this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Before getting to the meat of the content, I wanted to bring people's attention to the newly formed !lightnovels@ani.social community. @NineSwords@ani.social has run this communtiy excellently for a while now over on the ml instance. They are provisionally starting up the community here due to the defederation issues. So, if you want to learn more about where your anime come from, check it out. With that, let's get to the meat of my post this week...
I wanted to give a little bit of a meta update this week rather than talk about shows. There are a couple things that I have been working on or thinking about for the community going forward that I wanted to keep people here in the loop. It isn't something so important or finalized as to devote a whole thread to though, so I have compiled them here instead.
Episode Discussion Threads
I have gotten some feedback that episode discussion threads would be better separated to a different community because some users just want the news/general discussion rather than all the seasonal episodes, like it was prior to the Great Shinobu Outage™ of 2024. So, I wanted to gather some feedback from people here that care enough to read this far. I am not making any decisions until next season at the earliest, this is just to help test the waters of community opinion informally.
I won't give too much of my opinion on these questions so as to not color the feedback. One thing I will say is that, no matter what outcome happens, I am not going to keep a manually updated table of the episode discussion threads again. It has been a lot of work to keep the thread up to date (and I haven't bothered to keep the shinobu posts up to date). I am committing to finishing up this season, but...never again.
Comment Bot
I had a bit of a discussion the other day about how to possibly implement a bot that can be summoned in comment threads to provide links for a series. I have written basically zero code for this so far, but I think it is technically possible to do if the community would find it helpful. Basically the idea would be:
Sousou no Frieren • Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
Links
Is this something that the community would find useful or want? I haven't really poked around the AniList api too much, but I think things like a synopsis would also be possible to include, as well as things like a banner or cover image for the series. If you want to see an example of this on reddit, you can look at /u/Roboragi.
Community Wiki
I know that many of us were/are probably visitors to the /r/anime community on reddit. One of the great resources they have there is the wiki. Things like recommendation pages, watch order pages, and discussion thread index pages have all been things I have used in the past. Is there interest in a wiki being made for this community?
I have a couple wikis that I host for my personal and D&D group use, but wouldn't have too much trouble spinning one up for this community. If so, I plan to make use of the git backend to wiki.js to enable anybody to contribute through github pull requests if they are able. That would also enable some automation to keep things like episode discussion index pages up to date through incorporating that into a bot.
I’d prefer episode discussion here. I love seeing discussions about an episode I just finished. And it seems like this season we’re seeing a bit more activity? To me, this is the most important content I come here for. Perhaps it’d be okay to be separated, but it hardly feels spammy if it’s only for popular shows that most/many people are watching.
Comment bot seems not worth the effort compared to a google search.
Didn’t even know about the old Wiki. I just google that stuff.
Same here I ddin't even know /r/anime had a wiki, but good to know...
Keep them in this community; I'd rather all anime-related content be in one place.
Keep them user generated. Bot-created posts are too spammy, which is why I avoid the episode discussions community.
Personally I won't find it useful, because I can simply search for the series in AniList.
Yes. Documentation (if kept simple) has always been useful (to me at least).
You know, I would love to keep some of the episode discussions here, and I'm having too much fun selecting a screenshot for the episode discussion posts that I make.
BUT Not all shows need to have a episode discussion post, e.g. shows that don't appeal to this /c, such as Pokemon, Sazae-san, or Pon No Michi, and we don't have the volume of original content to quickly push those down to maintain relevant content at the top of the /c
I would also love to have screenshots for the bot-created discussion threads, but of course the bot won't do that for us, so it falls to the mods, which adds to their already heavy workload.
Re: Wiki
It doesn't hurt to explicitly state community rules.
OTOH, I don't think we're large enough and have deep enough user base with enough collective knowledge to justify something like a watch order wiki that won't duplicate what is published elsewhere.
Yeah, I agree about the watch order wiki. I don't think we have any hope or would find much value out of reproducing what exists elsewhere. One area I think we might be able to improve on what exists in /r/anime's wiki is the recommendations. Their recommendations page is frankly, so large and full of so many titles that it stops being very helpful, especially for newcomers to anime. I think some community curation on a recommendation list or a beginner's guide would be worthwhile.
I remember that there was a bot on reddit with a bunch of good aliases that linked to the series on anime list sites.
Someone could fork it and modify it to work with lemmy
https://github.com/Nihilate/Roboragi
I would be interested in a wiki for general purpose recommendations
The bot is defenietely beneficial but I don't know where to post disscussion threads
Forking roboragi is not a bad idea. I am going to have to take a look through the code, but it could be as easy as replacing PRAW with pythorhead so that it listens to/posts to lemmy instead of reddit.
