General Megathread for Elon Musk Nonsense and Twitter News

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.

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.

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.

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!

@mrmanager

@TheRtRevKaiser

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Now if only billionaires could be contained in real life.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Huh