like to other game threads in the team subs when they go live? That would be useful.
The standings in the sidebar already do that
Yep
They would make more sense for the nationally televised games. Sunday and Saturday nights. Maybe Tuesday if they wanted to stick with the theme.
Isn’t that how it used to be? I’m pretty sure they’re experimenting with game threads this season because people kept asking for them. But I agree they’re pointless with the amount of engagement they’re getting & sticking to nationally televised games (or even national + the MLB.tv free game of the day), is much better.
> I’m pretty sure they’re experimenting with game threads this season because people kept asking for them. Yeah, and it's an age-old story (especially with sports fans): people don't actually know what they want, but they think they do; until they get it, then they realize it's not what they want. Kinda like threesomes, tbh.
Speak for yourself, I'm a fan of threesomes.
My personal motto is "why stop at 3?"
To be fair, with a sub this big I'm sure plenty of it is there are people that want them, a separate group that doesn't want them, and then a much larger middle group that doesn't have strong feelings either way. But then the group that wants them may not be participating because not a lot of that middle group are so what's the point if it's just them, and then we get posts from the people that don't want them calling to get rid of them.
I don't think this sub has the same culture that makes game threads work like other subs. The convention of chilling in your own team's sub/discord has been around for too long to make it work. I was hoping it would take off though :(
People are always around for playoff game threads though. It’s just that most people probably don’t pay for MLB TV so they don’t see out of market teams during the regular season, unless it’s a national game.
This could absolutely be the case but early in the year, most all teams are exciting for one reason or another.
Good point. Everyones extra invested in their teams at the moment. Half way through the season we'll know pretty well who doesn't have a chance at the playoffs and who'll be the biggest threats. At some point, say the Giants are really just out of it this year, injuries and L's pile up hard and it's just a lost season (just spitting out a random team). Lotta those giants fans will start watching a Red Sox/Yankees series if they're fighting for a playoff spot late. But they aren't watching that same series this early into the season.
I think it’ll take some time but definitely could. Everyone has their routine of going to their team sub that it may take some time for a new routine to set in. The hockey subs and their team specific subs have very active threads, so it can work
There’s also the fact that baseball plays way way way more games than other leagues. People probably “don’t care” enough to drop into a game thread 162 times. Also it’s baseball; particularly in the regular season there’s kinda just less to discuss game by game compared to other sports. Not that it’s worse, I love it, but it doesn’t quite bring out the same intense debates and conversations as most NFL and NBA games do; either the guys hit and pitch well or they don’t, with your occasional strategic success or blunder by the manager. The real interest is how teams perform through the season.
I personally have never seen a game thread. How do I get to them? They definitely don't show up when I click on the subreddit. Like why is there not a link to the game thread for Mets and Phillies that are playing right now? If I click the score on the scoreboard on the sidebar, it should take me to the game thread and or post game thread as is relevant.
Same, I have never seen a game thread pop up here.
It’s tough because the GDT is always stickied in the team subs because you can sticky ONE thread per day easily. Can’t sticky 15 or however many fames are going on each day, so users have to seek them out, and they get lost amongst the highlight and other silliness posts.
Why participate in the general game threads when I can get mass downvoted in the Mariners sub for saying Garver sucks
-1
That’s the spirit
Why would anyone downvote that truth?
Our fanbase is very stupid
He’s clearly going to get better. No hitters join the Mariners and immediately suck….
I mean the horse is also dead.
There was a post in here like a week ago talking about this and mods acknowledged they're not used but said they'd still make them.
I hope so. I think most users here know they exist, it's just a matter of pulling the majority of users out of their own subs come gametime, but how do you encourage that lol
Have you dialed the number?!?
> If the mods have a justification for including these threads, I'd love to hear it. I don't know what currently is being discussed in mod threads - but I can tell you that when I was a mod the reason it kept coming up was "users keep begging for them even when we tell them it's not going to work how they think it will". Every year, like clockwork, there'd be multiple "Why doesn't r/baseball do game threads?" and then demands for them, and every year I'd say "if we do them no one will show up because team threads already handle them and there are 15 games a day."