As for discussion threads, right now (and for the rest of this season), you just create a thread in this community. The only rules are:
That's it really. When I see the discussion post in this community, I will add it to the giant table of winter season discussion threads.
Oh so !episode_discussion@ani.social is getting phased out from the sound of it. I'm out of the loop and was curious how that community fit into the picture, this cleared it up, assuming I interpreted correctly.
Yeah, I think it is time. There is a bit of history I could go into about episode discussion threads, but I don't really have a lot of time today. However, that community was initially separated from the main community because there just wasn't enough activity in /c/anime to justify making all those posts here as they would drown out anything else. I think that a couple things have made that problem a lot less worrisome:
I am still figuring out exactly what the model will look like going forward, but I think it is clear from the experiment this season that this community can bear the volume of discussion threads now.
That makes sense to me, a hybrid of /c/anime and series-specific /c/s depending on popularity. That makes more sense than /c/episode_discussion since that's categorized on the type of content, rather than categorized by a community of people interested in it. So I agree with the future vision. Appreciate you taking the time to explain!
So after cooking in my brain overnight, here's my proposal:
Allow users to post links to discussion threads like I have been doing for Dungeon Meshi and Freiren.
As a mod, you might be able to lock the posts to prevent comments, but this is more work for you and so far my results have been good, and users have been following the links to other /C's for discussion.
I haven't tried it yet, but I think we should be able to add a screenshot for such "Link to episode discussion" posts
2a) Conversely, the "link to discussion" posts serve as a reminder of what episodes dropped that day, and are considered by someone to be worth watching.
2b) There's added incentive for user investment in this /c in the race to make the episode discussion link.
I feel gratified by the upvotes for my "Link to episode discussion" posts, even though our users have been well behaved, and no comments have been posted in the link threads. Those valuable Interwebs points...
I have found that the best episode discussion does not always happen in !episode_discussion@ani.social
This is the case of Dungeon Meshi, where the episode posts in !dungeonmeshi@ani.social have been banging!
But I feel Dungeon Meshi the rare case where the show is good enough and has its own good /c
There is a downside in that we won't have a one stop shop to see if we have new comments in the episode discussions. I think this could be a big one.
I propose that !episode_discussions have a liberal mod addition policy, to allow mods to add screenshots to shinobu-generated threads.
Can a mod create a new mod with restrictions, such as to only allow adding images/screenshots to the OP?
This is in order to bring some color to the otherwise bland looking threads.
All of this (and the other comments in this thread) have been valuable feedback. I am thinking about all of this and swirling it around in my brain. I have decided a couple guidelines based on the feedback so far:
I am thinking about the best balance to strike with this. Either something like a bot takes over posting regularly after user-made threads generate some interest, or perhaps the bot doesn't make any posts and instead just monitors posts made by users. This second option would need me to enact some formatting rules on the posts to make sure that threads could be picked up by the bot.
I also like the screenshots that have been used for discussion threads recently. Neither mods or instance admins are able to edit post information one-sidedly, so only the original poster is able to edit the link to be a screenshot. So, if we end up with bot-created posts, I have worked on making sure some art is included. For example, something like the cover image or banner image for a show, both of which are accessible via the AniList api.
I appreciate the ideas and feedback people have had so far. Still lots of thinking to do about this. I have been working on some code for a while now, but it has changed a lot as my thoughts on what I want as an end product change.
I still think keeping episode discussion separate is better, and I like zabadoh's suggestion to let people make link posts from here to the threads. It will reduce the clutter to 0-reply threads here.
But my main concern is having timely discussion posts. I don't always watch episodes immediately, but when I do, sometimes I find that no discussion thread is created yet, and I don't feel like making a new post, looking up all the old posts to link to, properly format it etc. so I just leave and come back in a few days and comment if I still remember to (and still remember what I wanted to say). Call me lazy but however small a barrier you think it is, it is there and I think getting Shinobu repaired will greatly enhance the experience here.
To reiterate, making properly formatted posts with links to previous episodes, is something that can and should be done automatically by bots. To have users manually do it creates a barrier. Ideally either a bot should create posts for every show of the season as soon as an episode is broadcasted in case someone wants to talk about it, or there should be a way to request a bot to create episode discussion posts, to avoid duplicates and/or wrongly formatted posts.
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:
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:
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.
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.
How about this idea for the bot:
For shows voted on:
For shows with no vote initially:
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.