[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.

36 comments

As others have said, I’d probably not post at all if there’s no automated post. I like them and lurk frequently, but also agree there’s too many with zero participation. Either a cutoff of 5-10 shows that are the highest popularity or simply cutting a show after 1-2 weeks of zero comments would simplify it well.
I’d also add another recommendation here that might help with participation. I’m frequently watching older shows or stuff that’s a few weeks behind. Would anybody be interested in a weekly general “what did you watch this week and what did you think of it” thread?
- A weekly general thread sounds like a good idea!
- I agree that a weekly pinned thread where non-seasonal anime could be discussed would be great. I also watch some older shows and there isn't anywhere in this community currently to discuss them other than just creating a new post; which a lot of people like yourself tend to find a high barrier to entry.

It helps me personally to not have to make a post myself to comment on a show.
- Same. Faced with the prospect of having to manually make episode posts going forward, I actually spun up a wiki for myself to more easily be able to copy paste all the markdown for each show involved in the posts.

FWIW: I think anything we can do to increase discussion will be a boon to the community. That's why we collectively wanted an episode discussion bot in the first place, after all. With that being said, we probably overshot it. Rather than making it easier for everyone to join the discussion, we ended up spreading out the discussion too thinly. It's a sort of ghost-town effect.
So, what next? Well, I still believe in automation, though I think we need to redo it in a way that better fits the current size of the community. We should start small and build that back out until such a point that we can actually justify the one-episode-one-thread model. How do we do that? That's up to you guys, but here's a proposal to consider:
Every day, an episode discussion thread gets automatically posted covering all episodes which aired that day
On that thread, a poll is posted for people to vote on the best episode of the day
On an as-needed basis, if a show is so popular that the other episodes are getting crowded out, then we give those shows their own dedicated threads in the style of the current bot
What do you folks think? I'm very open to thoughts & suggestions
- 1 thread for all episodes of that day? That doesn't sound like a great idea tbh.
  It's hard to have a proper discussion when everyone's talking about multiple things at the same time and others might see things about an episode of another anime they've not watched yet, possibly being spoilered because of it. Unless you don't want spoilers but that kinda defeats the point of an episode thread doesn't it?
  It might be better to have a poll before the new season starts and then make episode threads based on that?
  
  That's a good point! Now that I realize the spoiler implications... I'm suddenly a lot less happy with the original concept. With that being said, I don't feel that leaving it up to a pre-season poll is an ideal solution either. Lots of strong-looking shows drop off hard and lots of the season's best start out as dark horses -- most of the time, I think that we'd end up preventing more active discussions than we'd actually be bringing back. Theoretically, we could try to solve this with a recurring poll, but I'm skeptical of doing that because: A) poll participation suffers from selection bias & B) flooding the feed with repeated poll threads would be even worse than simply sending out a bunch of empty discussion threads.
  I apologize for claiming to be open to thoughts and then immediately shooting down that one... so let me at least conjure up an important takeaway from it: the best possible solution to the problem is one that -- no matter which show you choose -- you can still find a place discuss the latest episode of it somewhere. I think that's important because it keeps us out of the business of gatekeeping and creates the kind of cross-pollination opportunities that many of us want out of an online anime community (i.e.: you can discover cool shows as they're airing because fans are talking about it in the same shared space).
  With that being said, if I had to structure an ordered list of priorities, it'd look like this:
  Minimize "spillover" spoilers between ongoing series
  Maximize per thread feed impact (i.e.: the only acceptable feed spam is good content)
  Maximize discoverability / cross-polination
  I like the idea of merging threads because it boosts objectives 2 & 3, but objective 1 takes precedence. Could we somehow have our cake and eat it too? For example: /r/anime has their spoiler corner subthreads which start autocollapsed. Lemmy doesn't support this (yet), but perhaps there are alternative solutions if we get clever enough?
- I thought that this moment might be a good point to ask peoples' opinions because of the temporary outage so that people saw what it might be like without the bot. I personally agree with you that automation can be beneficial and help facilitate community involvement. Also personally, I think that the current Shinobu is great, but wanted to see what others thought.
  Thanks again for the hard work of keeping our Shinobu running.
  
  Err... there's really no need to explain yourself. You're just voicing what everyone else was already thinking, including me!
  For the purposes of this thread please just think of me like any other member of the community. That guy who deals with the bot upkeep may as well be someone else entirely 😉

I'm okay with a bot posting episodes for popular series (which are guaranteed to have comments), but the abundance of zero comment discussion posts benefits no one. I propose we limit shinobot to top 10-15-20 popular series per season (by MAL followers or we can vote before the season starts). Anything else can be posted manually (it's very simple anyway - go to /r/anime and copy the source text for the episode discussion, replace or remove one /r/community link and optionally link past discussions).
- I kind of like the voting before a season idea!

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
- | 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?
  I like this idea, cause it feels more organic than putting a hard limit on any show. Every show deserves a chance to have someone be watching it and discussing it instead of just the popular stuff. And this same setting scales up easily if the discussion posts take off here compared to limiting discussion to just the top 15-20 shows others have mentioned.
  Plus it also works if a show is overhyped and people drop it like ep4, then the system would stop posting at Ep6 due to lack of discussion.

