Yeah I gotta jump on the pro mega thread bandwagon here. On r/politics I can only imagine how worthless the front page would become if they had let every big story be posted in individual posts.
And we can't rely on users, because some people will like different sources (WaPo, NPR, CNN, whatever) more than others. We also don't want some bot magically hiding "duplicate" posts because who knows if it will do a good job? A big long list of similar submissions collected in one place for everyone to see is the best worst option.
Megathreads on Lemmy will be more manageable just because of the smaller user size.
A Reddit megathread with like 100k comments in it is pretty worthless. There will be a handful of poweruser comments posted early that dominate and the rest of the comments in the gutter. If you post even a little late, your comment goes straight to the 1 upvote mines that nobody reads.
A Lemmy megathread is going to have like, 500 comments maybe. Much more manageable.
That’s why I like the idea of duplicate communities on different instances. A political event requiring a megathread will still have the flavor of the instance it is in primarily and will slightly spread out the discussion while still somewhat containing it from just wrecking everybody’s’ feeds.
You're not wrong. You remindrd me of the chat feed on Twitch. A streamer with a large enough audience has a totally unusable chat. No one can even read anything that gets posted because it's scrolling by so fast but that doesn't stop those thousands of people from screaming into the void. That seems totally pointless to me but clearly some don't mind being lost in the flood.
Good points. Something I ended up doing on reddit was reply to the top comment, which had a decent track record for being seen and maybe even replied to.
Totally agree. Mega threads are great, especially in smaller communities where posting the same question or article over and over clogs everything up. Even more relevant with a small community that suddenly found it's subject matter in the news and now every asshole is spam posting trying to farm engagement.
I like them for the "small talk." Maybe I got a question that can be answered super quick and don't want to make a whole post just for it. Or even answer a few.