Is there a way to combine identical links?

3 years ago by McBinary to c/kbinMeta

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shepherd 22 points 3 years ago

tl;dr: I fully agree with you that there's room for improvement here, but I can't for the life of me decide on a solution I actually like lmao.

Yeah, it's definitely going to be common while the masses settle on which community/instance they want to emphasize.

The question for now is, how do you think this should actually be handled? What counts as identical links? There's several factors that can change, and that makes handling the problem much more complicated than it initially seems.

In your example, it's 1) the same user posting 2) the same link with 3) the same title to 4) different communities. That does seem like basic reposting, and it would initially seem like we should just combine them and have it say "[USER], 10 hours ago posted to [Community1], [C2], [C3], etc"

But each of those communities and each of those instances may abide by different rules. It would definitely be a disservice to each community to pile all the discussion threads into one communal comment section.

So.... I guess if it's 4) a different community, then it's okay to have 'duplicate' threads? Uh oh.

I have a feeling that same argument would apply to veryyy similar threads with 1) different users, 2) different links to the same content, or 3) different titles. So what the heck, how do we improve this situation?? What are we even asking for??

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Mallard 13 points 3 years ago

Tabs on the comment page, before the comments, that you use to select the instance.

An extra "+ 2 other instances" text on a post that reveals the other instances on hover/click.

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shepherd 4 points 3 years ago

@Mallard Tabs! That's not bad! It's gonna confuse new people for a bit, but they're already confused lol.

And I guess we just choose which ones are the main display and which get demoted to "+ 2 others" by using the sort option? Top Hot New?


Okay, actually thinking this through more, I think this plus Mallard's tabs may be the best way to start! Display the version of a link that best suits the sort option, stack the rest. Maybe let them be unstacked in the feed (like how reddit comments work lol), so you can still look at the other titles easily.

That's really promising! Okay, someone please poke holes in this plan lol.

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McBinary 5 points 3 years ago

@shepherd Yeah I'm not sure of an appropriate solution either.

These may not even need to be merged, but maybe there is a way to just display one thread and link all identical links as a "cross-post" within the thread? That way we're just seeing a single aggregated link without a bunch of spam? Something like this:

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shepherd 2 points 3 years ago

That's not bad, but that's only the solution for Identical 1) User 2) Link 3) Title, but Different 4) Community. I'm not opposed to implementing it, or something like it! It's definitely a step in the right direction, but it's not complete.

What if it's Identical 2) Link, but Different 1) User 3) Title 4) Community?? Basically, a bunch of different people post the same link to different communities, and they alll write a different title lmao. Basically the exactly same "spam" problem, harder to stack.

I don't really think we should do a whole grid of the different people posting different titles to different communities lmao.

(Don't even get me started on 2) Different Links to the same content hahah)

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shepherd 1 point 3 years ago

I think, maybe the change needs to happen in us lmao. Maybe, we should look at this as a feature, that lets us compare beehaw's responses vs lemmy's vs kbin vs any community or instance.

You can subscribe to all the communities to get different sides of the spectrum for a broader perspective.

Or maybe you only actually care for the responses from some communities (factors like content quality, quantity, political spectrum, etc) so you get to control exactly what you want to experience, and can unsubscribe accordingly.

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McBinary 2 points 3 years ago

@shepherd I fear that is easier said than done. I frequent /ALL most of the time, and new communities pop up pretty consistently. Unsubscribing from a seeming endless torrent of new instances and communities is tedious and probably futile in the long run. It would at least require a lot of constant curating to keep up with it.

If we were to aggregate identical links into a single thread with hyperlinks to the crossposts - it would allow much the same functionality without requiring each user to manually exclude large parts of the fedi.

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