Poll Link: https://strawpoll.ai/poll/vote/thKiWOAMaJfQ
Background
Hello! I am the maintainer of @[email protected]. Shinobu is the [email protected] 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! ❤️
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.
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.
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.
The main issue I was seeing on Lemmy with Shinobu is due to the low popularity shows. We already have a much lower active user count than Reddit does, so a lot of automated discussion threads here get completely ignored. So this just creates a lot of clutter in the feed with posts on 0 votes and 0 comments.
How about a way to request the bot to create a post if it stopped (e.g. due to no one participating in previous episodes)? It would both lower the barrier of entry for people who want to talk about an episode and keep the post format consistent.
I’ll refrain from talking specifics until the poll closes since the ideal solution is going to vary a fair amount depending upon the exact curation methodology, but I basically agree with what you’re saying here.
There will definitely be some feature for this, though – depending on the goal order established in the survey – it is possible that the feature won’t be ready at day one. For what it’s worth, I will be sharing a proposed roadmap with the community long before anything gets written in stone. Goal #1 is ensuring that the entire pipeline is as fully aligned as possible with what the community finds valuable.
Slightly off-topic, but I think ani.social is not properly getting federated with kbin.social.
I can’t see any episode discussion posts posted by shinobu on [email protected] .Hey RealM, as @[email protected] has already suggested, this is a kbin quirk. It’s documented on the kbin Codeberg bug tracker as #350. The kbin maintainers have not yet commented on whether this is intended behavior or a bug, but it does not appear as if anything will be done about the problem in the near future.
The only course of action that I could possibly take to work around the issue is to remove the bot flag from @[email protected]. Unfortunately, doing this would violate the right of Lemmy users to opt out of seeing bot activity – not to mention also violate the ToS of numerous instances (including ani.social)
Thanks for the context!
Yeah, I suppose I will just have to create a new account on lemmy then :)
If I remember correctly, kbin doesn’t allow bot accounts to federate by default. I don’t know if there are manual exceptions that can be made or not.
As a fellow Kbin user, I ended up creating a lemmy account just for this and making it my anime account instead. It’s a little annoying to have multiple accounts, but also its good redundancy in case something happens to one of them.
i believe once more people gets active the better it becomes for everyone.
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(?).)
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!
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.
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.
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.
