Hey folks -
The seemingly never-ending flood of Musk/Twitter news and commentary is getting to some of our users (and some of the mods, too), so we’ve decided to create a general Megathread for all things related to Elon Musk and X/Twitter.
This thread will be a general Musk catch-all, so we’re including news about Musk acting the fool as related to any of his companies (SpaceX, Tesla, Boring). News about those companies that don’t involve Elon can be posted outside this thread.
I agree with others that the concept of “mega threads” are fundamentally broken and not something I’m interested in carrying over from Reddit.
This is a place for discussion where users vote to decide what rises or stays obscure. Let the system work how it is designed. If there are too many posts about a particular topic, it’s either extremely relevant at the time or there are other moderation rules that could be considered to make sure low-effort posts are not dominating more substantial posts.
Tagging. Flair. Hashtags. Some kind of meta information.
Even in reddit posts can have flair. Lemmy have come to the edge of not having a filtering system, and need one asap. community specific tags or lemmy-wide tags or organic loose tagging, something is needed.
Here’s the issue for this feature : https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317
It doesn’t exist yet.
Tags with mods having tag powers feels like the best option long term. Any sorting system can be applied without worrying about compatibility.
I think it’s a bit silly to have megathreads just because some users can’t scroll past posts that doesnt interest them.
I agree its not great with multiple threads but it’s also not the end of the world imo. Users want to talk about these things. Let them.
It’s not fun to post on megathreads because your comments get buried. At least it was like that on reddit.
To rid the feed of Elon news we now have a stickied post with Elon news. I feel like there’s a meme hidden there somewhere.
I think it’s a bit silly to have megathreads just because some users can’t scroll past posts that doesnt interest them.
The problem is there are so goddamn many, to the extent that I’m working on a userscript that lets me entire hide posts that contain keywords. Checking my frontpage using Subscribed/Active, 5 of the first 20 posts are about this “news”. And that’s a full day after it happened, yesterday was far worse
Edit: The userscript is ready!
IMO the important thing is removing duplicates and pushing people to post to the most relevant communities (and for us regular users, only upvoting the post in the most relevant community). As well, Lemmy itself needs better means of combining the same post across many communities.
When I say removing duplicates, I also mean for a given event, not a literal duplicate link. We don’t need 5 posts from different media sites on the same event unless a new one is significantly different.
That’s the issue I’ve been noticing a lot. Every major news site wants to post their own opinion piece on how dumb Musk is (can’t blame em) and it feels like every single one of those will get posted to some Lemmy community.
Of course there are a lot of posts about it. There are big changes happening over at Twitter right now. It will obviously settle down eventually, but it’s an ongoing, pretty significant event.
That’s the reason I want a mega thread. I want to be able to scroll past anything Elon. Putting it in one spot is ideal.
It’s ideal for you since you don’t want to discuss it, yes.
My guess is some of them simply don’t like people saying bad things about musk and just want to stifle discussion.
I’m pretty sure most of the people running Beehaw are more than happy with people saying bad things about Musk. But it does get a little spammy, it’s honestly not all that interesting after a while?
I get that but all this solution does is effectively ban any discussions of Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter.
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Within 5 days the megathread will have 1 to 0 comments a day. And that’s a generous estimate. You know this.
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Because lemmy, like Reddit, is not conducive to the concept of a megathread. It’s the format that’s the problem, not the contents. You expect people to constantly stop what they’re doing and deliberately navigate to an old megathread and then sort through all the comments/conversations happening with days - weeks even - of gaps between them? Nobody does that.
Most of the Musk and Twitter posts don’t even have many comments as it is anyway. And when they do it’s people saying the same thing over and over in multiple splintered comment sections.
Besides, I don’t think lemmy is that way for megathreads yet like reddit can be. Partly because the userbase is smaller and more engaged, and partly because “active” sort exists.
People are treating this platform exactly like reddit because the churn of posts is exactly the same. You participate in the first hours or you miss it entirely.
No, people are annoyed by the constant articles he generates.
So the solution is to all but ban any discussion of him or his companies, all of which are pretty important topics, particularly in US tech news?
I can’t stand the dude, he’s garbage. I wish he’d fade out of the limelight and let smart people take his companies forward. But to functionally ban any discussions because he’s too present is a big over-correction.
I don’t agree with it, I’d prefer people use filters (most clients seem to support them).
Or people could go on the other hundreds of websites that exist and talk about him there?
Well the next time a community bans a topic you think should be allowed you make sure to remember this comment lol
There is already a system for users to provide feedback on what articles they do or don’t want to see.
