tl;dr Starting next season (April), episode posts will be bot-created to enable easier filtering for those that don't want to see them. Only shows with active engagement from users will have threads.
This week is a meta comment, so for those that just want to talk about anime, feel free to ignore this comment and make your own. I wanted to provide a follow-up to this community about the ongoing discussions surrounding episode discussion threads. I have gotten a lot of feedback on the issue and have mostly settled on an approach going forward.
The Feedback I Received
I initially asked for feedback from people in the Week 7 thread and got some great replies in that thread with input. I then followed in the Week 8 thread saying that people should feel free to send me a private message with feedback if they don't feel comfortable posting publicly. I got loads of feedback from people. This number grew higher at certain points, but I was having trouble keeping up with the volume of messages, so I stopped screenshotting it:
Boiling down the feedback I got, I would broad-strokes summarize it like this:
- About 2/3 of users are happy to see the episode discussion threads brought into the main anime community here rather than having them be separated out like they were pre-2024 (and still are for some shows).
- The remaining 1/3 of users primarily want to use this community for the other types of posts here (news, discussion, reviews, clips, etc.) Some of them even told me they have unsubscribed from the community due to the user-created episode discussion threads in the community this past season.
- Most users were not comfortable with or not willing to overcome the barrier of creating episode discussion posts manually and would only engage with them once they had already been made by somebody else.
- Almost everybody didn't like how most threads in [email protected] had zero comments and little/no engagement from the community. There are many reasons this may be the case, but the end result of a mostly barren community was not ideal.
Thank you everybody for all the feedback I have gotten over the past couple weeks! Nothing I am about to detail in this next section is 100% final, so if you have additional feedback, feel free to reach out however you feel comfortable. That can be either a reply to this comment, a lemmy private message, or I have also been hanging out on the [email protected] discord server.
Tentative Plan Starting Next Season
I have tried to incorporate feedback from everybody and balance the different priorities that were expressed to me as best I could. So, with that out of the way, the main takeaways are that...
- Starting with next season, episode discussion posts are going to be allowed in this community
- However, they will only be allowed to be posted by a specific bot account rather than any user
The move to a single account making all the posts allows that 1/3 of users that don't want to see them to simply block that account and get back to the community that they want without preventing that 2/3 of users from having the threads they want. Making it a bot means that episode threads are made timely and with a consistent format, including links to all previous discussions; a big barrier to user-created posts that was often expressed to me.
I have been hard at work on the codebase for the new bot and it is mostly working already on a test instance I run. The bot will work quite differently in some respects than the shinobu that we all know and love from the episode_discussion community. The changes have been made with a couple goals in mind:
- To make posting much more reliable than shinobu by using the AniList api for episode airtimes
- To minimize making episode discussion threads that nobody engages with/comments in
- Lots of quality-of-life improvements over shinobu that make it easier to run/maintain in an ongoing manner for me.
I am going to end this comment here. If you want to read on about some more details about the bot, interacting with it, and how it works, I will reply to this comment with a bunch of nitty-gritty details.