I think one thing that the old comments section provided that this forum lacks at this moment was personability. In the old system, I would regularly maintain conversations with different people by posting comments on individual profiles. Granted, this system was very poorly optimized, as anyone could see these often very personal messages, and you could only send about one message per minute due to the fact that it would take a considerable amount of time before comments would update and sync on profiles. I think this forum-style community is very good at sharing information in a productive manner, and the amount of moderation you guys put in ensures that this forum will remain a clean and welcoming online community. However, I believe that this format is somewhat inherently sterile, and moderately ineffective at communicating, well, feelings and emotions. I see this as a byproduct of a system that relies heavily on moderation and a model that aims at conversing through fewer, heavily constructed messages that come at intervals of hours or days rather than rapid, impulsive messages. I do not, by any means think that this current forum which you guys have created is inferior or a waste of time. It is simply a different system from the old, and thus will lead to different outcomes. However, I strongly believe there is still a place for something similar to the old model, but perhaps modernized a bit. Now, I don't know what kind of programming team you guys have, or what kind of overhead you are working with. But, I believe that the inclusion of an integrated direct messaging service into the rest of Pandora's services would fill the aforementioned void. This messaging service would not have to be anything too fancy, with the exception that I feel it is very important to include some kind of feature that allows you to see what songs that the person you are messaging is listening to. Perhaps this feature could exist such that you can see what all of your followers are listening too, and maybe this feature could toggle on and off. Another idea that I can think of that would be interesting, yet also probably infeasible, would be live chat rooms bound to specific radio stations. Basically, this would be something similar to live chat rooms on Twitch or Youtube livestreams. I understand that Pandora is not a "live" streaming application to the extent of Twitch or Youtube, nevertheless, I feel that interactions in chatrooms where everyone is experiencing the same content simultaneously is an incredibly valuable asset towards building an online community. I understand that live chat rooms would come with a multitude of challenges, such as a need for moderation, increased infrastructure, and I don't have any idea how you guys would work out developing radio stations for a livestreaming application given all the years of work that has gone into song prediction algorithms that are based on individual feedback and customization. Yet, nobody has really used live chatrooms on a completely music-oriented platform before, (maybe for good reason) and I think it's an idea worth talking about a least. Let me know what you or any other community members think about these ideas 🙂
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