Not really specific to this community, but it's the most-reasonable place I could think of to post this.
Many of us came from Reddit, and created communities to parallel subreddits that we enjoyed there, using the same name. This was straightforward for Reddit expats who were familiar with those communities and immediately knew what content was expected at a community. However, many of these communities don't have a great description telling a new user clearly what the community is about. It's easy to have communities that, at minimum, take digging through posts to understand or just come off as bizarre without that context. And over time, I expect an larger proportion of users who join a community to not be simply coming from an analogous Reddit subreddit, so it'd be better to target users as if they're fresh.
I'd suggest that a good description should let someone understand, preferably in the first sentence or two, basically what the community is about, even if they are coming to the community with no prior relevant knowledge.
Some examples where I think subreddit descriptions are better than the Threadiverse community descriptions, just skimming through my community subscriptions list:
NotTheOnion
!NotTheOnion@lemmy.world
We’re not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
https://old.reddit.com/r/NotTheOnion
For true stories that that you could have sworn were from The Onion.
Please note that we are an editorialized subreddit devoted to showcasing articles that read like satire.
You can probably figure out what's intended from carefully reading the full community description, especially if you know what The Onion is, but the subreddit's description is a lot clearer up-front.
OutOfTheLoop
!OutOfTheLoop@lemmy.world
A community that helps people stay up to date with things going on.
https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/
Have you ever seen a whole bunch of news stories/reddit posts/videos or anything else about some topic and you had no idea what everyone was going on about? Did you feel out of the loop? This subreddit is dedicated to helping you get up to speed with the recent trends and news.
It's not that the community's description is wrong, but it could as well refer to any news source. The subreddit's description makes it pretty clear what is intended.
ShittyLifeProTips
!ShittyLifeProTips@lemmy.world
To a place for the shittiest, most mocking “pro-tips” you can think of. This Community is welcome to anything shitty pro-tip related, such as memes, discussing the best shitty tip, and much more.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ShittyLifeProTips/
A place for the shittiest, most mocking "pro-tips" you can think of. Whether you want to let us know how glue can help out your hair or the quickest way to clog a public toilet, we're the place to post.
WHAT IS A LIFE PRO TIP? A Life Pro Tip (or LPT) is a tip that improves life for you and those around you in a specific and significant way.
LPTs must be shitty. The post must contain a life pro tip that is shitty. This isn't a dumping ground for shitty statements. Any tips that are actual good advice will be removed at the discretion of the mod team. What constitutes shitty is hard to explain, but much like porn, we know it when we see it.
If you don't know what a "pro-tip" is, the community description may leave you confused. The subreddit description doesn't.
Shmups
!shmups@lemmus.org
This is a place on Lemmy to talk about arcade, PC, and console shmups/shoot 'em ups/STGs. (We can talk about other arcade-based/scoring genres too, if you’d like.) All experience levels welcome.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shmups/
Shoot 'em ups!
A Reddit gaming community dedicated to shoot 'em up games. Shoot 'em up, in a general sense, means a 2D sprite-based game with lots of shooting as the primary game mechanic.
The old.reddit.com subreddit
what I usually use
actually has no description at all, but the new Reddit description is going to make it at least somewhat clear what a shmup is for people who might like the video game genre (or potentially like it, if they're just stumbling across the subreddit) but aren't "in" enough to know the technical term is. If you require a user to know what some bit of jargon means to understand your description, you are excluding users who don't know that jargon.
InternetIsBeautiful
!InternetIsBeautiful@lemmy.world
For the beautiful things that make the web webbier
https://old.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/
What to post:
- Single purpose websites.
- Top-level domains.
- Web Tools.
- Minimal or beautifully designed websites.
- Awesome websites that offer a unique service.
The community description is pretty opaque. Maybe one can figure out what's supposed to go there by looking at existing posts, but that's gonna be prone to "drift"
if the last few posts are somewhat off-topic or something. I'm not saying that the subreddit description is ideal, but it's a lot clearer.
TipOfMyTongue
!TipOfMyTongue@lemmy.world
Crowdsource your search for the name of that thing.
https://old.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
Can't remember the name of that movie you saw when you were a kid? Or the name of that video game you had for Game Gear? This is the place to get help.
The community description isn't bad, but I think that the subreddit description is probably better. I don't know how many people know what "croudsourcing" is, and I think that a few examples are a good way to quickly get the idea across.
BuildAPC
!BuildAPC@lemmy.world
[no description]
https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/
Please keep in mind that we are here to help you build a computer, not to build it for you.
I'm not saying that the subreddit's description is ideal, but it sure beats nothing.
Many of the communities that I looked at had what I'd call perfectly fine descriptions. This isn't to criticize Threadiverse communities in general. But I would point out that writing a good community description is one of the lowest-effort things that one can do to help a community grow, and that it's probably a good idea to look at your description from the eyes of a new user who might be stumbling into your community from a random link, has no idea what it's about, and is trying to figure out in the first sentence or two from your community description. Or maybe a user who is browsing the lemmyverse community list and is trying to figure out what your community is about, mostly from that little bit of text. Plus, for lemmyverse.net's little community cards, your full description isn't even visible, so it's really important that a user browsing them can figure things out from the first bit of text in your description. It might be worth just looking at your community description, trying to put yourself in the eyes of a new user who knows nothing about the content involved, and ask "can I clearly understand what this community is about, at least at a basic level, from the first sentence or two?"
Some of the community descriptions were written, I think, by people who were in a rush to get their community up-and-running in the Great Reddit Migration, and understandably, were more concerned about getting things up-and-running quickly for users coming from Reddit. I think that it's understandable, in the circumstances that they were written, to write them for those migrating users. Or just to not worry too much about the descriptions at first. But...that's a while in the past now, and I think that it might be worth, in many cases, taking a second look at community descriptions. It's a very prominent way to indicate what content should be in a community and to help users interested in that content find it, and it's a lot more bang-for-the-buck than moderating out stuff that shouldn't be there or in trying to accrue users for the community by promoting it via posting content or promoting it on communities like !communitypromo@lemmy.ca.
EDIT: Revised my own post to try to make the first bit of text a bit clearer; thanks, @Valmond@lemmy.world.
