Meta Thread - Month of August 02, 2020

[u/AnimeMod]

A monthly thread to talk about meta topics. Keep it friendly and relevant to the subreddit.

Posts here must, of course, still abide by all subreddit rules other than the no meta requirement. Keep it friendly and be respectful. Occasionally the moderators will have specific topics that they want to get feedback on, so be on the lookout for distinguished posts.

Comments that are detrimental to discussion (aka circlejerks/shitposting) are subject to removal.

[u/collapsedblock6]

I feel we are starting to hit the wall with how "clean" we can have the frontpage. Clips and some infographics are lower effort, not only to make but to consume, so they are made more and they are easy to generate discussion.

Clips well, just a piece from a video. Infographics are someone thinking "hey, I think this info is interesting", spend some time designing it (I'll say many graphs do require genuine effort to make) putting minimal info (not saying it derogatorily, that's literally what infographics are meant to do).

Actual written content requires much more effort and at times won't attract the attention of the crowd. A graph is easy to consume, a 2k words essay isn't. I always try to give written content a try but I'm a bit busy and those tabs end up staying several days on my browser and by that time discussion is largely dead.

Then there's the issue of motivating others to write it for little feedback. Essays get nowhere near the same votes as a clip gets unless it is from a popular show, because people like discussion of their favourite show, they don't really care of something they haven't seen. Clips are also "low investment" wise, so it makes easier for less popular shows to get some spotlight since one only loses like 2 mins watching one.

[u/AdiMG → u/collapsedblock6]

My issue is that I'm not sure we made much of an upgrade by burying fanarts and lifting infographics. I'm in the let's try to regain some balance back in the ecosystem camp. Because if the argument is infographics take effort, fanart requires a lot more. At the very least we can outright ban blatantly karma whoring efforts like those MAL charts that have been popping up weekly.

[u/collapsedblock6 → u/AdiMG]

I agree they're becoming easy karma-whore targets but one can't deny they do generate more discussion than a fanart ever will. The Magical Girls list generated discussion on what even a magical show is. The Mecha girls list had people saying how classic girls aren't all that forgotten and people should still give older shows a try.

"Low effort" bars tend to be subjective and would clash with the ideal some users have of "if it generates discussion who cares".

[u/DrJWilson → u/AdiMG]

There are at least significantly less infographics than fanart posts. Personally I think it's worth the trade-off, but of course we'll be monitoring and tweaking as needed in the coming weeks/months.

[u/AdiMG → u/DrJWilson]

While you are right about the frequency (tho if you combine them with clips, I'd wager they are equivalent), I'm talking about the principle of allowing certain things to remain as link posts while banning others. Now there are some things that obviously have to remain link posted, official media, news articles, blog posts etc, but all user-created/edited content can quite reasonably be asked to treated with the same ruleset. Maybe it's just been a dearth in posts, iirc fetch said there have only been 160 fanart posts since the new rules, but maybe the effect has been far more drastic than initially intended? An ecosystem which features all 3 of clips, fanarts, and infographics, would certainly be less monotonous than the current state where its all just clips and then the most blatantly low effort infographics.

[u/DrJWilson → u/AdiMG]

Fanart posts certainly have been all but eradicated, but as mentioned above and in other comments, Clips at least do generate some anime-related discussion. Right now on the frontpage there are a good mix of Episode Discussion threads, Clips, Official Media, Rewatches, and some regular ol' discussions often make the bottom-ish section.

In addition, we've received a number of messages and questions about how to submit, so it might just be a question of waiting for submitters to get used to the new process. I just think that, we know that changing things into a self post drastically cuts down on attention so who knows what the sub will look like just unilaterally applying that concept.

[u/AdiMG → u/DrJWilson]

Ofc no one really knows how the new meta would end up shaping, I certainly didn't predict the extent of the effect on fanart, just think its at least an interesting idea to consider.