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.
All spoilers must be tagged!
That's a good point! Now that I realize the spoiler implications... I'm suddenly a lot less happy with the original concept. With that being said, I don't feel that leaving it up to a pre-season poll is an ideal solution either. Lots of strong-looking shows drop off hard and lots of the season's best start out as dark horses -- most of the time, I think that we'd end up preventing more active discussions than we'd actually be bringing back. Theoretically, we could try to solve this with a recurring poll, but I'm skeptical of doing that because: A) poll participation suffers from selection bias & B) flooding the feed with repeated poll threads would be even worse than simply sending out a bunch of empty discussion threads.
I apologize for claiming to be open to thoughts and then immediately shooting down that one... so let me at least conjure up an important takeaway from it: the best possible solution to the problem is one that -- no matter which show you choose -- you can still find a place discuss the latest episode of it somewhere. I think that's important because it keeps us out of the business of gatekeeping and creates the kind of cross-pollination opportunities that many of us want out of an online anime community (i.e.: you can discover cool shows as they're airing because fans are talking about it in the same shared space).
With that being said, if I had to structure an ordered list of priorities, it'd look like this:
I like the idea of merging threads because it boosts objectives 2 & 3, but objective 1 takes precedence. Could we somehow have our cake and eat it too? For example: /r/anime has their spoiler corner subthreads which start autocollapsed. Lemmy doesn't support this (yet), but perhaps there are alternative solutions if we get clever enough?
I agree that a poll isn't the most ideal, but it's the simplest I feel like. Overcomplicating it is even less ideal.
This I don't agree with. It's not like people aren't allowed to make their own threads. If it seems like there's a sleeper hit, and user created episode threads for said hit are very active and reoccuring, then automate it. Of course, that requires a pretty active someone to keep a lookout for that.
Why would it be flooded? You don't have to do the poll that frequently. If you redo the poll midway through the season, wouldn't that be enough? Or maybe after about 3-4 weeks, when for most anime, 3-4 episodes should be out.
Feel free to disagree, but multiple people in the thread have said that they're not interested in creating threads manually even when they have something to discuss -- also keep in mind that these are statements coming from community members who self-selected their way into this meta thread in the first place!
Because poll turnout is generally low, it will take multiple polling drives over time in order to assemble a representative sample. It is true that a representative sample isn't strictly necessary, but the less accurate the polling, the less aligned the resulting outcome will be with what community members actually want.
I'm just speaking for myself now, but I don't think the current situation is so dire that making a change should be considered strictly mandatory. The perfect may indeed be the enemy of the good... but we already have a half-good option. Any chosen alternative needs to be demonstrably gooder.
In any case, I think we're ultimately of the same mind about what makes a good solution; all other things being equal, the chosen solution should be made as simple as reasonably possible. Superfluous bells & whistles will only compromise the odds of success, after all! With that being said, could I get your thoughts on this modified proposal? I like it a fair amount, but it still strikes me as somewhat clunky... I'd love to get your eyes on it for a second opinion if you have the time
Not to come across too stubborn or unwilling, but yeah, that solution doesn't seem great either. Honestly, I like it less than your original suggestion. 2 communities just for anime? That seems like a good way to splinter the community that's already small and way too convoluted for newcomers. I wouldn't want to watch 2 spaces for anime.
Honestly, keeping it the way it is would be better. It's only really an issue if the bot, API or whatever has an outage or bug.