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 agree. Even when the megathread included a list of posts relevant to a topic, whatever nuance was there gets lost in the grand comment thread. We really need a tagging and filtering system so that users can opt out of topics.
That way, it’s not incumbent on mods to make a Megathread, or make a judgement call on whether there are too many posts on any one topic.
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.
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.
Not only that, but it slows down discussion and more niche/focused topics are often missed
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!
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.
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.
Very true
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.
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.
If the mods really find it that irritating, they might as well ban all Musk-related news.
Don’t threaten me with a good time
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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.
No, it doesn’t.
Within 5 days the megathread will have 1 to 0 comments a day. And that’s a generous estimate. You know this.
But that’s not censorship. It’s people choosing to disengage or no longer to contribute.
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?
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.
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.
I agree, and think megathreads should only be used when the scope is limited to prevent the same story from being posted multiple times
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… :)
Huh
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.
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.
Unfortunately, as I have this data - I can tell you “hot” is not how most people browse according to their preference settings.
Active is overwhelming how people browse.
Which doesn’t solve the issue at all. It’s just trading problems. It biases new content just like Reddit’s karma algo did. Same problem, different flavor.
I like “active” sort specifically because it biases new comments on posts, instead of new posts, so that if people keep talking on a post, or if an old post gets an unexpected rush of comment activity, it’ll stay on my homepage. It makes the homepage move slower, makes post success much less dependent on its exact timing vs peak lemmy usage, and it lets discussions last longer, and lets people participate in discussions longer than immediately after the post goes up. Gives everything a more patient feel.
And imo may indeed mitigate the problems some are fearing with megathreads based on how they could be on reddit sometimes.
None of that will stop the chilling effect this functional ban is creating. Notice not a single post/comment about Musk, Twitter/X, Tesla, and SpaceX has gone up yet they claim we were basically drowning in them prior. So if we were, why aren’t they happening here now? The answer is: No one will bother.
I don’t love Musk and frankly I’d like to see less but it also takes me less than a fraction of a second to scroll past it. This change will not lead to them being aggregated in one place, it will simply mean the topic disappears entirely. If that’s what the community wants so be it but this wishful thinking that it won’t have the chilling effect I’m mentioning here is, well, wishful thinking.
Bro you’re on kbin. How do you know how or why people do things on Lemmy?
You’re so right. I have absolutely no access to Lemmy, especially not Memmy on my smartphone. There is no possible way for me to know how it works.
Do you know then that hot is still pretty broken?
Ok? It’s the default just like Reddit. We have a massive migration of people from Reddit operating like they’re still on Reddit because they’re on a site that’s meant to be a replacement for…Reddit. And one day it won’t be flawed/broken I imagine.
I really am not interested in discussing this with someone who is so eager to discount someone’s point because they use a different side of fediverse tbh.
I see posts on the daily talking about better sort options than hot. I think it is you who is less familiar with the diversity of the fediverse. Remember, my original comment was:
Everybody’s subscribe page is different
I’m not interested in dismissing your feedback, but I do kind of agree with the point made by person you’re responding to (I don’t agree with the rhetoric).
By sorting by hot, I get a lot of low-engagement posts with 5-20 upvotes and 0 comments. It’s just not the kind of content I want on my feed. And while this is all anecdotal, Lionir also responded to you with (hopefully honest) confirmation that active > hot for most users.
I felt a great disturbance in the Lemmyverse, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly … moved to this post.
Bravo. Thank you
Lol, thanks. We’ll most likely leave posts that were submitted before this thread since most of them have already generated discussion and we’d hate to cut that off. It would be great if there was some way to bundle up existing posts under a single post without removing them, but I’ve yet to see a site with a feature like that.
Isn’t the “correct” way (using that term very loosely here) to create a new community and move the stuff over there? Then people who are interested in that topic can just subscribe that one. You could call it /c/eloncirclejerk or something like that.
Conceptually, a megathread is like a community, but within the hierarchy of another community.
!enoughmuskspam already exists somewhere I think
Elon musk containment thread thank God.
Now if only billionaires could be contained in real life.
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).
Seems to me that these threads keep coming up and rising up because people want to talk about them.
