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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.ca
scratsearcher 🔍🔮📊🎲 @sopuli.xyz

Are you annoyed by lemmy crossposts?

Crossposts might be annoying, because

  • essentially they are the "repost" feature of lemmy. And repeats might be low quality spam, because you have to look at the source, how often it was reposted already, etc.
  • crossposts might seem like a cry for unwarranted attention, but they might be necessary in a fractured federated system like Lemmy …

Or do you not care when realizing "this is a crosspost"?

31 comments

  • this is how a crosspost appears for me. Not annoying

    Its annoying when people spam the same thing to many communities in one go though, without a crosspost between them

  • Depends on several factors for me.

    Not Annoyed:

    • If it's cross-posted to a community that's not almost identical to the first. e.g. Crossposted from News to "Not the Onion"
    • The community receiving the crosspost is small/niche

    Mildly Annoyed:

    • Cross-posting to a similar community, especially on the same instance. e.g. News -> World News.

    Annoyed:

    • If it's just someone posting the same thing to 2-5 communities at once. I find it highly obnoxious
    • Someone doesn't check that the same article (or almost the exact same article) has been posted to the same community already (depends on the UI/app if that counts as a crosspost; in the one I use it is)

    Extremely Annoyed

    • The way Lemmy defines cross-posts under the hood. There's no direct link between them at all, and they're a completely artificial construct on the UI side. Basically any two or more posts with the same URL that come through in the same API fetch have to be rolled up by the UI. Some UIs will extend that to the title as well.

    • I am a little confused:

      If it’s just someone posting the same thing to 2-5 communities at once. I find it highly obnoxious

      does "at once" mean for example: within 5 minutes of the original post?

      For example I cross-posted this question here to lemmy.worlds "No stupid questions" community within 5 minutes of this post, would you be annoyed by that?

      • For example I cross-posted this question here to lemmy.worlds "No stupid questions" community within 5 minutes of this post, would you be annoyed by that?

        Yes. Unless something changed in other UIs, crossposts are only defined by their URL. With text only posts, that would be at least two identical posts back to back. Not many UIs will roll up crossposts on title (again, unless something has changed on that front between 0.19.3 and 0.19.9.

  • If anything, I just stumbled with this setting in the Summit Lemmy client for Android:

    I just started using it so I'm still gonna check if I see less duplicated or cross posts... (I always hid my read post before starting my doom scrolling session, so I'd suggest that is a requirement for my testing).

    • Mark duplicate posts as read … Any posts that are determined to be duplicates …

      Hmm sounds like a duplicate detection algorithm is used, maybe they check something like this:

       
          
if(post1 == post2) delete(post2);

      interesting!

      • I think it just marks it as read (dims it) instead of hiding it.

  • The fact that you actually crossposted this between !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world and !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca is interesting, but is an example of a recurring issue on the whole platform.

    My personal stance on this is that

    If rules, moderation policies and admin policies are similar, there should only be one community on a single topic while we have a userbase below 100k

    This allows for !politics@lemmy.world and !politics@hexbear.net to coexist, as there is a reason for them to (different moderation policies). It's similar for !climate@slrpnk.net and !climatehope@lemmy.world, as those communities have different principles and perspectives on their topic.

    This suggests to consolidate communities like !movies@lemmy.world and !movies@lemm.ee

    Another recent example is

    These three communities have similar rules, similar moderation and admin policies. They should be consolidated. And I know this is a very controversial topic, but I made a longer post recently on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com for people interested.

    In summary, my main argument is that

    • even though subscribers can potentially subscribe to all communities on a topic
    • posters are only going to post to one community, because they want the conversation to happen with the most people in one place, which is not the case if you crosspost as the comments gets splintered across the different communities

    To take a recent example

    As a member of both communities, I find it a pain to have two similar communities even more so when both post the exact same content because it creates more noise in my feed and because it forces me to waste my time and energy deciding where I will read said duplicated content and maybe post a comment. The solution is obvious: I will unsubscribe from one (for the time being, I still follow the two communities).

    https://jlai.lu/post/16318139/13038429

    There is a natural tendency of "one community emerges as the main one" on several topics

    If one community does not emerge as the main one, it's usually because two or more regular posters maintain both communities active by posting to their preferred community.

    So, my suggestions are to consolidate similar communities. This single decision will not make this platform similar to Reddit. On Reddit, you had no way to complain about power tripping mods, there were no public modlogs, and discourse criticizing the mods or the admins would get silenced.

    Here, we have !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, and recent examples have shown that the community can actually resist power tripping: https://feddit.org/post/7025680/4263481.

    If the mods of the consolidated community start to power trip, document this on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com and reorganize on the alternative communities. If not, stay on that one community, to foster more active conversations and posts.

    That's the theory we encourage on !fedigrow@lemm.ee, feel free to join us there to discuss this further.

    • I find it good you posted this elaborate post on the topic, thanks Blaze! Some Key points I think:

      • Crossposting was seen as a solution to cross-instance fragmentation of lemmy communities
      • Crossposting did not solve the problem. fragmentation still exists.
      • Consollidation is a complex topic, as similar instances with similar moderation policies have to be found by each other …

      • as similar instances with similar moderation policies have to be found by each other …

        They usually are, some examples on !fedigrow@lemm.ee

        Some admins just want to keep their communities open no matter what. See an example here: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24057566

        Feel free to chime in with your own input, or just a link to this point, at this point I'm just kind of done with that conversation.

31 comments