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.