#mylittlepony - #Hiatus in Hindsight

Hiatus in Hindsight

Sup. Since the Hiatus is coming to a close I thought I'd do a postmortem.

I've seen many complaints that content is in a lull and there's nothing to talk about during the hiatus so the main goal of my decrees was to give the subreddit a bit of a boost. I think I had mixed results here but in general I'd call it a success.

One of the things I was most paranoid about was taking over the subreddit. The goal was to add content, not to replace it or crowd it out. Some of the more popular weeks (like this last week) I feel might have crossed the line but in general I think we did great here.

The biggest challenge is walking the thin line between too narrow of a topic and too broad. Either end winds up in less people posting. There's lots of topic requests that I think would be interesting to see what people come up with but wouldn't have enough to them to last more than a day or two.

I tried to incorporate other pony communities or activities in my decrees, but this largely fell through. Originally I was talking with /r/mlpdrawingschool about combining weekly themes but decided after a bit that what made for good posting themes didn't necessarily make for good drawing themes. I also tried to work around Equestria Daily's pony celebration days but this was difficult because I often didn't know about them far in advance and often didn't have a good theme to go with them.

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Week by Week

• Costumes: Opening week here, right on Halloween! I picked a softball theme to start things off and picked Costumes, since a lot of people would already be posting those. The downside to this is that I had no idea if anyone was participating because of the decree or just posting normally.
• Fluttershy: I was originally planning on doing a pony focused week every couple of weeks and started with Fluttershy. However once again I have no idea how much was posted as part of the decree vs how much was normal sub activity, but in general I didn't see much Flutters this week. I decided at this point that we needed both more visabilty and more specific themes for people to follow.
• Snuggles: This was a week requested by Heir-of-Rick, and who can say no to him? In order to increase visibility I moved the Decree to NPT and encouraged people to add tags to their posts. I actually think the tags did far more than the Decree move, so maybe in the future I'll go back to Monday through Monday or something. This week was far more successful than the previous ones so I decided to use it as the template for future weeks.
• Socks vs Sweaters: I think adding some silly arbitrary competition made this way more fun. I actually contacted the mods and got some custom flairs made for this week, but that kind of flopped. For one thing the flairs came late due to some miscommunication errors on my part, and they weren't really advertised outside the Decree. Also they didn't look all that different from standard cutie mark flairs so I think they mostly went unnoticed. I definitely want to do this week again (or something like it) next time, hopefully with more visibility and some more friendly trash talking.
• Family: I wasn't wanting to entirely give up on Pony centric weeks, so I figured I'd work them in to other themes. This week Equestria Daily was also doing Applejack Day, and as well as being Thanksgiving I figured I'd roll Applejack in with one of her main themes: family! We had a lot more variety than just Applejack as well, and AJ actually kind of took the sidelines.
• Combat: Easily one of the more popular weeks. A theme that a lot of people can recall specific favorites but not too restrictive, and a good change of pace from the normal sub posts.
• Sleep: I wanted to do sleepover week but figured that was too narrow in scope, so I combined Sleeping and Sleepovers! Pretty standard week, nothing of note.
• Royal Sisters: Timed on the Winter Solstice (for the Northern hemisphere) or the longest night of the year, I figured it would be the perfect week for Luna. But I was still wary of solo pony weeks so I threw in Celestia to boot. I figured that having it focus on two ponies would provide enough content for a week, but I was expecting primarily solo Luna or Celestia pics. To my surprise most of the pics were of BOTH the princesses together, even though that was a more restrictive theme. The takeaway from this is that more specific themes give people a better starting point for finding and posting things. It's a thin line to walk, not being too specific or too general.
• Hearthswarming: So this week was notable because I was contacted by FlaminScribblenaut beforehand, asking if I could help promote their new sub /r/happyhearthswarming. This made me start thinking of not only providing content to the main sub but also the myriad of other pony subs that don't get nearly as much attention as they deserve. I started keeping what subs the themes could be crossposted to in mind, but I think I didn't do enough here. In the future I'll be sure to pimp other subs more.
• Party: Hey look, Pinkie week conveniently bundled with New Years! Overall this was a pretty standard week, not much of note.
• Filly: One of the weeks I had in my backlog for a long time. This is one that I remember thinking would be a huge success but only turned out OK. Not sure how I should have promoted it differently.
• Non-Pony: I'd had a lot of requests for Griffon Week, Changeling Week, Dragon Week, etc, and I felt all of those were too narrow in scope individually. Rolled together though they made for a really good week. Equestria Daily also had Spike Day scheduled for this week so it felt like a good time for it.
• Summer in January: I really wanted to do a Beach week but it just wouldn't fit into the appropriate time schedule (for Northern hemisphere) so I shoehorned it in this way. Wasn't nearly as big a success as I had hoped. Also the mods mentioned to me that this week was rather polarizing from the perspective of what content rating people expect from the sub - lots of people took exception to the swimsuit pics, and others made lots of lewd comments stating they wanted even more. Fun times for the mods I'm sure.
• Gala: I think in the future if I do a similar week I'll change the name, as it was originally intended for all things formal attire and not just the Grand Galloping Gala. This went on this particular week because it was tangentially related to Equestria Daily's Rainbow Dash Day (dressing in style, etc) but it was kind of forced.
• Stallion: I really wanted to do this near Valentines day so we could hype up the "beefcake" angle of the male pony population. This week kind of flopped though.
• Alternative Ships: I'll be honest, I was expecting the sub to get flooded with shipping pics around this time and this was my way of passively aggressively fighting against that. There weren't that many sappy romance pics though so it was a false alarm. At this point the mods made me start sticking the "I'm not affiliated!" footer on my decrees because they started getting complaints about all the "troll" decrees "ruining" the sub. I decided to tone things down a little in response.
• Future: A often requested week, Future week went over OK but not nearly as well as I was expecting with how hyped people were for it.
• OCs: Original Characters get a real bad wrap sometimes. Well a lot of them deserve it honestly, but there's a lot of good ones out there that I don't feel should be dragged down with the rest. This week was to highlight some of the better ones as well as a good excuse to get back into promoting other subs.
• Ponies Around the World: Another one of those weeks that was made by combining a bunch of requests together. It saw a lot of pretty fun posts and I'm pretty happy with it.
• Adopt a Subreddit: 10/10, would decree again.
• Crossover: I was expecting this to be a lot more kooky than it actually was. Probably a good thing. Another very popular week.
• Madness: Putting the Hiatus in Hiatus. The Hiatus is normally known for all it crazy goofiness and I hadn't seen much of that, so I put in this week to compensate. I had actually offered to mods to do this on the week of April Fools, and then for the joke I would take over the sub and screw with the CSS. As they had other April Fools plans I did this earlier so as to not interfere with whatever they were doing.
• Supporting Cast: I was originally going to do a Character a Day here like I did for the following week, but I couldn't decide on what characters. Spike? CMC? Starlight? Celestia and Luna? New characters from Season 6? Most had already had spotlight days already, and I was down one day to work with because I didn't want to conflict with whatever the sub was doing for April Fools. In the end I was too ambiguous and did "Supporting Cast", and this week flopped because of it.
• Mane 6: Well now we have a new reigning champ for most popular week. Holy cow there were a lot of posts, probably too many. I like the character focus days but having 6 in a row is too many, I'll spread them out next time.

Submitted April 13, 2017 at 11:42AM by PrincessOfTheHiatus
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