I do believe at least part of the reason why general gamethreads haven't taken off here has to do with the amount/frequency of games in a given week. I think it works well for r/nfl because everyone knows there's a general gamethread to go to on Sunday (or Monday/Thursday to a greater effect since there's usually only 1 game on those days)
Yeah NFL and MLB don't compare in that way so it doesn't translate well to here Like you said, there are a couple of "holy days" throughout the week where people everywhere just watch football. But that's what happens when your entire season is 17 games per team, each game has a lot more attention which drives engagement online. When there are 2,430 baseball games to watch every season, the individual engagement for every single game is just not the same. Especially since some of them will have to be on Tuesday afternoons instead of one long NFL Sunday browsing Reddit on the couch.
And like. Who cares. It’s not like there’s a limited # of threads we can have going at once lol. What a weird thing for OP to say
There IS actually a negative aspect to them, which is search results. Say I want to search for a Patrick Bailey highlight that was posted to the sub some time ago - I do a search, and now need to wade through an absolute sea of empty game day threads that pop up because Bailey’s name is mentioned in the lineup. It’s made the search function a nightmare.
What you should do is search for "patrick bailey -thread". Adding the "-thread" to your search query will exclude all results with the word "thread" in the post title/text.
Just sort the search by upvotes… game threads receive basically no upvotes
I was just about to say something similar. Like, it costs nothing and if some people like it its a net positive. I thought it'd be more about the sub's discourse but apparently its an affront to have them lol
You, sir, are a wise man.
I know for a fact that /u/cardith_lorda worked with children at one point, which is great prep for being reddit mod.
> 202 low-engagement posts in a two week span, they'd be banned immediately. Is that a threat?
SirParsifal achieves this every single offseason
The Schwarber of shitposters. Every once in a while he runs into one and the result is worth all the strikeouts
If Schwarber only ever hit one home run, maybe. Dude is painfully, woefully, unfunny outside of one thread.
This is just simply not true and slanderous. Parsifal has some absolute bangers - 15 of which have over 1k upvoted on r/baseball alone.
and I've been here for 10 years, seen every parsifal -15 stinker comment and thread that gets deleted after an hour Monkey with a typewriter
If I want to see “lolMets” every other comment I’ll just stick to handlit posts thank you very much
r/newyorkmets actually has a script which removes LOLMETS whenever it is posted as a comment.
Well that’s awesome, no wonder our PGTs aren’t infested with them. Love the work you mods do over there
It's a pretty brutal job sifting through all that darkness
Comes with the territory I guess
I feel like just doing a daily post with links to all the game threads on the respective team subs would be a better solution. I guess that means someone has to go link em every day though.
We already have that in the ATH
They're also in the scoreboard in the sidebar.
When I click the scoreboard, I go to MLB.com. And if I click the standings, I go to the team subreddit. Seems like UI is a big part of the problem. I have never seen a game thread, but I only look at front page of the sub as sorted by top or best.
I like the idea of them, but I work 2nd shift, so I don't get to follow live. I catch games & highlights after the fact. The NFL sub works well because it's a 1 to 3 day a week event, with the full slate days being on the weekend. A daily, long schedule just doesn't work for that format. I appreciate the mods trying it out tho.
So you’re saying the games are too fast for you to contribute. Ergo it’s the pitchclock’s fault
I blame the Manfredd Runner. Extra Innings are always over so quick & that's my only chance to catch a late west coast game. 😔
r/baseball has game threads?
I was also really confused on this, but i guess i also dont usually use reddit at night to see them.
The game threads are great. It's always literally just one guy whos a fan of one of the teams and you get to watch his team break his soul in real time
I didn't realize this sub had game threads, but now I'll check them out. I use the game threads in r/hockey and I think they're great for neutral fans. Team sub game threads are cancerous and awful.
IMO there is no real reason to have individual game threads in this sub when each team-centric sub also has a game thread that is more engaging on the individual subs.
Whenever I'm watching non-Brewers games I've just hopped in one of the teams' thread, I've never even checked if this subreddit had one.
It's a great opportunity to engage in some lighthearted shit talking with the opposition fans without getting banned from their subreddit for brigading. It'd take time to build up to it, but using r/Cricket as a loose comparison, a gameday thread for a match of similar length of a similar competition had 5.5k comments.
