Trying Something New: Reddit Q&A for May 17th Livestream

Because reddit has good community democracy tools to vote up and down posts, we're trying something new for next week's Q&A. This does not mean we'll always do it this way, but we need to find ways to make the LiveStream Q&A more usable. This is an attempt at that.

The forums will continue to be our primary place to discuss things with you all day to day. This is JUST for the LiveStream, as Q&A has continued to be a problem, and reddit is a place we already have an active presence and strong community.

Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/planetaryan..._livestream_may_17th_2013_qa_session_will_be/

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We're not giving a lot of detail about the next LiveStream yet, but here's a place to discuss and ask questions in advance. Questions placed before end of day Thursday will be compiled, and we will answer all that we can in the time we have.
We want to try and use reddit as the source of Q&A questions. Obviously it means the things we show that day will be impossible to ask about, but I'm going to encourage all of the community to come here to ask questions, vote on the best, so we can easily bubble up the questions people most want to hear. Short and concise questions will be given preference.

- We will use this post as show Q&A questions
- We will place (or use someone else's) post as a post show Q&A
- If a question gets a ton of votes, and we can't answer it yet, it will get a boilerplate "We can't discuss this yet". We hope not to do that much, but.. game dev is what it is. If we're not ready, we're not ready.

Sucks for those not on Reddit then?

Mike

That is a problem, though being on reddit requires less info than an UberNet account.

Good idea. Maybe you could even let people ask questions on it while the stream is online. You would just need to get enough people to vote on good questions while watching. Dunno if that can work, but it's worth a try.

@Mike: Making an account probably takes less than 5 Minutes. Considering how much time you are committing to the forums I would be surprised if that is a problem for you.

Nobody ever does QA's on /v/.

(just kidding you'd probably get banned for advertising)

Reasoning for trying this:
- Making an account on reddit is easy, and a great many people probably already do
- They already have the tools needed to try and allow for a democractic mode of getting the most popular community questions answered
- reddit is multiple orders of magnitude larger than our own forums, so it means more than just the people we talk to every day have a chance to be heard
- We hope to get our own forums to have some tools like this, but that's more work on top of an already heavily loaded team, just to update phpBB to a newer version and then on top of that need to find a way to hierarchically thread and upvote/downvote questions.

Damnit, you just made me snort my coffee.

Just curious, it doesn't really effect me, I don't have a reddit account and don't have any burning questions that you guys could answer at this point! ;p

Mike

Have you guys been using the chat cooldown on twitch? It kinda sucks that questions won't be relevant to the latest content...

Seems smart for those standard questions that aren't related to the stream (the majority of them apparently). And the upvote system is pretty good for this, even though it relies heavily on the snowball effect I think.

I'd still do a few questions in the chat though, about the actual content of the stream. Just somehow filter it? Shame that it's always spammed to hell and back.

Will investigate, as that could help a lot!

Anything for you, babe.

http://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/a ... n-commands

I think you're going to get better and more pointed questions with Reddit.
However, it won't be directly related to the Stream...

The Reddit Q&A format typically works better for a video response instead of a livestream.

One thing you could do is have the questions come in, and every few days, post up a new video response.
That would help keep momentum going for you guys too?

I would recommend telling people at the very beginning of the stream to visit the forums. It might get a few people not to ask questions about factions.

Just a side note since I don't have reddit and don't really plan on getting it, but is it possible that we might just see some livestreams of 30 mins of gameplay or close ups of some units? I would just love that.

Hanging out on the forums truly does jade one somewhat. We know all there is to know already

...

Unless Neutrino will tell me a little more about Progenitors... and why the 2nd backer Commander is named after them. Eh?

Actually if they were to setup an irc chat for their twitch channel they would gain much more control over the chat. They could do stuff like typing a certain word will highlight what that person typed. So say like typing the word question highlights it so "Question: Do you like pie?" on their irc chat that would be in say red text and normal chatter says normal. This way questions stand out more. Also the irc will not auto scroll like the twitch chat does.

Also adding a chatbot could help out as well. They add lots more chat commands and other functions like auto purging spam messages or inappropriate links

I'm not denying any of this...

Though, built in chat commands probably require the least effort

Chatbot's have built in commands. All you do is go to the bot's Twitch channel and type in it's chat "go to channel" or something to that effect and BAM! Chatbot in your chats. The most used bot is http://www.twitch.tv/nightbot

Y'know, these are all some good ideas. May I suggest that if you think you've got a good idea on managing the chat, that you set up an example with some clear instructions on how to replicate the effort?

I imagine that something where garat can A) look at the idea and B) have clear instructions for quick setup would put the idea much closer to the realm of 'we can try this out'

The Nightbot Twitch channel has the needed info for it in the channels info section under the video.

[Edit]
I think a combination of both would be best. They'll most likely get more detailed Question and Answers using the Reddit giving Uber time to prepare beforehand. As well as using the chat to get on the spot live question based off the live stream. What could also help for the youtube archive is to use what ever broadcast software they are using to screen capture the chat and the Reddit questions and overlay them in the video. That way when watching the archives you don't miss out on any of the information.