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.
Yeah, i found that. As it is pretty clear that official support for tagging is not there, causing mayhem here looks like the better idea.
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.
Elon musk containment thread thank God.
Now if only billionaires could be contained in real life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
My guess is some of them simply don’t like people saying bad things about musk and just want to stifle discussion.
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 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/conversations happening with days - weeks even - of gaps between them? Nobody does that.
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.
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.
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
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.
Memmy, which at least anecdotally seems like the most popular app for Lemmy, definitely sorts by hot. I guess I should not have assumed that Lemmy does that.
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.
X suspends pro-Nazi account after two brands halt advertising
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.
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.
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.
A++ title. Megathread is a great idea too.
If only containing Elon Musk and his immature drivel to a single location was as easy in real life…
