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?

It helps me personally to not have to make a post myself to comment on a show.

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).

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:

1. Every day, an episode discussion thread gets automatically posted covering all episodes which aired that day
2. On that thread, a poll is posted for people to vote on the best episode of the day
3. 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

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.

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

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.

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 @[email protected] 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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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:

1. Create a new comm called [email protected]. The only user allowed to post/comment there should be the bot.
2. 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".
3. The bot would still create episode threads in [email protected], as it does now.
4. 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: [[email protected]](insert link here).
5. 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: [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) 56498 01.
6. When the bot finds those three things, it edits the relevant comment in the relevant [email protected] thread, adding a link to the thread where it found it. Like this: Episode ## discussion: [[email protected]](insert link here), [[email protected]](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.