Discoverability of My Fanfare

February 14, 2015 3:49 PM

I was pumped at the not so recent announcement that there would be a "my Fanfare" way to follow discussions on Fanfare, but I totally failed to find it and only just now did. I suspect this is a usability problem that could be fixed.

The fact that you can follow discussions on FanFare is extremely well hidden, unlike the ability to follow them on the Blue where "my comments" is a prominent and automatically available choice.

"My Fanfare" does indeed have a similar tab, although it's not as obvious that this means you can track the replies and discussions you're involved in. But if you haven't taken other actions it just says "go to the show page to add shows." It's not at all obvious how to do this; when viewing a show discussion the "show page" is a tiny little link in a list that is topped by an off-site IMDB link, so it's not at all obvious that anything on-site and important might be there. It's certainly not apparent that you need to click that tiny link to get to a place where there's an option to manually add the show to the list of things you want to follow.

At the very least it seems "Add to My Fanfare" should be a prominent link at the top of every episode discussion for those who aren't already on board. FanFare discussion is still very anemic compared to what we did on the Blue and I think it's mostly because it's so much harder to check up on followups to your previous comments.

posted by localroger to Feature Requests at 3:49 PM (23 comments total)

Yeah, I'd be down with hearing ideas about discoverability, how folks would want to go about the process of finding/adding shows. We've got other stuff that's still work-in-progress ideas for the subsite, like the idea of genre/etc. metadata tagging as part of the My FanFare functionality, that's part of what we'd want to think about as far as potential future-state with some of this stuff as well.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:05 PM on February 14, 2015

Heh; my first thought on this was "what's My Comments"?

FanFare discussion is still very anemic compared to what we did on the Blue and I think it's mostly because it's so much harder to check up on followups to your previous comments.

I haven't found (the second part of this) true; FanFare posts appear in Recent Activity just like every other section, and they got the "add to Activity" link recently just like every other section.

So for me: no harder to follow conversations I'm already in on FanFare than anywhere else on the site. But that's mostly because I'm already hooked on Recent Activity; maybe if I were following it some other way ("My Favorites" or "My Comments"?) it'd be different.

I'm not sure My FanFare is really about tracking discussion on existing posts; it's more a way of producing a filtered-by-shows list of FanFare posts, much as My Ask is a way of producing a filtered-by-categories list of AskMe posts.

I do think that discoverability is more of an issue for FanFare: there's a lot more structure to FanFare data, both explicitly (TV shows have a numerical and chronological order, and a TV show is a grouping of series is a grouping of episodes) and implicitly (genre? network? stars?). It's less of a bucket of loosely-characterized posts than MeFi or Ask.

One example: it bugs me that a MetaFilter search for Breaking Bad, for FanFare results, shows a list of episode pages but doesn't list the FanFare show page. (And why are there stray episodes of The Wire and Downton in the first page of the search results?)

Another example: the FanFare All TV Shows page shows episodes in series/number order; but then individual show pages show the episodes in posting-date order. (Fargo is a good example here.) This feels like a hangover from the MetaFilter "group blog" order, where reverse-chronological-posting-order is the right choice. But it's wrong for the deep archives of FanFare: for someone browsing into an old show, episode order is the natural choice, anything else is confusing.

(Lest this sound too grar-ey: I really like FanFare and want it to succeed.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:26 PM on February 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I expected an Add Show button on the My Fanfare page, and an Add to My Fanfare button on any particular post about a show's episode. I think those two things would be nice.
posted by michaelh at 4:29 PM on February 14, 2015

...and an Add to My Fanfare button on any particular post about a show's episode.

We have this one already. Look for the + My FanFare in the sidebar of any post. It's the last link in the Show Info box just below the poster.
posted by pb (staff) at 4:59 PM on February 14, 2015

...as people are adding movies and television shows to follow, I want to take a small opportunity to implore everyone to go see Kingsmen, because it is wonderfully insane.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:55 PM on February 14, 2015

We have this one already.

But it's invisible. Tomorrow is my 51st birthday and I can't see for shit since 40 or so, and while I can kind of read the default color scheme and font for the main text of Fanfare I can't read the sidebar without glasses or compulsively hitting CTRL+ until it breaks the site design. If you want people to contribute to robust discussions it needs to be PROMINENT. And it's not.
posted by localroger at 8:13 PM on February 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

P.S. considering it's obviously all the same technology, is there any reason we couldn't just have a FanFare "my comments" link as we do on the Blue?
posted by localroger at 8:15 PM on February 14, 2015

localroger, do you use Recent Activity? The My Comments tab on MetaFilter is something we had on the site before Recent Activity existed. It's not needed as much now because Recent Activity lets you know when there are new comments on posts you've commented on. (And now you can even add threads to Recent Activity without commenting.)
posted by pb (staff) at 9:04 PM on February 14, 2015

I was thinking about making a pony request but this seems like a much better place to ask, could we get a "Recent Comments" of just the recent comments happening in "My Fanfare" threads?

Because, say I have just recently marathoned an older or ongoing show with a small number of people geeking out about it on Fanfare. I want to be able to add that show to My Fanfare so I will see new episodes and rewatches, but I also want to be able to sort all of those threads so I can see where the freshest conversations - that I have not already participated in nor added to my recent activity (thanks, pb!) - are happening about these shows that are new to me.