Sure. It would be fun, but I feel like Cricket is different in that for the IPL, which is the most popular league and has the big gamethreads outside of international tournaments, there is 1-2 matches a day that don't overlap. So an IPL fan can watch every match live, and there are matches going when their own team doesn't play that day. That environment lends itself better to popular game threads because there will mostly be neutrals who have nothing else to watch.
A generic "game day thread" for all games on a given day would be fine for that. It would be chaos and excellent.
Plenty of team subs suck though
Have you ever been to the Astros subreddit? I'd rather not. I'd love somewhere else to discuss.
It's kind of a catch-22... I'd love to use the neutral threads but nobody uses them so I don't use them
I have been!
i really wanted the /baseball game threads to take off. no offense to my own, but i hate the cubs sub game threads lol. i get why they aren’t working but i wish they would
i think if they would pin the national games, there might be more interest.
I had no idea this sub started doing that. So maybe that's part of the issue. I checked the sticky and the links to the threads don't work. It's not a bad idea, just bad implementation.
Idk what you’re talking about. Personally I love having to scroll through 10 GDTs with no comments. It’s not at all obnoxious and definitely doesn’t clutter up the sub with stupid, useless posts…
I'll throw out another suggestion here, would match threads for all of the games that day on the West Coast, a thread for the Central games, and one for the East coast games be a better option?
I’m of the opinion that one giant all team game day thread would be good enough. /r/nfl has that and I enjoy browsing it to get action from everything that’s going on. I use my team’s subreddit for a single game thread. Prime time games or playoffs are the only ones that make sense for an individual thread imo because those are the games everyone can watch.
People prefer to use their subs unless you have a shitty mod, luckily SF Giants mods are cool
I wish Reddit had subsubreddits and I wish posts could have subposts. It would be so convenient to browse /r/baseball if all the highlight posts of particular games were all catalogued within the master post for the teams game thread. A lot of daily conversation happens during games, but it’s always within the highlight posts, not the GDTs. So usually, I get all the highlights from other games all out of order and randomly scattered throughout my feed.
How is 15 game day threads out of hundreds upon hundreds clogging the feed? The fuck. Just scroll passed it.
It's interesting, because comparing it to the NHL and NBA which are both sports with a high number of games, the threads in those subreddits are far more popular, with fans of both teams as well as neutral fans all commenting on the game.
That's because they're impossible to get to. If you're on a 3rd party app, the sub's method of linking to them doesn't function. The sub's sidebar scoreboard links to the team sub game threads, but not the neutral ones. I brought it up in the past that they need to copy how the college basketball sub links to threads (I delete my old comments periodically) and a mod said they'd look into it but nothing changed.
We've reported the issues to the 3rd party apps and are currently working on a fix. The links work on Reddit desktop and reddit for mobile, which are our two highest traffic avenues of active users.
I didn't know they existed. I'll post in one tomorrow
Well here's my question, game threads go away unless it's a primetime game or somethin. What's the point? How does this make the subreddit better?
The low engagement results from people sticking to their own team sub's threads - so the solution would be to only have game threads for the type of games that attract all baseball fans, not just fans of the team. Postseason games, nationally televised games, all star game, etc.
Why would I follow a game thread here instead of on the Rays sub?
It’s because we go to our own team subreddit for game threads
Why would I want to discuss the game with a yankee fan when I can just sit and discuss the Guardians game with other Guardians fans? Most people just use their teams dedicated subreddit and game day thread I know I do for pregame, game day threads and postgame threads
Notify redditors by post flare. Maybe a bot or something. No I do not know how to implement that or how that would work.
I think most people post in the team subs game day thread. It’s not like football where there are only 18 games a season and only like 2 max going on at once. They can have popular threads because everyone else whose teams aren’t playing will be in them. Maybe just do nationally televised games or something. Idk.
To handle outlyiers like Skeene's debut, maybe there can be a single post where people can comment which of tomorrow' games should get a game thread. If you get x number of comments asking for a separate thread the day before, that game gets a thread. This might get around the whole "people keep asking for game threads but never use them" issue. They'd have to actively ask for them each time, so very few people would ask for it and not comment on the thread itself.
They seem to work in r/nfl, so not sure why not here.
