FanFare MeMails on the Pony Express May 9, 2015 5:52 PM Subscribe
Could we please give users the option to get two kinds of fanfare-related memails?
- An alert when someone starts a thread for an episode of a podcast/show that you're following on MyFanfare. (This is perhaps redundant, but I can't be the only one who doesn't think to wander over to MyFanfare that much…)
- A digest listing all of the new shows, podcasts (not individual episodes) and movies added to FanFare in the last week. I can't even think of all the media on which I'd be interesting in seeing the community's perspective, and this would be a good way to discover that other folks want to have those conversations as well.
The view we've had in the past is that sections like My FanFare and My MeFi are the alert mechanisms. You browse it when you're ready to read the site.
But if you're used to sites that alert you to new things via email I can see that not having things pushed to you could be a different kind of annoyance.
posted by pb (staff) at 6:11 PM on May 9, 2015
But if you're used to sites that alert you to new things via email I can see that not having things pushed to you could be a different kind of annoyance.
posted by pb (staff) at 6:11 PM on May 9, 2015
So partly my counter-proposal for brainstorming is: what could be added to or done to My FanFare to make it more useful or less forgettable if it's something you recognize value in already but just haven't gotten into a habit with?
Perhaps merging it with recent activity? As soon as someone posts an episode of a show you follow, add it to the feed.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:12 PM on May 9, 2015 [4 favorites]
Perhaps merging it with recent activity? As soon as someone posts an episode of a show you follow, add it to the feed.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:12 PM on May 9, 2015 [4 favorites]
The view we've had in the past is that sections like My FanFare and My MeFi are the alert mechanisms. You browse it when you're ready to read the site.
That's certainly fair; I'm primarily a consumer of Recent Activity and the front page; both My MeFi and My FanFare are generally alien zones..
Perhaps I'm an edge case, but MeMail jumped to mind because I receive so little of it and it shouts at me most aggressively when I have a new message - that little red circle just demands attention. Power users might well just ignore it.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:16 PM on May 9, 2015
That's certainly fair; I'm primarily a consumer of Recent Activity and the front page; both My MeFi and My FanFare are generally alien zones..
Perhaps I'm an edge case, but MeMail jumped to mind because I receive so little of it and it shouts at me most aggressively when I have a new message - that little red circle just demands attention. Power users might well just ignore it.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:16 PM on May 9, 2015
Maybe let users add My FanFare and My MeFi to the same header bar on which memail lives?
posted by Going To Maine at 6:18 PM on May 9, 2015
posted by Going To Maine at 6:18 PM on May 9, 2015
Perhaps merging it with recent activity? As soon as someone posts an episode of a show you follow, add it to the feed.
The biggest concern with auto-adding new episode/movie/etc content to Recent Activity upon posting is that we have no idea whether someone has actually watched/read/etc that yet. Anybody who is not totally Johnny on the spot about everything they're following risks being spoiled on something as a result, which is obviously super duper sub-optimal.
My FanFare sidesteps that by giving you a space where you can see that a post exists without having its contents tossed into your face; Club pages will likewise just aggregate the posts that belong to that club rather than putting thread content itself, spoilers and all, on a front-page type view.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:19 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]
The biggest concern with auto-adding new episode/movie/etc content to Recent Activity upon posting is that we have no idea whether someone has actually watched/read/etc that yet. Anybody who is not totally Johnny on the spot about everything they're following risks being spoiled on something as a result, which is obviously super duper sub-optimal.
My FanFare sidesteps that by giving you a space where you can see that a post exists without having its contents tossed into your face; Club pages will likewise just aggregate the posts that belong to that club rather than putting thread content itself, spoilers and all, on a front-page type view.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:19 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]
Maybe let users add My FanFare and My MeFi to the same header bar on which memail lives?
The idea of a non-mefimail alert that exists entirely as a collection of smaller, automated messages is something we could chew on; not something we've really done anything with previously, but definitely one possible approach to giving people optional extra nudges without the weight of filling up their inbox.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:20 PM on May 9, 2015
The idea of a non-mefimail alert that exists entirely as a collection of smaller, automated messages is something we could chew on; not something we've really done anything with previously, but definitely one possible approach to giving people optional extra nudges without the weight of filling up their inbox.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:20 PM on May 9, 2015
>Perhaps merging it with recent activity? As soon as someone posts an episode of a show you follow, add it to the feed.
