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
Anime can be found on tons of streaming services that don't have comments, like Netflix.
Anime in particular is pretty famous for having its own communities and niche spaces on the internet. If anything, Crunchyroll's comments section seems to me like it's unnecessarily fracturing those communities based on who watches on Crunchyroll vs other methods.
There are costs to maintain and moderate communities. It seems to me like that's adding a good bit of cost to Crunchyroll's business model in exchange a vlrelatively small value provided to a small percentage of their customers. Whereas with dedicated social media platforms, the business model revolves around and only attracts individuals who highly valued that community. With a smaller community like that, it's easier to rely on volunteer mods (like most of Lemmy) or a bit of ad revenue.
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.
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.
Super useful for something like Overlord, where scenes with background information were cut and there'd be someone saying what else you'd know by this point in the manga, or if you'd forgotten something since watching a previous season and needed a reminder.
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.
“Protecting our community," by destroying it. If you don't have a community, then it can't be toxic. Were the comments so bad that this was the only solution?
Most streaming services don’t do comment sections. That’s mostly a YouTube and TikTok thing where the sites depend on user submitted content and also function as a social network. Despite this, people talk about shows on those services, just elsewhere.
Most comment sections under crunchyroll episodes are super wholesome and cheerful, people are mostly celebrating how good the episode was and how cool the next ones will be.
Comments dont make money, moderation costs money. So pull it and make the site more like the other streaming services out there, make some PR word salad to justify it. Not surprising really. Of course maybe it really was a Salty Spitoon in the comments section. Either way, not exactly the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
This is a solvable problem but requires thinking about anything but profits for a minute. Require accounts and ban them permanently from all comment sections. They only won't do this because it means that person might unsubscribe.
It would be nice if those comments were moderated, but mostly what I saw in crunchy roll comments was straight up fascist propaganda. I'm in a place where I'm like... Not everything needs a comment section. I can take the criticism this makes me a crunchy roll bootlicker. I'll take that L, but know this: we should all be pirating stuff all the time given how the big corporations treat our art and creations
Anime audiences in English areas skew older, late teens early adults, or later still. Still a fair amount of the younger bunch though. Conventions are almost exclusively adults though.