Just make any poll / upvote system include smaller QoL items only and make clear that they will only occasionally be done in between larger items.
By the way, I know you really want to get to audiovisual and Korean as soon as possible, but personally I think it would be better to make general improvements and improve the existing Japanese reading scenario first. I just have too much experience with my company always chasing the new thing instead of improving what they already have. They claim they do it because the market is tapped out on their core product (which may or may not be true), but Natively is still young and has a ton of room to grow within the Japanese reading community. I think moving into a second language this early would be a huge mistake (audiovisual less so, but still a bit risky).
Things I’d like to see before those big initiatives:
Ability to set actual favorite books/series to be displayed on the profile Overview page
More charts on the stats page
Book type filter on the stats page
Tweaking of the grading approach to alleviate issues with high level manga (even if just expanding the range for those)
More filtering options for the activity feed (e.g. filter out “reading updates”, filter by book type)
Ability to tweak gradings more easily. Having to go to the Gradings page and search is confusing
On-site notifications, with settings to choose whether to receive a notification, an email, or both for certain events. Specifically, I want an on-site notification for when a book I request gets added instead of an email. On-site notifications for when a new volume of a series you’re reading has been added to the site would also be nice. Notification when someone follows you. Surely more I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Social page should be improved. At least include profile pictures, but it’s really awkward right now.
(All that was just off the top of my head / from a quick scan of the tabs on the site, I’m sure I’ll have more later.)
I understand your concerns about strategy that you’re laying out here and appreciate the feedback!
I too have been in similar companies. And yes Natively is no where near tapped out yet for the Japanese community. But that’s not really my intent though. My concern is more about being flexible when it comes to growth… able to expand into other languages / other types rapidly if I need to. If I figure out audiovisual & a 2nd language now, I’ll be much more comfortable simply focusing entirely on tapping out those segments… as I’d know how to expand.
I don’t plan to move onto a 3rd or 4th language without greatly expanding the Korean / Japanese communities and show that I can tap them out.
I’m happy to discuss more about the overall strategy, but I’d probably prefer to do so via DMs
Edit: FWIW I’m actually not terribly concerned about adding Korean… it’s adding mostly filters and a book request functionality. Maybe a little search. Much more concerned about AudioVisual, as it’s new.
Maybe it can go somewhere over here, then? I pretty much ignore the prize winners, so maybe in the additional filters section? I did notice that the drop down menu of “sort by” has it:
On a completely different topic, I just came across a TL novel with no warning that it’s R18. I guess whoever requested it just didn’t put any info in the comment box.
What’s the policy with such book? Should we report them in some way, or should we just rely on the reader’s intelligence (considering they would have to buy it in an R18 category, and, in this specific instance, there’s 溺愛 and 淫れる in the title anyway)
Well, it’s optional… but the original intention was to allow users to showcase books they thought were good language learning experiences (useful vocab? useful phrases?) even if they didn’t think the book was all that entertaining.
When I originally implemented reviews, I read a lot of language learner reviews and found that they often manually gave a ‘language learning’ rating in the description, which I thought was a good idea.
No formal definition - just an attempt to allow people to express their opinions easier
Gotcha! Sounds pretty loose, then. I’ll have to consider how to best use it; my default is to mark harder books/books with a very specific setting with a higher language learning potential (look at everything you’re learning as you suffer), but that may not necessarily be helpful to the average browser…
I also do something like that, but in a slightly more organized way (even though it remains arbitrary).
I start from 3/5 (so, average) and do +1 for each “large enough” groups of such words/sentences, and -1 for each “long enough” part that brings nothing (for example, repetitive or using barely any useful words, like the fight scenes in some 男性向け light novels where you just have pages worth of screams)
I am thinking of changing that when rating easy books, though, since repetition is instead better for beginners/intermediate learners
Alrighty. I’ve never been much of a review person, but I feel like it’s my duty to leave at least a little something for some of these books that aren’t likely to receive many readers. I know I would definitely have appreciated some heads up on what’s contained in spinoff X of this series, novelizations of this well-known property, or the like; so many of these books have so little information in English it can make it difficult to know what you have in your hands unless you already speak decent Japanese.
In that spirit I’m going to do my best to leave reviews as I read. (Just finished adding reviews for all the ones I’ve already read.) Thanks to all who are already doing the same; it’s nice to know something more about a book than just that it has a pretty cover~
Edit: Just saw you can see a user’s review for a specific book on their Recently Read marquee on their profile page. Very nice touch!
I didn’t realize until after I clicked submit that I forgot to say that the other link was broken, since my first message only mentioned that lack of it in the search results.
For the reading speed statistic, I think I’d prefer pages per hour instead of pages/min… 0,2 or 0,3 pages per minute feels inaccurate and not very applicable to real life.
Should be an easy to implement change as well, if nobody has any strong preference for pages/min.
I didn’t realize until after I clicked submit that I forgot to say that the other link was broken, since my first message only mentioned that lack of it in the search results.
