For a while the Mahoro-chan bot has been posting titles, but they’re often not well upvoted or viewed and seem potentially more spammy among the titles that individuals are posting themselves out of interest. The bot was fine when this community was still pretty low on subscriber count but I’m thinking it might be past that time as engagement has gone up, and there were already other voiced concerns from members that even individual manga discussion posts were spammy.
I’m not a moderator anyhow so we’d either have to contact the bot creator (mentioned in the bot’s profile) or have a moderator do so depending on the decision.
Edit: I think @man_zonder_poespas summed up what I was thinking in a much better and concise manner in his comment: “Personally I like the idea that the chapter is posted by a fan of the series so that they’re relatively likely to respond to comments on the chapter. Y’know, have the idea that at least one person is invested in the thing being posted.”
I know we have engagement issues due to being new and very limited in size or if people are being scared off by just discussion posts. I do think that the larger the community, the better the chances of more discussion and more non-chapter posts since lurkers are always a majority.
Having some sort of pinned discussion posts as others have wanted, or a pinned awareness post to help drive more engagement I think would also at least be a sign for newcomers.
I would like for it not to be bots doing these posts, I dont really like seeing so many posts with 0 comments.
The best solution would be to make it so that people posts the chapters so that it guarantees there will always be interactions and at least a comment by the poster. But as @OtakuAltair@vlemmy.net says, people probably wont be bothered to make such posts and that is probably true so its a big point against the idea of complete removal. (Although I dont really see a reason to worry too much about format and timing, its not like there is rules on the matter for the first and for timing if people already read it they can still talk about it)
The second best solution IMO is keep the bot, but if possible restrict it to what people are actually reading weekly, so that there will always be at least a comment. I just dont think the size of this community allows to have this kinds of posts allows for having lots of posts.
I dont really like the idea of expanding it even more, most people arent reading more than a few series weekly and with the number of users participating daily here (about 25) there is no way we can sustain that, it will just fill the feed with content that no one pays attention to. Of course one can simply say we dont need interactions on each post, just the opportunity is enough and if it doesnt happen there then its not a big deal. But at least to me it gives ghost town vibes, it doesnt feel good to look at the sub and see how nobody interacts. If anything I would prefer that we increase the user made content and diversify a bit from chapter specific discussions which, while cool when people actually have something to say and discuss, dont feel good when nobody is reading.