“I want to read comment sections on anime episodes, I must know what anime fans have to say” - statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
There have been several shows that I’ve watched on CR that have been made a lot better by being able to read the comments section. Either because it’s One Piece and there’s always one guy giving you the timestamp to skip the recap or because the series I’m watching is actually pretty bad and a bunch of people are making jokes at the shows expense.
It’s been rare that I’ve seen someone on CR be overly negative or toxic without getting shutdown fast. It’s usually pretty wholesome and fun.
That was one of My favorite things about Crunchyroll. I love going through the comments after finishing a series and seeing what others were thinking. I know anime fans can be pretty crazy, but I very rarely saw toxic comments. It was mostly people talking about a shared experience and was surprisingly wholesome the majority of the time. I even got some good recommendations about what to watch next because of it too
Just to hazard a guess, it might be pretty closely moderated to keep the toxicity down. That might just be costing Crunchyroll more than they think it’s worth.
this is exactly it; anytime you see a really wholesome comment section, it’s because they have a team to actually moderate it which costs time and money
They banned someone for a few weeks who’d comment Dub time on dubs after some weirdos got irrationally angry about it and mass reported her. There’d also be a meaningful comment on the actual episode from the same user, but it wouldn’t be upvoted as much, so wouldn’t be displayed as prominently. Before the ban and after it was reversed, there’d typically be an argument in the replies to the Dub time comment between people angrily ranting about it and other people defending it.
So there clearly was some moderation, but beyond an automated bad word filter, and I guess something blocking URLs, it was done sparingly and reluctantly.
Good. Not every website needs to be a social media platform too. There’s already plenty of communities on the Internet to discuss anime.
Bad.
Censoring culture is not good, making it so the only place to get news is from paid talking heads who would never bite the hand that feeds, is not a good change.
The community is destroyed.
This isn’t censoring culture. This is a streaming platform focusing on streaming and giving up on trying to be more than that.
The communities still exist and will find a new platform. Just over a year ago there was a sizeable chunk of Redditors that came to Lemmy. It’s happened time after time when a platform goes down. Communities are much more than just the platform they are on.
I’ve just cancelled my Crunchyroll sub, not only because of the user content deletion but because they lock many translations and animes out of Spain and the quality of some subs are shit generated with AI. My new streaming service is nyaa.
The amount of people bootlicking a corporation’s decision to cut costs rather than just moderate effectively is pretty astonishing for Lemmy,
Plenty of people got value out of the comment section - if nothing else, they were invaluable in knowing when to skip past the recap/opening theme/filler content in long-running shows like One Piece.
Most of it is pretty inane, but there was some useful stuff in there, and I always found it fun to see what other people thought of particularly crazy episodes.