This is an option I would use, the spoiler thing is of concern but really the main reason I don't participate in Fanfare as much as I expected I would is I don't check it enough to see if stuff I want to talk about is posted yet or not. I think I would be fine with removing from activity without getting spoiled if I see something pop up I'm behind on most of the time.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:26 PM on May 9, 2015
This is an option I would use, the spoiler thing is of concern but really the main reason I don't participate in Fanfare as much as I expected I would is I don't check it enough to see if stuff I want to talk about is posted yet or not. I think I would be fine with removing from activity without getting spoiled if I see something pop up I'm behind on most of the time.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:26 PM on May 9, 2015
I think I would be fine with removing from activity without getting spoiled if I see something pop up I'm behind on most of the time.
Which is fine, as a statement of preference, but people have very different levels of spoiler tolerance, so any approach that presumes people in general will be fine with a major source of automatic spoiler risk is pretty much a non-starter.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:55 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
Which is fine, as a statement of preference, but people have very different levels of spoiler tolerance, so any approach that presumes people in general will be fine with a major source of automatic spoiler risk is pretty much a non-starter.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:55 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
The biggest concern with auto-adding new episode/movie/etc content to Recent Activity upon posting is that we have no idea whether someone has actually watched/read/etc that yet.
Sure, I get that. I know the idea of being able to fold recent activity content has come up in the past. If that ever shows up, maybe adding those threads (auto-folded) would be the right idea.
To continue making it about me, I'm seeing myself as a (hopefully typical) user who consumes the blue and wants to start consuming the purple, but is very used to getting everything I need out of the front page, recent activity, and memail, with excursions to metatalk and (rarely) the green. (& given the rarity, I'm not actually that typical I suppose.) When I browse the green, grey, and blue, I'm using them to find content to add to recent activity. If I miss a post on the blue or green I don't care too much because, hey, there'll be another and I know that I'm going to miss scads of them anyway. I don't like missing MetaTalk posts because they're the way I keep up with the community's zeitgeist, but they come up pretty rarely.
The front page of Fanfare, by contrast, appears to me to be a torrent of content, most of which is relevant. (Really, I suppose, Fanfare is a bunch of micro-communities of consumers of different shows, but the front page hides that.)
When I find a post I like on the blue, green, or grey, I shove it into recent activity and then keep up with it. The most recent content is pretty much by default the most important, so once I've scrolled down the page to a post I've seen before, I know I'm done for now. In contrast, the front page of Fanfare doesn't necessarily present the content that's most relevant to me - the content that's most relevant is the movie that I watched a few weeks ago and have been mulling over. It's something that I have to search for, which is a fundamental difference.
Clubs might be a great way to fix that - certainly the IRL-esque calendaring mentioned on the podcast will be awesome. But really, anything that makes it easier to integrate Fanfare's search workflow into my current what-just-happened workflow is great.
My FanFare sidesteps that by giving you a space where you can see that a post exists without having its contents tossed into your face;
It's true, and maybe that's the right hook. But it's a change that I need to make in my habits, and I'm pretty weak when it comes to changing up my routine.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:57 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
Sure, I get that. I know the idea of being able to fold recent activity content has come up in the past. If that ever shows up, maybe adding those threads (auto-folded) would be the right idea.
To continue making it about me, I'm seeing myself as a (hopefully typical) user who consumes the blue and wants to start consuming the purple, but is very used to getting everything I need out of the front page, recent activity, and memail, with excursions to metatalk and (rarely) the green. (& given the rarity, I'm not actually that typical I suppose.) When I browse the green, grey, and blue, I'm using them to find content to add to recent activity. If I miss a post on the blue or green I don't care too much because, hey, there'll be another and I know that I'm going to miss scads of them anyway. I don't like missing MetaTalk posts because they're the way I keep up with the community's zeitgeist, but they come up pretty rarely.
The front page of Fanfare, by contrast, appears to me to be a torrent of content, most of which is relevant. (Really, I suppose, Fanfare is a bunch of micro-communities of consumers of different shows, but the front page hides that.)
When I find a post I like on the blue, green, or grey, I shove it into recent activity and then keep up with it. The most recent content is pretty much by default the most important, so once I've scrolled down the page to a post I've seen before, I know I'm done for now. In contrast, the front page of Fanfare doesn't necessarily present the content that's most relevant to me - the content that's most relevant is the movie that I watched a few weeks ago and have been mulling over. It's something that I have to search for, which is a fundamental difference.
Clubs might be a great way to fix that - certainly the IRL-esque calendaring mentioned on the podcast will be awesome. But really, anything that makes it easier to integrate Fanfare's search workflow into my current what-just-happened workflow is great.