The better solution reddit had was to let posts be sorted by tags so that people who don’t want to see a certain topic can turn it off, rather than that decision being made for everyone else.
Unfortunately tags are not currently a Lemmy feature, so this isn’t an option
So despite the fact that a ton of current tech news revolves around Elon musk and his companies, the solution is to bury any and all discussion about him in a megathread we all know people will never read or comment on?
News about the companies that don’t involve him are still allowed outside the thread. The idea here is more to contain stuff about the man himself, as it gets spammy and repetitive after a while
News about the companies that don’t involve him are still allowed outside the thread.
That is not entirely correct.
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).
So 1) ALL things X/Twitter/Musk, 2) you can only talk about his other companies if it doesn’t involve him (which are the vast majority of stories about his companies).
This is functionally banning Musk and his companies from being discussed. No one will check the megathread. We both know this.
I hope you can appreciate and understand that the decision was made, in part, because we had users asking for it. I recognize the shortcomings of a megathread. However it won’t be possible to make every user here happy. We’ve taken the actions that we thought were best based on the desires of some of our users.
We appreciate feedback, and are welcoming any suggestions on how this could be handled better
You know you’re commenting on it now though right?
Day 3 and not a single post/comment about Musk, just you taking a needless jab at me because it’s funny to you. This thread is dead except for you and me right now.
Y’all have functionally banned all news related to Elon musk, Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX.
Some see this as a feature, not a bug.
Whether you do or don’t, it’s a flagrant attempt to end the topics without owning up to it. It’s window dressing.
As others have suggested maybe having a sub for trending news, that might be good actually. That way people can easily sub and unsub to this stuff without having to worry. (An on-going catch all for this kind of news, I think it would be better than focussing on a single current topic)
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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
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.
Nobody on Reddit, Lemmy, etc. behaves that way. Nobody checks megathreads unless it’s an ongoing, high profile situation. I guarantee you this megathread is going to get essentially no engagement within 48 hours and now for some odd reason all news about SpaceX, Twitter, and Tesla is functionally banned.
If you want a one stop shop to get all the necessary information in an efficient time then megathreads are great.
Strong disagree. My experience with megathreads is primarily being full of memes and puns, with so many hundreds of root comments that even using extra tools it was impossible to follow any real conversation or updates.
It’s also good at stopping a specific type of content from taking over a forum…
That is the only thing megathreads accomplish, IMO.
I don’t think I really need to tell y’all that megathreads are, as a general rule, worthless. The only way they are even moderately useful is if they are recurring, such as a weekly megathread for beginner questions on a technical/hobbyist sub. A static, one time megathread means that no one will ever talk about it at all. That is not the right call.
Anybody who has been a mod for more than a week knows that a megathread only stifles discussion unless it’s some major event happening in real time, such as Jan 6th. I get you don’t want musk spam but you’re over correcting.
Popcorn! Get your popcorn Hheeeerra!
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.
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What would be more helpful I think would be a “hide post” option.
That way you could hide stuff you’re not interested in, or posts you have already read. (Something good from reddit)
I like the idea of a megathread wrt to Musk. Seeing my front page composed of 50% Musk threads all of which are roughly the same, is frustrating. Or, hell, maybe make a Musk News sub and confine posts of it there that people can subscribe to if they want. It’s just too much of a whack a mole right now because there’s so much going on with it.
However, I do wish we had a “hide post” option. There was a post a while back that involved animal harm, and seeing that in the middle of my feed for 2 days straight was extremely upsetting, and there was nothing I could do about it.
Voyager has good features for hiding posts as well as marking posts read and hiding read posts.
You might give the Voyager app a try. It’s what I use. It has a hide post option, as well as a “mark read on scroll” option and a button to hide read posts. I think you have to enable the last two in its settings.
A++ title. Megathread is a great idea too.
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.
Terrible idea.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/26/23808331/twitter-x-ads-advertising-incentives-verification-brands
another change to Twitter’s ad policy. Starting August 7th, advertisers that haven’t reached certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification. According to emails obtained by the WSJ, brands need to have spent at least $1,000 on ads within the prior 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days to retain the gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.
