this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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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??
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.
@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.
If you think about the OF creators literally posting the same image in 100 different subs, you'll see that there's a practical limit to the number of tabs that will display.
Instead, I'm thinking that a text link-list of all the subs (with instances shown) it's been posted to is easier to manage. Then whichever one you click brings you to the localized comments page for that thread.
If you do it that way, then you can have a user configuration setting as to whether the link list is shown fully on each thread listing or whether there's a "+" button to expand it out.
@McBinary @Mallard
Ah sheet, that's a good point. I was thinking, surely the most constrained factors is number of communities. Nope, 'cause the OF creator posts to 100 communities, and their fans seem very likely to subscribe to a lot of those communities lmao.
@ShadowRunner What are you imagining would be the title that we see on /all or whatever feed?
Default Condensed/Expanded is a good user setting, we should definitely keep that lol.
Ah, that's an excellent point.
The irony is that the worst cases of shared links are from OF creators - but they bot-blast those links, so they all have the exact same title. That makes it easy - if every duplicate link has the same title, then just use that.
But for cases where they have different titles, you would either have to choose a generic system-generated title or alternatively, use the title of the instance that has the greatest engagement.
All of these questions, however, can be designed to be user-selectable in each of our own settings. That way, a person can decide whether or not they even want to stack duplicates, and if so, how is the title chosen.
@shepherd
@Mallard
Yeah, that's a great idea. It might also allow for future moderation to add stragglers into the same post even like a reddit megathread.