Should decently-scanlated chapters be appropriately praised?

[pandascepter]

DId you know that we used to have likes for groups in v3?

yes i totally remember that. i was like what does this button do? click anyway.

 

[comfykotatsu]

For me this isnt really about criticism but about encourging groups to improve their scanlations.
Adding penalties to that just does not seem like a good idea to me.
You can also criticise them already by opening a thread for a chapter or group and tell them what you are dissatisfied with.

We cant force people to improve, its up to them if they want to or not.
But we could tell them: Hey look, people like what you did, here have some cake.
Or we could tell them: Hey look, here is your social credit score, have fun.

Both will have likely some kind of impact, personally I always prefer the positive one over the negative one when it comes to encouragement.

Thinking about it further. What can we do in actively helping them improve?
Readers probably arent even the correct group of people to get feedback from. I would assume they are very unlikely to provide valuable feedback at all, maybe minimal. I guess the best feedback you can get is by other scanlators.
As an example, as a developer I wouldnt get my feedback regarding the code I have written by users of the application but instead by other developers.
I could get feedback on things like if a feature is well implemented, if it got bugs, if it has the expected behavior by users but those wont improve me as a developer but would improve the application in general.

So with that analogy, if a scanlator wants to improve the behind the scenes of their scanlation they should get feedback from their peers.

If mangadex wanted to go for something like that, it would need to implement a feature to connect groups with each other and have something like peer reviewing of scanlations.
Maybe something like github or gitlab. In which mangas would be open repositories which belong to a group, chapters / scanlations could be maybe seen as branches on which commites / changes happen, which could be reviewed by others.

Of course this more like a very abstract idea and I am kinda doubtful if groups would even want something like that in anyway.

The other unanswered thing is if the majority of scanlators even want encouragement to improve.
Because this isnt really something for readers but for scanlators in my opinion.

 

[Broncobear]

Yes, it should. I knew there were some translators who stopped or quit because there was no feedback, especially the ones who translated niche or old manga.

With no view counts available at the moment, maybe you guys could add interactive things like emoji buttons that you can click on every chapter listing? Make it something like a thumbs up emoji, a head pat emoji, a hug emoji or that handholding stuff Mangadex staffs seems to love.

This will at least show the scanlators that there are readers who read their chapters.

 

[Teddy]

for the record, some semi-private Discord messages

Looks at representive democracy in a 2 party political system

 

[vmman]

I said it and ill say it again, rate the group/ uploader and not the chapter, rating a chapter will bring too much subjectivity to the mix and would be confusing, like, I adore this shapter but tl is shi, would need two ratings preferably, instead, I liked this chapter but this group's work is shit, one rating on the uploader's page and one on the chapter itself (optional)

 

[OisE]

The rating system from Steam might be a good idea : evolution of the ratings for the group.

For the group rating : instead of a (totally objective) rating, working with the number of followers.

If I find good the TL and the work of a group I will follow them. Maybe showing the number of people following the group can help.

 

[seekermoc]

groups are generally consistent quality level

LHTranslations would like to say hi

Like I bring up Nyaa again...but if a group has ratings too low, maybe all their releases get a red title, if they're high, they get a green title.

That's not at all how Nyaa works. Known trusted groups get marked green, but that's done by the mods and has nothing to do with user voting.

Groups marked red are absolutely not low rated. Red just means they're re-encodes of another group's work. So if a trusted group puts out a 1.5GB episode (which IMO is ridiculous for 20 min of animation), and another group reencodes that to a not-insane 200MB it gets marked red. That's not a bad thing, it's a public service, and red is about all I download.