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:

  1. 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?”

  2. 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.

  3. 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!

  • UnlimitedRumination [he/him]English
    3•9 months ago

    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.