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.

  • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • mifan@feddit.dk
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Frog-Brawler@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • limeaide
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      1 year ago

      Not only that, but it slows down discussion and more niche/focused topics are often missed

    • Zetaphor@zemmy.cc
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • thedarkfly@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      I think the idea of a megathread is to give the opportunity to avoid a topic that is flooding the community to people not interested.

      • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Mega threads should be per event though. Eg, “Trump gets convicted” would be a mega thread. You wouldn’t have an “everything Trump related” mega thread.

    • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      My guess is some of them simply don’t like people saying bad things about musk and just want to stifle discussion.

      • zark@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I get that but all this solution does is effectively ban any discussions of Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, or Twitter.

            • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Within 5 days the megathread will have 1 to 0 comments a day. And that’s a generous estimate. You know this.

                • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  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 of conversations happening with days - weeks even - of gaps between them?

                  • Die4Ever@programming.dev
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                    1 year ago

                    Maybe, but Lemmy has sorting options that Reddit didn’t, like Active and New Comments, so maybe we need to reevaluate megathreads for Lemmy

              • Pigeon@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

        • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Gamma@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I don’t agree with it, I’d prefer people use filters (most clients seem to support them).

          • prd@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            Or people could go on the other hundreds of websites that exist and talk about him there?

            • hoodatninja@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Well the next time a community bans a topic you think should be allowed you make sure to remember this comment lol

        • QHC@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          There is already a system for users to provide feedback on what articles they do or don’t want to see.

          • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net
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            1 year ago

            I’m not here to weigh in on the megathread debate as a whole, but assuming you’re referring to upvotes and downvotes, Beehaw disables the latter.

          • Gamma@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            I agree, and think megathreads should only be used when the scope is limited to prevent the same story from being posted multiple times

      • mrmanager@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        I’ve noticed that there are tons of people who tries to tell others what to talk about, even what words they should use. What’s going on… :)

    • SatanicNotMessianic
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      1 year ago

      Let me start by saying I do not like Elon, and that we’re publicly witnessing the destruction of a company of historically unprecedented proportions. I was not really a twitter user (I subscribed for emergency services notifications), but I acknowledge that it has had a major role in transforming the information industry from news to celebrity communications. I like reading about how every move he makes just destroys more and more, even though I regret the destruction. It’s Shakespearean.

      I agree that megathreads are not conducive to discussion (although with the lower traffic levels currently here it might not be as bad). It always felt like an approach that acknowledged that there was a disconnect between the users of a sub and the moderators regarding what deserved to be the major topic of discussion for the day.

      On the other hand, I get that a tidal wave of news (eg a new Trump indictment) could overwhelm a sub and drown out other legitimate discussion. Even if you have fully functional and enforced dupe detection on submitted articles, the number of articles from different sources would still result in enough posts that other topics would get buried. Part of it is due to the unfortunately linear nature of how subs work - this kind of site is basically a tree of infinite width but with a depth of 1 for most purposes. The other part is the tendency for people to use upvotes as an “I agree” button, so that every “Trump was indicted” post gets upvotes and thus floats to the top in several of the default sorts.

      I think the best answer might be to increase the tree depth. I also think the fediverse is in a far better position to do so than reddit could have been, simply because so much code is still in development and individual instances can do experimentation.

      On the other hand, unless and until that happens, I think that the megathread approach, especially in this example, is appropriate and maybe the only solution. This is a general technology topic, not one dedicated to Musk/Twitter.

      I love reading about every fresh horror coming out of that ongoing dumpster fire. I love trading ideas about what’s happening, and I love the outrage over it. But there are topics that are dedicated to those articles, and I can generally get my fill from places like enoughmuskspam.

      I don’t love it, and I think a better architecture would make it unnecessary, but given the current constraints I don’t think there’s a better choice.