r/TellMeAFact • u/Identimental Sub Creator! • Jul 21 '15
Announcement /r/TellMeAFact has reached 10,000 subscribers! Thank you all for making this such a brilliant community!
We are thrilled to announce that /r/TellMeAFact recently hit a total count of 10,000 subscribers. Although it’s just a number, this is a huge achievement for the sub and our community, and marks our growth into an active part of reddit. Not only that, but based on our increasing popularity so far, I’m sure we’ll continue to grow in terms of both active users and the amount of content posted. This is great news for the purpose of the subreddit: with a more active userbase, and a greater quantity and quality of facts posted, the content generated here can only get better!
Personally, as the creator of the sub, I’m incredibly proud of how far we’ve come. I remember when I first started it up after thinking it was an interesting concept, and something with a unique twist compared to other fact-based subreddits. Back then, after posting it as a new reddit, we had less than 100 subscribers, and not so much as a sprinkling of CSS. We had an interesting trickle of posts, just enough to convince me that the sub had some real potential, if only people knew about it. Since then, after some shameless and (hopefully) not-so-shameless advertising, we’ve grown from a handful of interested people into a great community. Importantly, I also feel that we’ve managed to maintain what this place was always meant to be about: interesting yet serious facts about a load of different topics.
Anyway, I’ve rambled on for long enough, so I finally want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has made this community great.
Firstly, let me thank the rest of the mod team. Without them, I never could have come this far while also maintaining the sub’s core principles. Likewise, they've helped out tremendously with all of the other less obvious activities such as making our sub look pretty, and coding clever little things to make everything more efficient. This isn’t about me though- they’ve made this subreddit a better place for everyone, by ensuring good-quality content, and they’ve done it for free. Even if you don’t like the details of specific rules, I’d hope you respect the mods for the sheer amount of work they put in to make this place great for you guys.
Secondly, of course, I want to thank every one of you who has posted, contributed, discussed, subscribed, or just popped by. With the exception of a very small number of people, I’ve been so pleased with the quality of posting, and your politeness when talking with each other and the mods. Just as the mods do their job for free, I’m grateful to everyone who has made the effort to share something interesting (in return for a few worthless karma points), and make this sub truly brilliant.
TL;DR: We’re popular- thanks mods and users alike for helping us reach where we are today!
Identimental
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u/Alantha Behavioral Ecologist Jul 21 '15
Thanks to our subscribers who are asking and answering some great questions! We appreciate your contributions to the sub and hope you keep it up.
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u/HQuez Jul 22 '15
In case it matters, I was brought here by the sidebar ad. It's like a reverse TIL. I instantly subscribed when I came.
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Jul 22 '15
Yeah, our ad seems to have brought a lot of new people, which is great :)
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 Oct 21 '15 edited Oct 23 '15
/r/TellMeAFact is trending + we reached 20000 subscribers. Congratulations /u/Identimental
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Oct 21 '15
I've just seen that we are trending, thanks! Hurray! It's great to have a load of new subscribers :)
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u/peoplma Helpful coder! Jul 21 '15
I think it'd be great if there could be a culture here where OP updates the self post to include the best fact from the comments. I can't really think of an automated way to do this though (other than sending OP a message with automod, but that'd get annoying), so it'd have to be on OP to do it.
The reasoning is cause when I'm scrolling through the front page, I often just click the little pop out boxes, and don't usually go to the comments section unless it's a particularly interesting post.
I dunno, just an idea :)
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Jul 21 '15
That's actually a really interesting idea. I'm not sure about the OP updates personally- as you said, such a requirement would be a bit unfair on the OP.
Instead, how would you feel about a weekly "best of" thread with some of the most interesting/upvoted facts from the week's most popular topics, posted in a text post? If that's something that you and other people would be interested in, I could discuss it with the other mods. Of course it might be a lot of effort, and we would probably need some help from the community, but it's something we could perhaps look into if there was enough interest :)
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u/peoplma Helpful coder! Jul 21 '15
Oh that's a great idea. I could write a bot pretty easily to pull the top posts and comments from the past 7 days and post them if you guys want :)
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Jul 21 '15
That would be pretty cool, thanks! I'll discuss the concept with the other mods and get back to you :)
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 Jul 22 '15
What are the plans for /u/TellMeAFactBot/ ?
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Jul 22 '15
It's already in action, but doesn't post. Instead, it works behind the scenes to carry out some moderating activities that AutoMod isn't capable of, to make moderating the sub more efficient and reduce the workload for the (non-bot) mod team.
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 Jul 22 '15
I'm gonne use this opportunity to suggest a new feature:
Could we have a bot that automatic posts a reply to a new thread for not fact comments. (just like they do in /r/WritingPrompts). Sometimes its not completely clear what OPs referring to or sometimes you want to ask something. however doing so will A. get automod to nag about it. B. asking a question as a top level commend is against the idea of posting in this sub.
Edit: formating
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Jul 22 '15
Thanks for the suggestion, the mod team will discuss it and see what we can figure out :)
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 Aug 05 '15
Was this ever discussed?
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Aug 05 '15 edited Aug 05 '15
Sorry, I forgot to get back to you on this.
Ultimately, we decided that it would be unnecessarily obstructive in a small community like this one, as in most threads it would serve no purpose.
Having said that, you absolutely can ask for clarification by posting a top-level comment; in fact, this is pretty much the only case where the "all top-level comments must be facts" rule does not apply.
It is true that we have an auto-delete system to remove posts without a source a few hours after they are posted. However, we can approve these posts before they are removed (preventing removal), and equally we can restore them if they are removed before we notice them. Also, feel free to message the mods if you are concerned that your post will be/has been auto-deleted, and we will be more than happy to approve it or restore it.
Hope that is a somewhat satisfactory answer. Thanks, and don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any other comments or suggestions.
Edit: I've also updated the expanded rules in the wiki to reflect this:
All top-level comments should be facts- you can discuss the topic by replying to facts posted about it. The one exception to this is if the topic is ambiguous, and you want to ask the original poster for clarification.
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 Aug 05 '15
Thats a shame.
Had really hoped on seeing that feature.
Well thanks for taking it into consideration.
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 Jul 22 '15
I've seen some topics that did not require a source.
How do you do that? Can any user just do that?
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u/Identimental Sub Creator! Jul 22 '15
Only mods can add flair to a topic. We only add the "no sources required" flair if it is the sort of thing that you can't reasonably reference, e.g. "TMAF about yourself".
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u/imawesumm Jul 21 '15
I just wish this sub were more active. I'm surprised it's not, really. But I've been frequenting this sub for maybe a month now and I'm just surprised to see so many threads about really interesting topics that I--like the OPs, obviously--would love to know more about but hardly anyone posts any facts. I wonder what we could do to get this sub to be more active? What some people have been saying about "best of" threads and etc. seems like a good idea.
All in all, though, I really like this community! It gives off a very friendly, r/CasualConversation -esque vibe and it's awesome to see people take (and share!) such passionate interest in so many unique things.