Sometimes events in a newer episode will cause conversation in the thread of an older episode, or something like an artist who has done a soundtrack will release an album and a conversation about that will happen in an older thread where people were gushing about the good music in that episode, etc. I want to be able to sort just the shows I care about by recent comments. I love how on most of Mefi it feels like I am talking among a smaller group of people (as opposed to certain other sites where it feels like screaming amongst a stadium audience) but sometimes on Fanfare it is like talking about tv into the void. If I could sort my less-popular shows by recent activity I could feel more like I am talking with someone, and more inclined to participate instead of just passively read and move on.
posted by Mizu at 4:23 AM on February 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I see it. I guess it's just not where I expect it.
posted by michaelh at 6:29 AM on February 15, 2015

OK Recent Activity does a lot of what I want, but again it's kind of not obvious that it's a sometimes better alternative to the much more prominent My Comments tab. I suppose I somehow got the impression that Recent Activity would be recent activity for the site, not mine.
posted by localroger at 6:49 AM on February 15, 2015

Could perhaps we put together a "Metafilter: A New User's Instruction Manual"? Perhaps adapted from the orientation page on the MeFi Wiki? There's enough stuff with the site now that it might be beneficial, and you could make a link to it from the new account sign-up page.

Heck, I could use a Metafilter: An Old User's Instruction Manual.
posted by leotrotsky at 7:31 AM on February 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't want to open a new Metatalk for this question: Is there any guess as to when we can use FanFare for books? I want to talk about books not the talkies.
posted by Justinian at 1:03 PM on February 15, 2015

I really think FanFare already needs to be at least two sites or filterable streams, because the podcasts and rewatches and old movies really clutter up the view of hard-scheduled new material. Do that and making another for books would be trivial.
posted by localroger at 1:09 PM on February 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

localroger: I can't read the sidebar without glasses

You're over 40. What do you expect?
posted by Too-Ticky at 1:45 PM on February 15, 2015

We should add an "I remember the Reagan Administration" option to magnify the font.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:36 PM on February 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I would need the "I remember the Nixon Administration" option.
posted by localroger at 5:47 AM on February 16, 2015

Is there any guess as to when we can use FanFare for books?

Sorry, no guess on that one yet. I know mathowie has said he wants to add books eventually but it's not on the immediate horizon.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:08 AM on February 16, 2015

sad panda
posted by Justinian at 11:05 AM on February 16, 2015

Yeah, books are tough in the current guise of FanFare due to the time commitment. If you imagine a new popular TV show, it might only take 22 or 45min to watch an episode without commercials before you can talk about it. A new movie, 90min to two hours, and you're ready to discuss it. A podcast is anywhere from 20min to 2 hours, but a book? For some people it's a couple days, for many it's a week, and a few weeks isn't out of the question either.

So the problem with books threads would be seeing a post, going "oh hey, I want to read that next" and then reading it and returning to comment might be something that is a process that takes weeks instead of 20min-2hrs.

That doesn't mean it's impossible, just that we need to think of new ways to do it. Maybe that's making books go through a staging process or a "book club" so a book is proposed weeks before a post opens up, so people have time to read it and write their thoughts together on it. We need to figure out a way to do that in a way that makes sense but would require new coding.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:11 PM on February 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

No pressure, but count this as one vote for "that could be awesome". There are a couple of books I'm currently reading or have recently read that I'd love to be able to discuss with other MeFites…
posted by Lexica at 5:53 PM on February 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you imagine a new popular TV show, it might only take 22 or 45min to watch an episode without commercials before you can talk about it. A new movie, 90min to two hours, and you're ready to discuss it. A podcast is anywhere from 20min to 2 hours, but a book? For some people it's a couple days, for many it's a week, and a few weeks isn't out of the question either.

I don't think that's necessarily a problem, given that FF posts are open indefinitely. I already find myself watching movies from last year and going back to read, and chime in on, the FF post for the movie.

I do like the idea of a book club setting up a lead time for a read. This is sort of what FanFare Talk was supposed to be doing for the various film clubs. In practice though I don't think that's working very well because FanFare Talk is so ephemeral. So film club posts either get buried under newer posts (for example, the Robin Williams series is still running in its original FF Talk post) or they spam it with a post per upcoming movie.

I've been wondering if a more IRL-ish approach might work better for FanFare clubs and scheduled rewatches: instead of mishmashing everything into FanFare Talk, maybe a more formalized approach of "proposed" (ie, tentative "anyone interested?") and "upcoming" events. That would scale nicely to books, maybe?

The other problem with books is: they're longer than movies or TV episodes. It's hard to discuss a read-in-progress with other people unless either everyone's reading at the same pace; or if the book can be subdivided into "up to point X" chunks. But that division into chunks isn't as formalized as TV series/episode: some books don't have chapters, and page numbers vary between editions.

Is it reasonable to require that readers have finished the book before they join the discussion? Easiest way around this, but it feels like it would be frustrating to "OMG I REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS BOOK I'M READING" impulses.

(A paced read/discussion could be done informally -- poster of the book periodically adding "OK, now we're up to point X so anything up to here is fair game, please avoid spoilers for plot beyond this point". Needs no technical solution, just a social agreement on spoilers. But still maybe frustrating for readers who are progressing either faster or slower than the OP.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 4:06 PM on February 17, 2015

Actually, it strikes me that comics would be an easier first fit onto FanFare.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:51 PM on February 17, 2015