this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Here's the issue for this feature : https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317

It doesn't exist yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Tags with mods having tag powers feels like the best option long term. Any sorting system can be applied without worrying about compatibility.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's ideal for you since you don't want to discuss it, yes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@mrmanager

@TheRtRevKaiser

If the mods really find it that irritating, they might as well ban all Musk-related news.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Don't threaten me with a good time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But that's not censorship. It's people choosing to disengage or no longer to contribute.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

No, people are annoyed by the constant articles he generates.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Great, a megathread, let's bring over one of the worst parts of Reddit and moderation 😒

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately tags are not currently a Lemmy feature, so this isn't an option

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm cool with this, I don't need these articles telling me about musk/zucc/spez running the old platforms into the ground anymore. It's stuck in the past and ragebait. I think it's best to look forward. Walking away from old platforms completely means not letting them live rent-free in our heads anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
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