No Stupid Questions

Especially on big flashy news, I'm gonna see a news story about 7 times. Upvote the first, downvote the rest. Curse while doing so.

I'd love a solution, though. Why do we need to see it 7 times when it's the same content?

I find cross posts very annoying.

They divide the discussion, there can be a single cross post with five different children, and each one has one or two comments. That's bad for the Lemmy community

They fill up the feed with repetitive content, which can go from oh that was interesting to frustration seeing something over and over again.

They can be used to top post somebody's content to a different community, stealing the interactivity of the original poster. This is especially true for people trying to grow a small community and posting content

Where I have seen crossposts being useful is when two communities that are diametrically opposed when to talk about the same thing

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.

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).

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I do like seeing multiple crossposts, to an extent.

The "re-occuring crosspost issue" is not a problem for me since it keeps a topic fresh in my mind.

The "duplicate thread across multiple communities issue" is not much of an annoynace to me if done right. If someone is just reposting it to every related community they find, that is lazy and only clutters people's feeds. I think 2-3 crossposts, between the community talking about the specific niche then to the general topic. For example a piece of star trek news which is then crossposted from a star trek community to a TV shows related one.

Posting to too many communities will result in a bunch of dead threads. However, with the right touch it can spawn several engaging and active discussions, and expose people to new communities, so I like crossposts. With how moderation varies by instance, I do like getting perspectives from different groups talking about a big piece of news. Compare how users frequenting each of these communities might look at a piece of privacy news differently:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

The fact that you actually crossposted this between [email protected] and [email protected] 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 [email protected] and [email protected] to coexist, as there is a reason for them to (different moderation policies). It's similar for [email protected] and [email protected], as those communities have different principles and perspectives on their topic.

This suggests to consolidate communities like [email protected] and [email protected]

Another recent example is

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• there is now a third community, [email protected]

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 [email protected] 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

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

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.

• [email protected] vs [email protected]
• [email protected] vs [email protected]
• all the privacy communities that are active at the same time

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 [email protected], 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 [email protected] 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 [email protected], feel free to join us there to discuss this further.

In my client the crossposts are only shown one time with decent links to the other posts. Not annoying at all.

I only care when someone does it within the span of a few minutes so the top 5-10 posts I see when refreshing the page are literally the same post, from the same user, on 5-10 different communities. There is constant activity, but it's still not at the level of Reddit where posting to one place doesn't make it visible enough, and posting multiple times makes it feel like spam.

Compromise: Make a post, give it some time to see what traction it gets, and if it dies then cross post it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I'm not annoyed by cross-posts, but I've seen plenty other users who are, to the point that IMO this issue should be addressed.

I don't have a good solution for that though.

No fucks given :)