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