Perfect hahaha, thanks for clearing that up
No, you’re totally right I was just offering my own personal opinion. Appreciate you explaining some use cases where it could actually be useful, which admittedly didn’t even cross my mind 
they don’t have to change their privacy settings and assuming they already disabled the existing Discover features they would only need disable the details page activity feed/share button ( in same Discover section of opt outs) and the notifications.
A lot of ifs… I know how Plex users think. I say it again. It will be an issue. I wish to make the objections very clear while we’re testing the beta. Whatever happened to consent? Terms of service will need to be updated?
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As far as consent and terms of service policy for privacy that is default set to private and they need to consent by making those options available to friends.
most folks would not know about a feature ( im not talking about privacy here) unless it is on by default cuz most folks don’t read blogs, newsletters etc We could have just called this “early access” instead of a beta. Everyone is going to get these features eventually. and can disable and not use if they choose to.
and to be clear we are aware of the risk of folks being upset some things are on but mostly in the past they were more upset with having no way to turn them off.
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The impression I got was 1. It’s a Plex Pass feature, so not everyone will get to use it. And 2. We had learnt our lesson with the whole Discover debacle regarding auto enrolling users without the ability to disable which is the current state…
It would have been more preferable had say it been limited to auto enrol for users in a Plex Home, that’s akin more to consent implied rather that simply being a friend to someone who has a Plex Pass. Anyway. Who knows let’s see how it plays out. This is just my opinion 
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And yet we went ahead and did it anyway… 
Honestly I think everybody just needs to be happy that they’ve learnt their lesson and the beta is opt-in and not opt-out and they’re including options to disable it from the get go, credit where credit is due. I for one am happy with the changes they’re making across the board and I’m happy for all the hard work they’re putting in to improve Plex 
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I mean we can only tell folks all the info we have and how it works. If you take different impression what it literally says (that their friends don’t need a Plex Pass in the second sentence about joining in first post) I’m not really. sure what to say.
because the feature is pretty useless if your friends don’t use it too.
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Agreed. Ergo the Plex Home suggestion. Anyway. As I said. Let’s see how it goes.
I think it’s just a terminology misunderstanding - “enrolled” does not mean “enabled”.
I have an active Plex Pass so I can enroll my friends that don’t have Plex Pass in the beta, meaning they get the option to test the new feature without having Plex Pass. My friends activity isn’t shown to me unless they go and enable the feature on their account.
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Shame managed users have no access to this out of the gate, I’d love to beta test this. Due to the nature of how sharing servers works, creating managed users is far more suitable when sharing libraries with a friend who has their own subset of users (room mates in my situation).
This feature is very cool nontheless and can’t wait for it to come to managed users
Can the default setting be set to “Private” for Friends who gets enrolled automatically?
Update: As mentioned by dane22, It’s set to Private by default. Haven’t read the announcement fully initially but it’s mentioned in “Privacy Settings” section: Discover Together Beta : Announcement & Feedback
+1 for suggestion earlier that in future we can select Friends manually who will be enrolled and whom to send emails instead of everyone by default.
+1 for working on TV clients in future as I could see being helpful seeing Friend’s reviews on various Show/Movie out there on one-screen and don’t have to open web or mobile apps.
Lastly, thanks to Plex bringing out features like these, didn’t know I needed it until I saw it in action. 
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Ref: Discover Together Beta : Announcement & Feedback
- When you join the beta, your profile and activity is private by default.
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Thanks for making this opt-in rather than opt-out, at least for now. It continues to be a bummer every time there’s an announcement of a major, robust feature that clearly took an enormous amount of work and looks really well thought through, but is about expanding what the Plex product is rather than making it better at doing the core function it does. Your employees should be proud and I’m not trying to crap on the parade.
But when you see stuff like this, it says that continued issues with basic functionally aren’t an understandable result of scarce development resources (for which I’d forgive you), but rather a choice to prioritize hypothetical future customers over existing real customers.
I feel bad about making this reply because it is ostensibly not feedback about this beta feature, but I really get the sense there’s pretty widespread dissatisfaction (or at least not satisfaction) among existing customers, and there’s not a specific venue to provide feedback about customer perceptions of the overall development trajectory. There may be value in doing a broader, non-forum survey of Plex Pass customers to see if my intuition is right.
