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.
Great, a megathread, let’s bring over one of the worst parts of Reddit and moderation 😒
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