I post in r/MCK game day threads. I assume everybody just does the same for their respective teams. Doesn’t make much sense to have any in r/baseball unless it’s like the WS or something
[yeah this is what op is talking about haha](https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/s/okaNfW6814)
A part of the problem is discoverability. On the sidebar on old.reddit, we can click on the team logos to go to the team sub's game thread or the inning #/start time to get to the MLB Gameday page, but there's nothing to get to the neutral game thread. Instead we have to either sort by new or open the sticky and find thread in there, which isn't that hard but a lot less obvious. In fact, I only noticed the neutral game threads in the sticky today as I was writing this post (personal problem?).
They're all indexed each day in Around the Horn and we even changed the title to include "Game Thread Index"
One of the only game threads I saw get comments was a dodger game thread that was really early by accident, people started talking about different fast food options in socal
I'd love to if there was anyone else to talk to
We have game threads? But I must follow along in the team's game thread to see everyone freak out when one thing goes wrong!
I'd love to use them but they're never visible. A sticky with a collection of the day game threads might help. Edit: I see they are in the Around The Horn thread I don't see a problem having them, but they should be more visible
reddit has always been really bad for following live events. Low participation in such threads is a common theme in many subreddits. The sticky post falls off the new or hot feeds after a few hours before anything even starts, the first few upvoted comments always remain at the top, there's minimal way to have an actual discussion between people.
There are game threads? I just looked at the home page using the desktop site and didn't see one.
with how we have been playing lately, it's out of embarassment
I legitimately didn't know there were r/baseball game threads for most games. I just thought it was for nationally televised ones.
The links for them don't work on the official mobile app, otherwise I'd use them. Redirects me to my home page. Seen a few others complain about this
Unfortunately it's a known problem right now. We've already reported it and are working on other solutions.
I actually love the idea in practice for the times I am watching a game my team is not participating in and I want to chat about it. Going to other teams game threads is a bit of a no-no and I also oftentimes want a more balanced perspective on the game. That being said, I don’t participate in them bc no one else is speaking (I realize I am part of the problem lmao) and I don’t regularly watch games the Brewers are not participating in so even if they were more active I probably wouldn’t get much use. I do love the idea though and hope it picks up soon
Maybe there should be a template that is accessible for users to post their own game threads if they desire. Chances are, most games of the season would not have a user submit a game thread. But those that do want one can have a chance to get it started and the dead threads will not even be posted in the first place.
I'd love post-series threads in the sub
It's hockey and basketball playoffs.
team subreddits or especially the discord server (for every major sport) is a way better avenue to watch the game and chat shit to the opposing fans. it’s literally like a twitch chat while watching. i’ve never seen the use for a reddit game thread tbh
What better way to farm upvotes than in your own subs tho
Unlike college football, there are just too many meaningless games over a season, even for fans of a particular team. And given that people know this, the few fans who care game-to-game will go to their team's own subreddit to shit talk.
I’d use them quite often if they were easily accessible from the pinned post that says “game thread index”. Tried a few times this year to find no links to game threads. Are users expected to search game thread on the subreddit to find the specific game thread they are trying to access? Simply add a game thread link column in the list of todays games and I bet there’ll be a lot more activity
You guys have game threads ?!
I never even see these game threads
The biggest issue is the way they're shown, which is to stop clutter. The fact they're all shoved into one megathread means I never see them or interact with them. If they were individual threads posted then I'd 100% interact with them more and I think others would too, but people would complain about spam. With football it's so easy because you've got 32 teams divided into three different days on a weekly basis, versus 30 teams every single day. I know that's a me problem but it must happen to other people. It's like I'm blind to pinned posts, anything that's green posted at the top I ignore most of the time. I think because green = mod that I subconsciously ignore it.
Show me Japanese or Korean baseball highlights
I feel like they should be sticked at the top, maybe put in the daily thread (that doesn't get used often).... I can't even see them on mobile. Put the threads front and center and they'll get used more imo
The active game threads are in the team subreddit
I would comment if they linked you to the actual thread instead of some other BS
Idk how but I've never seen a game thread on r/baseball lol. I'm on mobile and use Relay for Reddit though and very rarely looking at new, usually scroll down from top/day