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.
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).
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)
Y’all have functionally banned all news related to Elon musk, Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX.
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
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
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.
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.
Terrible idea.
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.
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.
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.
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… :)
There is already a system for users to provide feedback on what articles they do or don’t want to see.
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.
If the mods really find it that irritating, they might as well ban all Musk-related news.
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.
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.
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.
