There were a large number of duplicates posted today, first on the death of Diane Feinstein and again on the plea deal of one of the defendants in the Trump Georgia case.
I don’t take removing posts lightly, so I want to explain my rationale here.
When someone visits a community, the last thing they should see is a bunch of articles on the same thing with more or less identical headlines. It splits the discussion, and reduces engagement with any single one of them.
There are a couple of different ways of handling it:
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Leave it alone, once the 24 hour news cycle works through, the front page will change and it will all be fine. This is where I started today, opening a discussion with the other mods, basically going “What do you think?”
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Keep the first post on each topic, remove the others as duplicates. This is what I’ve ended up doing. The OG posts on each topic seemed to have the most comments and the most upvotes, keep the discussion where it’s at.
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Nuke ALL the posts and move it to megathreads. Remove all future content and direct to the megathread. I’m, generally, not a fan of this as it removes comments already made and stifles new posts which may have a different angle.
For example:
Yeah, there were a bunch of posts of “Diane Feinstein dies at 90”, but there is also this post:
“The Diane Feinstein Paradox”
https://lemmy.world/post/5966546
That has more to say than just “dies at 90”, and as such isn’t a duplicate and I left it alone. In “the other place” the response would have been “subject contains Diane Feinstein, post removed, post in megathread” despite the fact that the article isn’t about her death, it’s about her life, and fundamentally has something different to say.
Similarly on the Georgia defendent striking a plea deal. Articles saying “hey, he made a plea deal” were removed as duplicates. The post of the courtroom video I left alone, because seeing the events first hand has a different impact and sparks a different discussion. Articles on the RAMIFICATIONS of the plea deal, I also left alone. Again, not the same as simply posting “there’s a plea deal.”
I hope all this makes sense and nobody takes the removals personally, it wasn’t personal, I promise!
Competent and transparent moderation in a fairly sized politics community. I am officially impressed.
You see enough bad examples, you want to set a good one. ;)
I definitely appreciate it. When the Feinstein story hit, my entire feed was just duplicates of that story (multiple in this community plus identical posts in other politics communities).
I’m not a fan of megathreads. Imo, it’d be best to keep the oldest post that links to a non-clickbait article, and if someone posts an article covering nearly the same content, remove/lock it and link to the other post.
EDIT: If it’s about an ongoing topic that wouldn’t be resolved for more than a few days, then a megathread might be appropriate.
I think that’s a reasonable attitude and I think you mods are doing a great job in this community, so thanks!
not a fan of this as it removes comments already made
Would be great if there was some way to merge comments under one post.
Was thinking the same thing. Always bothered me when the mods over on nazi digg would remove a popular thread in favor of one that no one was using. Looked like they were just removing discussion about topics they didn’t want anyone to talk about.
I’m glad the mods here are more thoughtful.
That all seems reasonable. Thank you for the mod work.
Thanks. Already too many with so many different communities too! I like number 2. If people want their link out there can post it in the first one. Thanks for the work your doing!
Great job on this.
Oddly enough, I didn’t see any of the posts you’re talking about. This is the first mention of Feinstein dying that I’ve seen, so thanks for the news, I guess.
Federation is WEIRD. There seems to be a lot of lag between what appears and what is removed.
Oh hey I got linked in the post, nice
Yeah, I saw that there were a bunch of posts about her death and still thought mine was different enough to warrant posting
Although, I did make a post on the GA ramifications that I think was deleted. Maybe it was a duplicate, not sure
Sounds like you went with the right option. I hate megathreads
The megathread seems like the best approach. You can make it text-only and put all the article links in the post. That way all the traffic doesn’t get given to the first link to get submitted.
Oh, we’ll definitely do megathreads when there are bigger topics, the first primaries, Super Tuesday, Trump Trial dates, etc.
Fortunately, in this case, there were only 3 or 4 dupes on each topic so it was easier to just leave up the OG post and remove the others.
In the case where we might potentially get dozens of dupes, yeah, Megathread territory.
Could you pin a comment on the post for that first article that gives links to alternative articles? I don’t know if that’s possible on lemmy. But megathreads are annoying to me because they usually just have a list of articles that is overwhelming and it’s much easier to just read none of them. Plus it doesn’t interact well with continuing conversation once it falls off the front page.
If there were a way to remove posts from the feed (either everything/local/subscribed or the community+everywhere) without destroying the post itself it would be nice too because you wouldn’t be deleting conversations. Then you could pin the other conversations on the first one.
That would be ideal, but I don’t think Lemmy supports that kind of nested structure. :(
Removed by mod
Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to think we hear about that happening more often than it actually happens.
I still have a 16 or 17 year old reddit account, multiple hundreds of thousands of karma, in all the cool secret subs, top 1% of reddit, crap, I was even part of reddits FCC filing on net neutrality (funny how THAT turned out!) and not once was I ever approached about selling out.
Maybe I’m doing it wrong?
Removed by mod
