Crossposts might be annoying, because
- essentially they are the “repost” feature of lemmy. And repeats might be low quality spam, because you have to look at the source, how often it was reposted already, etc.
- crossposts might seem like a cry for unwarranted attention, but they might be necessary in a fractured federated system like Lemmy …
Or do you not care when realizing “this is a crosspost”?
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
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:
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?
Unfortunatly that’s extremely unhelpful behaviour. Just because you saw one particular post before the others, it doesn’t mean others will too. They may not be subscribed to the same communities as you, or might sort differenty, or their instance may not even federate with the instance you saw the first post on. Down voting the ‘later’ posts ends up fouling other users’ feeds.
It would be good if marking a post as read marked all the cross-posts read too, I feel ike that would mostly deal with the irritation people feel as you’d immediately know you’d seen it, or it would be hidden by the ‘hide read posts’ option.
I disagree. Many people will be subscribed to many, but not all will. If they all have the same number of uobites and comments, then no superior group emerges.
If all are equal, then it will have no effect. If one community is more timely and more active, it should rise up as the main community.
I think cross posting and duplicate communities is a double edged sword. Personally, I up vote one and ignore the others, but it’s effectively the same thing, magnified to down vote the others.
I think having a merge community feature or a grouped community feature, so all posts for that group show up together and all duplicates are marked as such, together.
Having a way for communities to form groups, and having clients handle those groups as a unit would be great. It would keep the best aspects of federation, make community discovery easier and minimise the duplication of posts.
I am swaying to dislike the repost feature also, I am confused since it duplicates so much clutter in my UI, as the poster as well.
If you only follow one of those communities/your instance only federates one then you would only see it once
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
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).
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.
I am a little confused:
If it’s just someone posting the same thing to 2-5 communities at once. I find it highly obnoxious
does “at once” mean for example: within 5 minutes of the original post?
For example I cross-posted this question here to lemmy.worlds “No stupid questions” community within 5 minutes of this post, would you be annoyed by that?
For example I cross-posted this question here to lemmy.worlds “No stupid questions” community within 5 minutes of this post, would you be annoyed by that?
Yes. Unless something changed in other UIs, crossposts are only defined by their URL. With text only posts, that would be at least two identical posts back to back. Not many UIs will roll up crossposts on title (again, unless something has changed on that front between 0.19.3 and 0.19.9.
The fact that you actually crossposted this between !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world and !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca 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 !politics@lemmy.world and !politics@hexbear.net to coexist, as there is a reason for them to (different moderation policies). It’s similar for !climate@slrpnk.net and !climatehope@lemmy.world, as those communities have different principles and perspectives on their topic.
This suggests to consolidate communities like !movies@lemmy.world and !movies@lemm.ee
Another recent example is
- !buyeuropean@feddit.uk
- !buyfromeu@feddit.org
- there is now a third community, !BuyFromEU@europe.pub
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 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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
- !europe@feddit.org
- !fediverse@lemmy.world
- !gardening@lemmy.world
- !metal@lemmy.world
- !jrpg@lemmy.zip
- !crochet@lemmy.ca
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.
- !movies@lemmy.world vs !movies@lemm.ee
- !android@lemmy.world vs !android@lemdro.id
- 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 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com, 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 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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 !fedigrow@lemm.ee, 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.
interesting … I guess your client is some android app though … and the default browser UI handles it in a more annoying way for you as well?
My main client is the default app of lemmy.org in the browser.
Have now checked around and unfortunately I have to correct myself: It seems that crossposted posts are not unified into a single headline in the main feed. Maybe it only worked for the same instance, or something has changed over the last year.
Strange. Have now found some unified crosspost links in main feed with only one headline and the link to the crosspost below. Both examples are from around the same time. Maybe there is some logic that posts are only unified if there is no post in between them, or they are from similar time. Much guessing from my side.
Maybe there is some logic that posts are only unified if there is no post in between them, or they are from similar time. Much guessing from my side.
Crossposts are identified by a similar link, which is the case for your two examples (the techcrunch article or the picture link)
This makes if course more sense from technical and logical side :)
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 the opposite. I don’t mind seeing a few copies of the same news when it is current, that makes sense. The zombie reposts that keep popping up every day (then once again another week later for some reason…) get really annoying.
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.
Consolidation of similar communities
See also my other comment: https://mander.xyz/post/26595281/17594490
No fucks given :)
