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.
All spoilers must be tagged!
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:
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:
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.
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!
And thank you for the very original suggestion! The more ideas going around the better the brainstorm