Themed staff pick selections

[war-ble]

I follow a couple of webtoon apps and they sometimes feature themed staff picks of the week. It could be the hottest action series of the past few days, best/romances/thrillers/fantasy/etc, best girlfriend/boyfriend series etc.

I can see this being something that could spice up the front page and increase clicks since people are too lazy to search most of the time. Additionally, there could be a weekly poll where the readers decide what kind of theme the staff should make their picks of, so there'd be the double positive of staff & user interaction.

 

[MellowV2]

This was exactly why I hated Mangarock. I don't mind if the mods make a forum post about it. But it should not appear on the front page because it'll seriously clutter it.

 

[blackyawgdom]

What do you think Random is for. Or those rotating ones at the bottom of the front page?

 

[war-ble]

If you're that triggered by a cool feature, then it can be something you can toggle off or on in Settings or somewhere on the front page maybe, like the hentai toggle.

 

[dokkotak]

i think this already exists as a beta setting, called something like recommended manga... which is by default off.
if you want to turn it ON i think it's available in the manga reader settings, after you tick the advanced setting option.

 

[MadeOfMagicAndWires]

What do you think Random is for. Or those rotating ones at the bottom of the front page?

Random (by its nature) is a crapshoot that neither guarantees quality nor genre. I'm not even sure if it takes user blacklisted tags into account.

Featured just features all manga that currently have an anime adaptation airing and is at most useful to see what anime are airing this season.


New series will have 0-1 chapters released.

Top followed and rated series have a strong tendency to get stuck in a positive feedback loop and, for the most part, appeal to the lowest common denominator. They actually rarely produce any new titles for people to check out and rather just show the series everybody is reading already.

So yes, this site could use a curated list feature, it's just a matter of WHO curates them.

And for this, I don't think the staff is the best option. Regardless of the staff's personal tastes it's a really small group who don't necessarily have diverse enough interests to reliably curate themed lists every nth period. They probably aren't looking for even more work to do either.

The scanlation groups and/or Power Users make much more sense, as they are many and a significant portion of them have specialised into specific genres and media, either by conscious decision or simply by what they like.
Their position also gives them enough cultural capital for their opinion to hold some clout, both on this site and the community in general.

Moreover, this has already been somewhat implemented within the few group interviews, in which members are asked for their favourite series and recommendations.

Alternatively, you could just open this feature up to every user, as I think is the case for say IMDB, but it'd kind of counteract the idea of a "curated" list. I'm not sure how interested people are in hearing the opinion of any average Joe user.

 

[PantsMan]

I remember actually quite liking MangaRock's recommendation lists outside of the layout issues, for the most part because many of the entries they recommended very rarely were popular to begin with. Splitting them up by theme was also a pretty neat feature. For an ad-ridden aggregator, whoever was writing those lists (or wherever they were stealing them from) was doing good work

@MadeOfMagicAndWires
Good breakdown. I'd very much like to avoid shit like user-submitted recommendations becoming incorporated directly into the site. If Imdb and MAL are anything to go by, they're usually trash; either talking about super-popular series that don't need recommendations to begin with, or being used as glorified comments/spam. I'd rather not see the admins' time and front page space be taken up by them.

Scanlator recommendations sounds neat, but I doubt it would work. You'd need groups to constantly give you a steady stream of recommendations, which isn't necessarily a concern of theirs. On top of that it'd likely devolve into shilling and advertising projects the group just happens to be working on, since constantly making recommendations isn't easy either.

The only thing I could see working pretty easily is one of those "Manga spotlight" links on the front page, where one of the top 1000 highest rated/followed/whatever is shown every week in a corner of the front page. No good for finding hidden gems, but a decent addition to the "Featured titles" list.

 

[LowSanity]

I wouldn't want it on top. Right side or bottom is fine.
I don't care, if it will be a feature then fine. If not then i'm fine as well.

 

[Plykiya]

@war-ble Staff picks were something we considered before by recommendation of other people, but it was met with just as much opposition from people who didn't care about staff picks. Kind of like this thread. So we just decided not to do it. Most of staff have our MDLists open as well, not too hard to find which mangas we would recommend.

 

[Teasday]

Here's my pick for every week

 

[war-ble]

@Plykiya Then, is it possible to have this feature off by default and users can turn it on in Settings? And rather than selections curated by staff who are already busy, it could be a section curated by chosen individuals whose job is to curate and find hidden gems, perhaps once a week. I'm kinda tired of seeing the same kinda of manga featured over and over on the main page.

Most readers (myself included) are lazy and find it a chore to go searching for genres they're interested in, and even if we do the top results usually overlap because certain series are so popular. Making a curated section of hidden gems on the home page would satisfy the section of the userbase looking for new series to read, and since it would be turned off by default it wouldn't bother people who don't like curations.