1 yr. ago • 98%

(CONCLUDED) VOTE: Help decide the future of the Episode Discussion thread bot!

strawpoll.ai How do you feel regarding the CURRENT impact of automated episode discussions? (1 = Mostly Negatively / 3 = No opinion / 5 = Mostly Positively) | StrawPoll.ai

Create a poll with our free online poll maker.

Poll Link: https://strawpoll.ai/poll/vote/thKiWOAMaJfQ

Background

Hello! I am the maintainer of @shinobu@ani.social. Shinobu is the !anime@lemmy.ml community bot responsible for posting episode discussion threads whenever new anime episodes air (example).

The goal of the above survey is to begin the process of establishing a community consensus for how Shinobu should be updated in order to best fit the needs of our community. The content of the survey is based upon the comments and suggestions fielded from this recent discussion on the topic.

Please note that the survey is planned to run until October 16th @ 12:00PM EDT. My goal is to honor the results of the poll however they may turn out, granted that the aforementioned results are accepted as reasonable and legitimate by the community at large.

As always, thanks for being a member of the community and doing your part to make it special! ❤️

9 comments

The main thing I've been seeing is that since it just picks up every airing series, it can create spam of the same series which is releasing multiple episodes at once. As well as posting discussion threads which routinely get 0 votes and 0 comments on them even after days from being posted due to being an extremely niche show.

13
- This will be a good thing to watch out for with the upcoming Apothecary Diaries. To make sure it only creates 1 post for the 3 episodes that will air together, instead of 3 separate ones.
  
  1
- I think at least some people do not watch every episode that is released ASAP, so having multiple threads for multiple episodes that are released at once is useful for not spoiling the latter episodes, so that's not spamming IMO.
  
  That said, even on Reddit where there were more users, those multiple-episode-at-once (or whole series-at-once like netflix) animes tends to get lower discussion participation, especially the episodes in the middle so I understand where you are coming from.
  
  1
I don't watch currently airing seasons. I wait for a season to complete before watching them.

I have two concerns for a general anime community:

I don't want to be spoiled - which is not always obviously evadeable on clips, images, and memes

I'm not interested in first-airing episode discussion threads - the number of episodes airing means other anime general discussion and content gets driven out/back

(I don't think I've seen that many episode discussion threads in my feed though(?).)
5
i believe once more people gets active the better it becomes for everyone.

5
There's still a few shows that the bot is missing, for me it's Hirogaru Sky and Otona Precure but I assume that's are others.

Personally my request is for the episode polls to not require a reddit login.

Thanks for your work!

4
- I can speak as to what is likely the cause for Hirogaru being missing as I have messed around with the bot's code a bit. Hirogaru is listed as a Winter 2023 show (ref). I doubt the instance of holo that is posting here has loaded the winter 2023 shows. That would likely cause a deluge of posts of old episodes/shows that would need cleaning up. I don't think it is very easy to just load one show and have it ignore the previously released episodes.
  
  As for Otona, sometimes there are shows that the bot seems unable to find reliably. Another example from this season would be Tearmoon as it never made a thread yesterday for it. The bot works by scraping a bunch of streaming sites and a public torrent tracker for newly episode listings, so it can sometimes miss stuff if the formatting of a site changes or if there is an unexpected naming convention of a show.
  
  Full disclosure, the reason I am somewhat familiar with how the bot works is that I have been tinkering around with the code to try to improve some of these things. The bot was originally made for r/anime almost a decade ago, so there are now much better apis available.
  
  EDIT: I just loaded the winter shows on a local copy of holo and it was able to pick up Hirogaru, but still not Tearmoon or Otona.
  
  5
I unfortunately didn't see the thread until after the poll was closed, so I wasn't able to participate. Personally, I like the way the threads are now, although I wish they were a little bit busier. I'm trying to be the change I want to see by commenting on shows that may have 0 comments, and upvoting (what's the proper Lemmy term for that) all the shows I'm watching. I don't watch shows until the evening time, but I really enjoy coming on here the morning after and seeing if anyone else is watching/commenting.

I checked out the other thread, and wasn't really a huge fan of any of the other ideas. The closest one I could get behind was the single post per day for all the shows, which would cut down on the number of threads, but would probably be a barrier to participating in that you'd have to remember what day your show was on and may have to wade through comments on shows you're not watching/get spoiled. Anything other than the way it is now would probably lower participation, in my opinion.

3
You should probably have made some of the questions optional -- "distribute a 100 points" is just not something I'm going to bother thinking about.

2

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