Thanks for the feedback @MusicListenzGood! Please check out ListenBrainz Redesign, particularly the figma design project linked within, for where we’re headed with the project. I’ve already made comments in the figma project with a lot of your feedback, but please feel free to use the comment function to reply or add new comments.
I’ll address some things here as well, if I haven’t quoted something it doesn’t mean it has gone unread though 
Everything @UltimateRiff added was spot on as well, of course.
This is a big chunk of feedback at once so please don’t hesitate to bring things up again later, bump people, or create tickets or threads for specific parts of this that you would like to get more eyes on.
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Definitely in the pipeline, love your suggestions though. Please keep an eye on the design thread as I haven’t mocked these up yet at all, and feedback will be welcome.
The decision was made at the last summit that the CritiqueBrainz frontend will take the lonely road (be shut down*) after all of its features have been migrated to MB/LB/BB, so the ‘reviews in CB’ is definitely going to happen. *CB lovers, don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere soon, will be lots of time for discussion when the time comes
I (and a lot of the team) used to be a big user of last.fm, so I was pushing for shoutboxes for a while, because they were a big part of my experience there. However MetaBrainz staff with more ‘web 2.0’ experience said definitely not, and when we recently had meetings with a former last.fm developer/team lead they also said ‘definitely not’. So I have come to believe that we can give people good, satisfying, ways to interact around music without resorting to a global shoutbox on entities. Not sure what form that’s going to take (though we already have review comments, and ‘recommend track to’, and ‘pin recording’, and so on, which allow free text), but I think it’s fair to say: don’t expect shoutboxes in LB.
There is a bigger dev discussion floating around around how to do a notification system, which DM’s may (but, same as shoutboxes, very possible not) be a part of. Probably this notification system should be a global MeB one. For that we need to finish the universal MeB universal system. And so on… basically… don’t hold your breath. But also don’t despair!
As mentioned, we tested a lot of this in the last ‘year in music’, and I’m keen to expand on it.
Ideas welcome! There are lots of LB ‘grid’ mockups here, but that is just one way to share things. Recently I’ve also realised that we should give artists a way to share their stats/fun things as well (they drive a lot of new traffic/their listeners to Spotify et al). and so on.
Last.fm already did a lot of work around this. An example that came up in our meetings (from my notes) was “A user listening to a popular artist once isn’t really valuable data - solved by taking the top listeners of an artist to compute weights initially (so Thom Yorke appears in Radioheads top related artists… even if most people who listen to Radiohead just listen to other ‘popular’ stuff)”
I’m sure there are heaps of other things to take into account. @lucifer and @rob have been working with this, mainly in regards to creating playlists, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t translate into any ‘similar/recommended artist’ features we eventually do.
This is the kind of cool stuff I would really like to put into our ‘feed’ page, which currently is just literally a feed of some listens from your follows. You can see my mockup in the figma. The mockup is fairly conservative, but it starts to hint at tying in what other people/the global community is up to (X is trending), and what artists are up to (X released an album). There’s so much potential for this to be the hub for music updates!
btw, re. social feeds,it’s so hard to display things from other services (e.g. the big companies) without jumping through a lot of unclear (and changing without warning) hoops. Even if the technical implementation is possible, easy even, anything that requires calls on other services is ultimately up to how open their API is.
@rob, @lucifer, what about something like this? I could mockup something based on our other ‘explore’ pages, with some sliders and options, similar to the grid ones. Since you’re neck-deep in playlists at the moment maybe this interests one of you.
Check the rest of MusicListenzGood’s post above for some more interesting thoughts under ‘I would love to see more general(not user specific) playlists…’
I think once we expand the data we show in LB (two things I’m thinking of in particular, the artist/album/track pages, but also a drop down ‘info’ panel on user pages, for listens, which we’re planning), it will be very quickly obvious when data is missing. Then we can put little ‘edit’ links in the gaps. Same for tools that use artist country, genre, and so on. Because we’re not surfacing that data that much at this early stage it hasn’t come into play yet.
I fully expect every page on MB to be playable in LB eventually, I don’t see why we wouldn’t. This is also a dream of mine (in addition to being able to see what you’ve listened to/a LB listen count for every entity on a MB page…)
You’re not alone, please add a vote/comment to https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/LB-1040
This is something you would be very very welcome to contribute to, if you have the time and the inclination to sketch out a bit of a plan, and then start filling in details