Note that while I get the benefit, one historic mechanism for trolling on Usenet relied on the fact that many clients would respond to both Usenet groups if a post was cross-posted.
This meant that one could post troll bait cross-posted to two groups that had userbases that didn’t agree with each other, and watch as a flamewar ensued. E.g. “I’m thinking about getting a Mac or a Windows PC and am not sure which is better. I heard from my friend that Macs kind of suck. Can you help explain?” to comp.sys.mac.advocacy and comp.sys.ms-windows.advocacy or something.
Reddit avoided this by not having responses visible to users visible to both groups. It just linked to cross-posts.
PieFed’s merging of crossposts to users of both groups helps address federation-induced fragmentation on the Threadiverse (multiple “linux” communities effectively act as one ad-hoc community for the life of a given crosspost). But it also lets a malicious crossposter force users of arbitrary groups into one discussion, and I can say that that definitely led to problems in the past.
Combining crossposts on every platform would be neat…
PieFed does this already. For instance, you can see that this article was posted 29 times and had a total of 159 comments:
And then when viewing the post, the comments are organized below into each community:
Note: The totals given for each community don’t seem to line up with the overall total. It might be a bug caused by deleted comments.
It would be nice if other platforms had the same kinda deal.
Its very hard to do in practice so I kinda get it.
Note that while I get the benefit, one historic mechanism for trolling on Usenet relied on the fact that many clients would respond to both Usenet groups if a post was cross-posted.
This meant that one could post troll bait cross-posted to two groups that had userbases that didn’t agree with each other, and watch as a flamewar ensued. E.g. “I’m thinking about getting a Mac or a Windows PC and am not sure which is better. I heard from my friend that Macs kind of suck. Can you help explain?” to comp.sys.mac.advocacy and comp.sys.ms-windows.advocacy or something.
Reddit avoided this by not having responses visible to users visible to both groups. It just linked to cross-posts.
PieFed’s merging of crossposts to users of both groups helps address federation-induced fragmentation on the Threadiverse (multiple “linux” communities effectively act as one ad-hoc community for the life of a given crosspost). But it also lets a malicious crossposter force users of arbitrary groups into one discussion, and I can say that that definitely led to problems in the past.
I noticed that the communities and accounts I have blocked still count towards the displayed combined total.
Also “combining crossposts” because most people don’t use that feature, and post in multiple communities instead (for Lemmy).