X suspends pro-Nazi account after two brands halt advertising
I haven’t seen official sourcing on it yet but apparently a QAnon guy got suspended for posting notoriously bad child sexual abuse materials and then Musk reinstated the account. I’m frankly afraid to look it up because I don’t want to see the materials. https://twitter.com/faineg/status/1684329030500098048?t=747mnnSVncGD8OBd0Vhddg&s=19
I just went on twitter today and saw the change. X? What is that man’s obsession with the letter X? Half of his kids are named X-something, his newest scheme is called x.ai or something? I swear to god he’s an android or something.
An alternative that may address the concerns in comments would be temporary sub communities for loud events
- Create community technology_elon_bs@
- Mods of parent community inherit sub
- Create a pinned post in parent community announcing.
- Close sub community when noise goes down.
I like this compromise solution.
Or, if one wanted a more permanent community instead, we could split a, idk, “Corporate and Billionaire Drama” or “Web Drama” community (something along those lines) off for this type of thing going forward, so “Technology” could stay more specifically about tech and not about all the crap around it. But maybe that line would be too hard to draw I guess.
Lemmy/Kbin really don’t function in a way that make megathreads work though. This won’t work here and we can’t be thinking about trying to adopt Reddit behaviors in a platform that works very differently. Unlike Reddit, there isn’t a singular community around Technology. There are dozens that we can all see built across every instance. I had to scroll just to see I was looking at the Beehaw one.
Great, a megathread, let’s bring over one of the worst parts of Reddit and moderation 😒
I’m sorry if it’s frustrating to you to have megathreads like this. I’m not enthused about the extra effort in redirecting posts to the Megathread, either, but I’m not aware of a better way to handle topics that are flooding a community other than gathering them up in a thread like this. It annoys users (and mods) when dozens of articles about the same topic are dominating a community, so we’d like to do something to alleviate that when possible. I’ve seen similar concepts used in a number of different places (old-school forums, reddit alternatives like Tildes) because, as far as I’ve seen, there’s not a better alternative for wrangling topics that might otherwise clutter the feed.
If you have any ideas about better ways to handle this type of thing in the future, I’d love to hear them (and I genuinely mean that - I think we’re open to suggestions if a better way exists).
Well it depends on your goals with the platform. If you want a one stop shop to get all the necessary information in an efficient time then megathreads are great. It’s also good at stopping a specific type of content from taking over a forum while still providing an outlet for people to discuss.
If your goal is to idly consume content, then a megathread probably sucks. Same if you want to be an influencer, it’ll cut down on your exposure. Megathreads also can hide major developments that can hide behind a thread that people should be notified about. And if there wasn’t much content on a platform to begin with… A megathread can force a ghost town.
There are definitely both good and bad things about Megathreads and there’s a ton of depth and nuance that could be had.
In this case, I’m not sure whether a megathread was warranted or not though
No one is going to post news/articles here and then discuss them as they would in a regular post. It won’t get bumped up on the subscribed page if something interesting happens. Most of the comments here are going be about the megathread itself.
So this is effectively banning all the discussion concerning all of his companies. Which might be something you want to do, every community can decide for itself what kind of stuff they want to forbid after all. But I feel like it should be said directly, not via making a catch-all megathread.
Everybody’s subscribe page is different. It will get bumped in active and new comments on Lemmy as I understand them. This feels like the intended use case for those sorts.
Whether or not it intended that way, that is not how people browse. Most people just sort by “hot“ - the default - and doomscroll all day. There is nothing to incentivize people sorting by new/active comments so no one will.
While people have made some interesting comments on the downsides of megathreads, I’m glad we have a way of containing the Musk stuff. It gets a bit much.
To people who do have concerns though, if you’re tech minded maybe look at contributing to a way of improving the functionality of Lemmy. It’s in our gift to improve this place so if we can do something about it then we should, rather than passively complain when things aren’t how we want them to be.
To people who do have concerns though, if you’re tech minded maybe look at contributing to a way of improving the functionality of Lemmy. It’s in our gift to improve this place so if we can do something about it then we should, rather than passively complain when things aren’t how we want them to be.
This has literally nothing to do with whether or not relegating topics to megathreads is a good thing. In order to fix the issues with megathreads, we’d have to fundamentally change how these forums work, which no one is going to do and users aren’t going to follow unless most, if not all, instances follow suit. It has to be baked into the platform. The entire cycle of content sites like reddit, lemmy, etc. depend on is antithetical to megathreads outside of extreme high profile events, such as a presidential election or (yet another) still ongoing school shooting or something.
