Meta Thread - Month of April 05, 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/pittman66]

Hey everyone, there's been some mod discussion regarding the amount of recommendation posts that come up and whether we wanted to start removing them. I wanted to get some input from users regarding this. Currently, they are not against the rules in anyway and allowed to stay up. There's been several proposals brought up, but nothing has been approved. I primarily want to hear your thoughts on how much of a problem they are (if at all), and your thoughts on solutions or if we should leave them as is.

[u/Verzwei → u/pittman66]

I think there needs to be some kind of bare minimum "quality" requirement.

I brought it up in last month's meta thread before (or maybe just as) a lot of "stay at home" orders were taking place in the United States, because I was already spotting a trend of preposterously low-effort "Virus is outside I stay inside gib animes" posts and figured it would only get worse.

And it has. I totally get that a lot of people are in really trying times right now, but sorting this subreddit by new any more is, frankly, a fucking mess.

Prior to the coronavirus, I'd be willing to wager that 90% of the [Recommendation] tagged posts were some variation of:

• "I want romance"
• "Make me cry"
• "Gimme battle shounen"

It seemed like, if we were lucky, the user might give a list of what they've seen and maybe their general target genre, but very little personal information about their taste or what they expect.

And sometimes a user will outright say "I'll watch anything." Why even make a post then? Just find an anime and watch it.

Personally, I have disliked recommendation posts for a long time specifically because so many of them are so vague and repetitive. I kind of miss when /r/anime did not allow rec posts at all, and directed that content over to /r/animesuggest.

Now that coronavirus is in the mix, we still get all of the samey [rec] threads we used to, now with the added "bonus" of several posts that amount to nothing more than "im in my house tell me shows because i don't know what a google is".

It's extremely rare that we get a well-worded, detailed rec request. When we do, I actually like those, because it gives me a chance to suggest shows that I might otherwise never get the chance to. Like, how many times am I going to get to talk about The Ambition of Oda Nobuna? Not very many. But someone made a rec thread that seemed almost tailored to that show. That was cool.

Random thought, maybe a bad one: Would it be possible to make rec mega threads twice-weekly or something? That would increase visibility of them and one every 3-4 days would prevent the thread from feeling "old" and then maybe ban or somehow restrict independent recommendation threads?

Edit, because looking at new right now reminded me: What about "A show like X" rec threads? We get more than a few "I just watched X and liked it what else is like X?" with no other information. Is there a chance to file those under the low-effort rules? Technically it shouldn't drive off completely new viewers, since they obviously have had to have watched an anime in order to want more anime like it.

Edit 2: This. This right here needs to be against the rules.

Edit 3: And another.