On the one hand, if they're not getting used then it may be better to get rid of them as they'll clog up the community with threads people have no interest in.
On the other hand, how do we decide which ones to allow and which to filter out? If we only use shows that have previously prompted discussion then that prevents a show from being talked about if it only becomes more popular later on in a season.
One alternative is to only have a thread per show's season. This would greatly reduce the amount of unused clutter in this community and could be a decent stopgap until this community attracts a large enough userbase to necessitate weekly threads. The only thing I don't like about this idea is if a season runs a pretty long episode count, it may become harder to find in the list, and if someone starts an anime partway through its season then they may have to deal with spoilers if they come here to discuss it.
- I see what you are saying. The one thread/season would definitely cause some spoiler issues unless there were some strict moderation. Your idea caused me to think of something like a pinned megathread with actively airing shows and their episode thread links in a table. Then, you could have the bot post the discussion threads to a separate, dedicated, bot-run community that houses all the automated threads. This would leave /c/anime more clutter-free, even if there is little activity on a lot of shows.
  For example, the megathread could have something like this for the actively airing shows:
  
  Also, just found out that this table does not render correctly in Jerboa on mobile. So, that might be an issue for something like this.

One issue I've seen is that the bot's empty posts tend to flood out other more interesting stuff from my main feed.
I've thought about removing the community from my feed for that reason, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
- Yeah, this is what I am worried about. I don't personally really mind it, but I sympathize with those that would find it annoying. In general, I have seen a fairly negative sentiment towards bots of any kind on Lemmy, so I wanted to get a feel for what others in this community think.

Personally speaking, I appreciate the automated posts as a standardized format for the posts to be made. Having consistent post titles makes searching for previous discussions easier and the posts (after some tweaking for lemmy vs. reddit) include a table to make looking at previous episode discussion threads very easy.
That being said, I sympathize with people that don't want the community or their feed filled up with episode threads that don't have any comments/activity in them. While the community remains small, it might be better to limit the number of shows that the bot is used for rather than let it rip on everything it finds. The anime subreddit can do that because of the larger userbase more actively voting popular things to the front page, but in this community, all posts spend some time in the front page.
The bot also definitely has some issues. There are some shows that it seems to not be able to pick up new episodes for. As an example this season, the bot missed making a thread for Tearmoon Empire (thanks @lvxferre@lemmy.ml for stepping in). Last season, I remember several shows that also never really got threads either. I am not a dev, so I can't really dive too deeply to figure out why, but the problems are there.

I like to have the episode discussion threads, without it I'd not comment at all I think.
For the flood, maybe limit the automated threads to popular series.

I'm okay with bots posting discussion posts. But they should be popular anime to have more user engagement. Once we have more users then maybe we can move to slightly less popular shows.

The reasons for this can be traced back to a breaking api change on an external website
This probably explains why our local feed was flooded earlier today. It seems this community was flooded along with it too. I'm fine with the normal behavior of Shinobu honestly but less posts to concentrate discussions would be better.

The problem that I see is that Shinobu is playing two roles, both important but neither done flawlessly: gathering info for the series, and episode discussion threads. As such, I'm going to suggest a different approach:
Create a new comm called !anime_series@ani.social. The only user allowed to post/comment there should be the bot.
Once per series, the bot would create in !anime_series a thread containing: JP and EN names of the series, cover pic, short description, external links (MAL, Kitsu, etc.), and a reference code for that series (for example "56498" or "bokunopico".
The bot would still create episode threads in !episode_discussion@ani.social, as it does now.
For each thread created in the !episode_discussion, the bot would add a new comment for the thread in !anime_series. That comment would contain Episode ## discussion: [!episode_discussion@ani.social](insert link here).
The bot would not post threads automatically in other comms. Instead, it would look for posts or comments pinging it, followed by the reference code and episode number. Like this: !shinobu@ani.social 56498 01.
When the bot finds those three things, it edits the relevant comment in the relevant !anime_series@ani.social thread, adding a link to the thread where it found it. Like this: Episode ## discussion: [!episode_discussion@ani.social](insert link here), [!anime@lemmy.ml](insert link here). The bot would also answer the post/comment pinging it, saying episode discussion added to the database! [link](insert link here) or similare.
I believe that this would be the best approach, because:
There's a central repository for information about the series, inside Lemmy. If you want to look for new series to follow, or for a discussion about a specific episode, you go there and follow the links provided.
The most laborious part of creating disc threads is to gather external links. The bot would do it for us.
There's at least one discussion thread about each episode, created automatically. It's also in a centralised place, so nobody can complain "waah bot spam". You're only seeing bot content if you're fine with it.
Even if you're really sloppy creating a discussion thread elsewhere, as long as someone in it pings the bot correctly, people will find it.
You won't see content for series that nobody is watching, unless you follow the bot comms.
- 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:
  Too many low-interest series competing for real estate with high-interest series on the community feed
  Low-interest series not attracting any attention
  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:
  Restrict per-episode threads to a secondary community (!episode_discussion@ani.social works, but anywhere else would work just as well)
  On a daily basis, post a "Today's Episode Ratings" thread to the main !anime@lemmy.ml community which will simultaneously act as a directory of what's airing today & a ranked board showing each individual thread's current score/ratio/comments
  If an episode thread does well one week, then the next episode of that show will have earned the right to get hosted directly on the main !anime@lemmy.ml community feed instead of being hidden away
  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!

I am also participating in weekly threads about Ascendance of a bookworm and I think weekly thread for all of the series would be too much. But I think daily would be a sweet spot for now.
- Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !aobprepub@bookwormstory.social

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

36 comments