General Megathread for Elon Musk Nonsense and Twitter News
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 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
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.
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’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?
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.
There’s nothing to evaluate. Megathreads were designed to kill topics on Reddit (unless it was a MAJOR, developing, current event) and they do the same here. You’re the first person to comment at all in this thread in over a month.
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.
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.