[Meta] Automated Episode Discussion Posts

Over the past couple days you may have noticed that our friendly @shinobu@ani.social 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 @chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org , 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 !anime@lemmy.ml 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.

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36 comments

Maybe find a way to consolidate a bit and post one thread for each day's or even each week's episodes? That would reduce the number of threads while still allowing an opportunity to comment on everything. Of course, that would probably require major modifications of the bot.
I find the unanswered threads a very minor irritant (in other words, if you hadn't broached the subject, I wouldn't have bothered saying anything—in a perfect world, I'd prefer not to have them, but it's no big deal).
- It would certainly require a major rework or a new bot entirely, but I made this thread for brainstorming ideas and getting peoples' opinions. This isn't a bad idea, though I think it might run into incidental spoiler exposure similar to another idea in this thread. I like the idea though of consolidating many threads into a periodic megathread of some kind. Weekly makes sense to me, similar to the airing page on anichart.
  
  I think that a weekly thread that populates replies automatically as new episodes come out would be a good compromise regarding sparing people's front pages from a deluge of posts and also keeping things relatively indexed so people can avoid spoilers
  
  I see, so the top level replies in the megathread would be the equivalent of an episode thread and discussion of that episode would be replies to the bot's top level comment? That could help, though it would be even better if lemmy allowed for replies to be automatically collapsed like the source corner posts in the reddit threads.
  
  Yeah, exactly. Even if it can't, I still think that's a preferrable solution, it's easy enough to glaze over spoilers if you're just scrolling to something you wanna see, or you can just ctrl+f

36 comments