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Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [Week 7] (ani.social)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by wjs018@ani.social to c/anime@ani.social

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A new Monday means it is a new general discussion thread. We are at or near the halfway point of the season for most of the winter shows. I plan on dedicating next week's thread to a midterm report of sorts, so look forward to it! In the meantime, please use this thread to talk about what you have watched recently, any questions you might have, recommendations, or whatever else strikes your fancy. Like usual, a couple examples:

Are there any shows with more suggestive eyecatches than Bravern?
Is Metallic Rouge some elaborate experiment to see how long an audience will watch pretty nonsense?
Is Kensuke from Dungeon Meshi basically a Pokemon that Laios uses to fight?

As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).

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[–] wjs018@ani.social 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Thanks, this is great feedback. I completely appreciate the issues you raise about timeliness and the barrier to creating posts.

As I have been getting more feedback, both in this thread and in PMs, I have been really torn on the issue of separating threads to a separate community. I think that the two solutions I am kicking around right now are to either:

Separate discussions back to a separate community and be either bot or user created. Not sure yet the details here, but it would let people that don't want to see discussion threads to stay subbed to this community without clogging up their feed with seasonal threads.
Keep discussions in this community, but only allow discussion threads to be posted by a single bot account. This lets users just block that user or all bots and they don't see the threads. Meanwhile, people that are interested in the discussion threads will see them.

A key part of this is that I have an upgraded version of shinobu that I have been working on and is pretty much ready to implement (it's been working well on a test instance I host). I am planning on letting this season run as-is, but plan to put the upgraded bot into use by next season in some form. Some key features I have tried to improve on over the current shinobu:

It uses the AniList api to know exactly when a show airs. So, it will be much more reliable and prompt when it comes to timing of discussion thread posts (no more shows that just can't be found or are found days/weeks later randomly).
It can keep track of the engagement with previous episodes. So, if a show isn't generating user engagement (upvotes/comments), it can stop posting threads for the show. I need to think of a process by which a show can be re-enabled, but this should help dramatically cut down the number of threads that languish with 0 comments.
(Not fully implemented yet) A summary post that can be pinned to the community that has all the most recent discussion threads that have been made. This lets users go to one post and scan the list of shows and pick out the one they are looking for.

Another idea I had recently after this round of feedback was having a bot that parses any newly user-created threads to match it to a show/episode # to create a comment in that thread with the show information and past discussion links. That takes the burden off the post creator to keep track of all that. They would just need to follow some simple post title/body formatting so that the bot can parse it. It would basically be that the post title needs to have Episode # and then the AniList link to the show would need to be in the post body. That's it. The bot would make a comment that has all the past comment threads for the show as well as things like relevant links, alternative names, etc.

[–] 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip 2 points 8 months ago

Hmm, putting it very narrowly, I'm happy if I come here and there is a discussion thread for the episode I want to talk about ready.

Going from there, my thinking is, if we want to grow the community, having a discussion thread ready for every episode for every show of the season, will be able to accommodate every potential new person like "me".

However, a season can have 40 shows or more, that means 40+ posts per week, and for the current community size perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of them will have no engagement an clutter up this community.

I think the clutter wouldn't bother me but I can see it might make the community look less attractive.

I said I prefer a separate episode discussions community because I thought it is one solution to the clutter, but on second thoughts I don't feel too strongly about this.

Another solution you seem to be considering is simply not have a discussion thread if nobody wants it, which would be effective in reducing clutter, but as you know the hard part is how do you tell.

No matter what you decide, just want you to know your work is appreciated.

[–] 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zip 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

How about this idea for the bot:

x weeks before a new season, post a list of shows and have people vote on shows they'll watch.
every show that gets >1 vote will have discussion thread created by the bot weekly.
bot will stop creating threads for shows that have no engagement for y consecutive weeks.
have some way to restart shows after they are suspended (e.g. have user PM the bot with some command)
when shows are started mid-season or restarted, the first thread created will be discussion for all previously omitted episodes, like this:

For shows voted on:

First 4 weeks, bot creates discussion threads for ep.1, 2, 3, 4
bot stop due to no engagement
somebody requests restart when ep 7 aired
bot creates one discussion thread for ep. 5-7
next week, bot creates discussion thread for ep. 8

For shows with no vote initially:

First 3 weeks, no discussion thread
somebody requests show when ep 4 aired
bot creates one discussion thread for ep 1-4
next week, bot creates discussion thread for ep. 5

This is so we don't have several low-traffic threads (in the first example ep 5, 6, 7 threads when only 1 person requested, probably to talk about ep 7) created at the same time, but still have a place to discuss every episode when people pick up a show mid-season.