Would I make use of this feature? Maybe!
But to the extent this is primarily a UI buildout, I’d much rather progress on actor/director/writer profiles being able to combine movies and TV shows; to the extent this is primarily a feature about sharing Plex libraries, I’d much rather progress be made on the perennial transcode feature requests (transcode to x265 if supported; issues around default transcoding threshold; weird behavior around non-SRT subtitles); to the extent this is primarily a feature about metadata, I’d rather work go into making a robust native version of the old Sub-Zero plugin; to the extent this about the client, I’d rather work go into a native M1/ARM client on Mac… these features aren’t sexy and don’t get announcement posts, but they do make the core product a lot better.
Even to the extent this is about the Discover feature, I think it’d be great to see progress on resolving the fact that dozens of smaller countries have bad upstream metadata about service availability, leading to tons of open threads in these forums where people tell you they have access to streaming services but can’t see them in Plex. I know this is an upstream issue, but human capital can be spent to work with the upstream partner you’re paying.
In hindsight it may have been a bad idea to offer lifetime Plex memberships because it presents an incomplete contract (in the game theoretic sense) where you already have all the money you will ever get from the customer, but the customer still wants product improvements and you need to chase non-customers to get money. This is a recipe for bad incentive compatibility between customers and provider.
Again, I am sorry to make an off-topic post. It’s just a real bummer!
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After for using an hour or so these are my raw thoughts:
Friends option needs more exposure: Earlier I didn’t bother adding my friends as wasn’t sharing library with them and they had their own library. However with features like these, I think users will be adding more friends and that option is not promoted like “Home” or “Manage Library Access” section.
Maybe we can merge Friends section into Manage Library Access? Basically, don’t want adding/removing of features to be inside Profile, it could be more reachable.
Adding multiple Cards in “Discover > Activity” tab: Currently there is only 1 card shown on a 1080p monitor and lots of empty spaces there, more cards can be easily added depending on User’s resolution. (Referring to Plex-Web).
Allow Ratings to be adjusted from “Profile > Ratings” section: Would prefer not to open show/movie page again to adjust the rating. It will be handy if we can do it from that section.
Extending “Share” so that it can be used as Reviews?: Currently “Share” is great for quick sharing of words and it explicitly requires picking a friend. However, don’t think it can be used for Reviews unless there are some changes made to it.
Reviews here are basically what my friend’s think of that movie/show and that can be further integrated into existing RT “Reviews” where I would prefer what my friend think of that movie/show prior to critics. All this without them specifying me in particular but aggregate their own reviews/thoughts over time just like Ratings.
Muting/Filtering of certain Options per Friend basis: Let’s say Lisa shared her History/Watchlist/Ratings to everyone, but I prefer to not see her History while Ratings/Watchlist are fine. That way my “Discover > Activity” is clean and has only feed I care about.
Since if I all my friends enabled these feature then I will be bombarded with everything they do and would prefer to filter these things down.
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I know the daily activity emails aren’t being sent yet but this seems like it should be off by default or at least an option presented when the user is enabling Discover Together.
I know none of my friends and family care enough about what I watch to want a daily/weekly update email on it and having the option buried in email preferences that don’t seem to be changed on the Plex clients is going to cause me headaches trying to talk my less techy friends through disabling them.
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What will these emails and notifications entail exactly? Will I be getting an email/notification after each of my friends finishes something and vice versa, will an email go out to everyone after I watch something?
And will the be sent to ALL my friends, regardless of they’re sharing settings? (If a friend keeps all of their individual watch history private in the discover together settings, will they still get emails from everyone else?
I really like the feature but don’t want emails to be sent for all activity
It sounds like there will be a daily/weekly roundup email of your friends activity.
I’d assume only friends who have shared their activity will be included but this just seems like an unneccesary feature that will annoy people, especially with having to log into the Plex website to disable it.
Agreed. So far the feed is cluttered with watch history which I do not care much for, i like the interactive stuff, the shared stuff, the recommendations, the commentaries reviews etc. My Plex Home consumes a lot of content and seeing what everyone is watching isn’t necessary.
