Over the past couple days you may have noticed that our friendly @shinobu@ani.social had not been posting episode discussion threads. The reasons for this can be traced back to a breaking api change on an external website (see here, here, and here for more info). Well, thanks to the work of @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org , our friendly neighborhood Shinobu is back (sans polls).

However, I thought this might be a good opportunity to gauge the community’s feelings about automated episode discussion posts. The fact of the matter is that our community at !anime@lemmy.ml is not as big or active as the anime subreddit that the bot was designed for. Most of Shinobu’s episode discussion threads spend their whole lives without ever receiving a single comment.

It makes me wonder if, because of the smaller size of our community, should Shinobu not make posts for shows that the people here aren’t really watching/commenting on? Perhaps Shinobu is limited to only posting threads for shows in which the threads have been active? At the moment, there is no automated way of enabling/disabling shows in this way, but it could likely be done manually with some sqlite database tinkering (I say as somebody not running/maintaining the bot).

I am not a mod or the maintainer of the bot, simply an interested party wanting to get others opinions that are active in this community.

  • @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    I like various parts of this proposal, though most of the feedback I’m seeing is that people do generally want proactive threads as long as they’re relevant. The problem is finding a way to continue proactively posting threads in people’s feeds while somehow eliminating the following issues with the current implementation:

    • Too many low-interest series competing for real estate with high-interest series on the community feed
    • Low-interest series not attracting any attention

    Your approach solves the first problem at the expense of severely reducing the discoverability of lower interest series. It seems possible to tweak this proposal in such a way that it solves the original problem without that downside:

    1. Restrict per-episode threads to a secondary community (!episode_discussion@ani.social works, but anywhere else would work just as well)
    2. On a daily basis, post a “Today’s Episode Ratings” thread to the main !anime@lemmy.ml community which will simultaneously act as a directory of what’s airing today & a ranked board showing each individual thread’s current score/ratio/comments
    3. If an episode thread does well one week, then the next episode of that show will have earned the right to get hosted directly on the main !anime@lemmy.ml community feed instead of being hidden away

    I think this achieves a good balance between pruning automated posts and maintaining discoverability. The appeal of using a “Ranking” thread as a link directory like this is that it creates a fertile area for low-spoiler crossover discussions/discovery without sapping interest in visiting each of the high-spoiler individual episode discussion posts linked therein. Furthermore, dangling out the ability to “upgrade” a show like this will serve as a general incentive for engagement across all interest levels while still solving the original problem of fairly determining what should/shouldn’t be promoted on the main community feed.

    • LvxferreEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      When I proposed that idea I might’ve underrated the second issue, but re-reading the thread I think that you’re right - and the tweaks might do the trick.

      Thank you for the reply!