this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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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.