Over the past couple days you may have noticed that our friendly @[email protected] 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 @[email protected] , 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 [email protected] 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.
This is the first season to start after I moved to lemmy and I have been disappointed at how inconsistent the discussion posts have been, and have mostly stopped checking for them. I agree with others that discussion threads for every episode of every anime would become a lot of clutter, but I personally would not really engage if the discussion threads were preemptively trimmed down to just the most popular shows (I watch an episode of everything and I think it’s fun to talk about the weird quirks of the shows no one really likes).
I feel like a decent compromise would be to have the bot stop posting if no one is engaging with the posts (maybe 2 posts in a row with no/low engagement means the bot drops the show?), with a weekly miscellaneous thread for anything that got dropped or somehow missed or people working through their backlogs or whatever else
I know I can be a bit bad about posting instead of just lurking (i’m sure others can relate lol), but if the discussion threads were consistent and predictable I would be much more inclined to push myself to do my part by posting some thoughts even if they seem trivial, to try and get some discussion going
| feel like a decent compromise would be to have the bot stop posting if no one is engaging with the posts (maybe 2 posts in a row with no/low engagement means the bot drops the show?
I like this idea, cause it feels more organic than putting a hard limit on any show. Every show deserves a chance to have someone be watching it and discussing it instead of just the popular stuff. And this same setting scales up easily if the discussion posts take off here compared to limiting discussion to just the top 15-20 shows others have mentioned.
Plus it also works if a show is overhyped and people drop it like ep4, then the system would stop posting at Ep6 due to lack of discussion.