I have started to use LB more and more over the last few weeks. Many thanks for all your work!
What I have noticed moving from last.fm (especially the “old” one before the relaunch) is that LB has some social aspects (followers, feed, similar users) - but it’s quite tricky to get in touch. The shoutboxes on lst.fm was something I really liked - it was interesting to see comments on artists profiles and discover other users this way.
I have seen the CritiqueBrainz button to add artist reviews, but a simple comment on artist / album / track pages would be wonderful.
Is this something which has been discussed before (and maybe not realized on purpose due to moderation / spam questions)? What do others think about this?
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So glad that you’re enjoying LB!
I also enjoyed the shoutbox feature on last.fm.
It has been discussed, and currently there are no plans to incorporate shoutboxes or chat in ListenBrainz. As you’ve guessed, this is partly due to the MetaBrainz Foundation’s small pool of paid staff - upscaling to incorporate a moderation team would involve MeB turning into a different place. Which doesn’t sound very fun, which means it probably won’t happen 
Also, a former last.fm staffer said to us that their biggest regret was incorporating shoutboxes. As a long-time lfm user that was a surprise to me! But I can imagine they must have dealt with a lot of issues that I wasn’t privvy to as a user…
It would be an interesting experiment to create a user script or a website that overlays LB with a chat system.
In terms of LB development I think there are other ways we can foster interaction. Allowing reacts on plays/shares/reviews, for instance. Any other ideas? I think there’s the possibility to do some really fun stuff without an explicit plain-text shoutbox.
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That makes absolutely sense - shoutboxes full of spam would be the last thing we would like to see here. The time can be used better than moderating comments 
Reacts - similar to GitHub / Slack / GitLab on plays/shares/reviews would certainly be interesting, maybe even on other entities like tracks, albums or artists. The play count is one indication of a track/albums popularity, but sometimes one doesn’t listen that often to a given album (or in a way which can not (yet) be scrobbled. Allowing a reaction would be nice and could be shown in the feed too (user XY reacted to track Z with 
)
When I think about how I was using the shoutboxes over on last.fm, it was very often a way for me to discover users or comments. The content of the comment itself was secondary, but having a user mentioning another artist was extremely valuable to discover new music.
One way to solve this in a way which would not end in a “moderation nightmare” might be a fixed set of custom “relations”, “links” or “recommendations” (naming is difficult 
). Instead of adding a comment on an artist page, I might just add a relation of the type “artist recommendation” and select an artist from the MB db - allowing other users to check the mentioned artist. They type, direction and visibility of these relations might of course be extended, but it would allow to keep the full control over the content. Maybe I am the only one who might find this useful, but maybe this gives an idea for other solutions 
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This would be pretty cool! I think I would quite often use a FFO* feature on artists or albums that I liked. An interesting thing is that it would go both ways, leading from known artists to unknown artists, but also enticing people to listen to unknown artists if they lead to known ones that they like.
Though my instinct is to say “we could just automate that, based on listen/neighbour stats”, but then we lose the human curation element that made shoutboxes fun in the first place…
*For Fans Of
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The human element is exactly the thing which I am missing in all the similar artists, stats and other automations. While they are extremely useful, it’s important as well to have human recommendations.
If this is something which might be interesting for the future of LB, I am willing to help if I can allocate some time and the DB model is clear.
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Agreed re. human element! I feel LB is building up to that part, the groundwork is getting there.
If you want to get involved, your first step is the ticket tracker.
It’s not a big investment of effort to start voting and commenting on tickets, or creating new ones for features you would like to see. Then, when you have the time, you can try picking up a ticket and submitting a PR.
By the way, I realised why your username looked familiar - your edits came up in my MB subscriptions recently! Great to see more Swiss artists being added. I went on a mission over two (!) xmas holidays to add the Ghost Festival and now I have a lot of random CH artist subscriptions 
Naja, nod so schlimm!
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Thanks, I will do so.
Funny thing about the Ghost festival Thanks for adding it - I’m sure you’ll continue to get lots of notifications
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