My FanFare sidesteps that by giving you a space where you can see that a post exists without having its contents tossed into your face;
It's true, and maybe that's the right hook. But it's a change that I need to make in my habits, and I'm pretty weak when it comes to changing up my routine.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:57 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm always a little surprised that people don't subscribe via feedreader to various metafilter subsites they are interested in. I get updates in inoreader every time there is a new post to fanfare (and some other subsites). It alerts me to new posts I'm interested in and then I hop over to the site to read the thread. And it's very easy to skip over the things I'm not interested in.
posted by QuakerMel at 7:01 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by QuakerMel at 7:01 PM on May 9, 2015 [2 favorites]
Yeah, 'automatic alerts of new content being posted to sites that push xml without requiring a 1:1 relationship between alert and user' is pretty much what RSS does perfectly. There are any number of RSS-To-Email tools out there on the web for this.
posted by softlord at 7:40 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by softlord at 7:40 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
I subscribe to both individual shows and the FFTalk section via Feedly, although I navigate MeFi almost exclusively via the feeds so I can see how this would be a PITA for someone going directly through the site.
posted by Room 641-A at 7:40 PM on May 9, 2015
posted by Room 641-A at 7:40 PM on May 9, 2015
I'm always a little surprised that people don't subscribe via feedreader to various metafilter subsites they are interested in.
Yeah, I've tried RSS readers. I don't like 'em. But also - I like the site. The site is the third place. I don't want some other site to mediate my third place for me.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:44 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I've tried RSS readers. I don't like 'em. But also - I like the site. The site is the third place. I don't want some other site to mediate my third place for me.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:44 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
Although, if there hasn't been a "How do you use MetaFilter?" MeTa, maybe it's time to have one...
posted by Going To Maine at 7:50 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Going To Maine at 7:50 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]
RSS is a great tool, but it's very much a tool that some folks use and a whole lot of others don't, and the degree to which use of feeds to solve problems is baked into a lot of mefites' personal workflow for the site is I think in part just a reflection of RSS being so much more dominant a tool back when the site was young and the web was different and Google Reader hadn't been unceremoniously strangled in its sleep.
Which is to say we supply feeds because lots of people find them useful, but I don't think we can rely on "use the RSS feed" as a satisfactory general answer to newer content discovery/tracking/alert challenges on the site.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:12 PM on May 9, 2015
Which is to say we supply feeds because lots of people find them useful, but I don't think we can rely on "use the RSS feed" as a satisfactory general answer to newer content discovery/tracking/alert challenges on the site.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:12 PM on May 9, 2015
The archive section is very handy.
Perhaps something like:
Game of Thrones- 2731 (231 new)
posted by clavdivs at 9:14 PM on May 9, 2015
Perhaps something like:
Game of Thrones- 2731 (231 new)
posted by clavdivs at 9:14 PM on May 9, 2015
So I have a two-part idea for how My FanFare activity can be more discoverable.
However, I would also support adding notifications about new My FanFare threads to Recent Activity.
posted by Banknote of the year at 6:03 PM on May 10, 2015
- Make the My FanFare Shows sidebar into a miniature version of the My FanFare page. Maybe something like this, with a list of recent posts in your shows. So now you don't have to go into the My FanFare tab to see what's new.
- Let people add their My FanFare sidebar to the blue (and other subsites as well). That way, people like Going to Maine don't have to remember to go look in FanFare to see what's new.
However, I would also support adding notifications about new My FanFare threads to Recent Activity.
posted by Banknote of the year at 6:03 PM on May 10, 2015
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This falls into a general class of emails we've been disinclined to have the system send in the past: automated alerts for frequent events to (potentially) lots of users. That's not to say it's a non-starter, but there's a reason it's not something we already offer, and it mostly comes down to us wanting to be cautious about not making the site a major source of potentially regretted/annoying/ignored mail or filling up people's inboxes with more automated mail than human mail.
So partly my counter-proposal for brainstorming is: what could be added to or done to My FanFare to make it more useful or less forgettable if it's something you recognize value in already but just haven't gotten into a habit with?
A digest listing all of the new shows, podcasts (not individual episodes) and movies added to FanFare in the last week. I can't even think of all the media on which I'd be interesting in seeing the community's perspective, and this would be a good way to discover that other folks want to have those conversations as well.
I was just brainstorming about a similar idea with pb this last week, actually, in the context of the work we're doing on getting some basic FanFare Club functionality worked out for testing. The idea of a weekly digest email feels less problematic than an "every time a thing happens" email—if you subscribe to a lot of currently airing shows, or multiple active clubs, there could easily be a bunch of stuff that happens in a given week that could be condensed into a single message.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:05 PM on May 9, 2015 [1 favorite]