Top eidt: Thread is four hours old and already seems to have support. I'll create the first actual thread tomorrow. So please, your feedback is desired on anything you'd lke to see in the initial topic text. Also, I'm thinking fortnightly (every two weeks) might be good to start, but feedback will always be desired. Original thread follows:

https://tildes.net/~life/1o92/how_my_life_changed_with_adhd_medication#comments

That thread brought so many with ADHD out of the woodwork.

I wonder if there might be a use for a recurring (weekly? monthly?) thread for ADHD support?

I'd envision it for:

1. Venting
2. Mutual support, i.e. responsibility coaching, i.e. post what you're trying to work on so the rest of us can gently pester (check up on you) to try and help make sure You Did The Thing
3. General discussion as a hub for interesting ADHD-related articles/info/etc

Sort of like an ADHD club on Tildes that might help us all.

I know I am in love with the thread I linked just having so many of us there talking about this stuff. Reading others struggle with the same things I struggle with is comforting; reading others talking about conquering problems is lovely. And I know my "walking thread" is related to this idea - I started it to try and get folks from the community help keep me on track, so maybe that sort of thing would help others, too. (At least for some of us who aren't medicated! But even for medicated folks who could use that support)

So this is intended as a meta thread on the topic to see if the idea might have merit.

I think recurring threads are made manually, so I do volunteer to do that; but if the idea is a go and someone else would prefer to do it, I will certainly bow to that :)

(Also, it's my humble opinion that any autistic-related subjects would be quite welcome - I feel ADHD and autism are sibling diagnoses, even when they don't both apply to one person. Adn for that matter, anyone dealign with ADHD-adjacent issues - like how anxiety can sometimes present with ADHD-like symptoms - the venting and help-with-accomplishing-things should not be limited to JUST adhd folks, but I envision this as primarily and ADHD space that welcomes all. But my vision is up for discussion, IF the idea even has merit)

There used to be lively discussion about this topic.

For context: I find it fairly obvious that the Israeli government is deliberately attempting to wipe out the Palestinian people in a way that is slow/ambiguous enough to perhaps not officially qualify as genocide in a legal sense, but that is nevertheless effectively genocide from an emotionally aware human perspective.

I've mostly steered clear of the related conversation because many people seemed to have gotten tangled up in the legal definitions, as if Tildes were a branch of the International Court of Justice, which made me feel like the humanitarian view is getting dismissed or implied as being inferior. I wanted to see if this approach or its popularity on Tildes might have shifted with the new developments, such as Israel blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza and its recent plans to seize the area and hand aid distribution to private companies.

Am I somehow just not able to find the megathread? I believe I may have tried to filter it out earlier but it's not on my filters list and I'm unsure if there are other ways to hide content on Tildes that I may have forgotten about.

The legal discussion is not exactly the same as US politics. I would imagine that we have people who would like to follow it and people who prefer strongly to avoid it.

For example, today we had these two events and I didn't even look hard.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/barricades-go-up-around-fulton-county-courthouse-as-trump-indictment-looms

Superceding indictment filed in Florida documents case
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.85.0_1.pdf

So while megathreads are a thing, I think we can really benefit from making them more prominent. Because right now there are two topics about the Titan submersible on my front page (and two more if I go to the second page), multiple surveys about movies, and at least one new thread per day about the current reddit fiasco. It's getting a bit cluttered.

So my proposal: make megathreads more prominent.

• Give designated megathreads a colored border or some other simple decoration to make them grab the eye and stand out.
• Pin some megathreads so they show at the top of their respective tildes, especially if they relate to ongoing or developing events. I don't think this is necessary for all megathreads like recurring ones, but it will help cut down clutter. (Note: I did check, and this is indeed on Gitlab. Deimos left a comment three years ago that code was made, just hadn't been merged into Tildes yet due to not being needed at the time.)
• A little more advanced: for ongoing events, maybe have some way that multiple people can edit a post with updates on new developments or links. That way even if the original poster is offline when some big event happens, someone can update it or add new links.
  • Related to above: have a pinned comment on such megathreads to help collect links and such. This would probably be the ideal editable comment rather than the original post.
• To help cut down on the survey threads that typically just ask for lists without much discourse (e.g. "favorite X movie"): Have recurring survey megathreads asking the most common such questions, possibly each week or every other week
  • You could either cycle through different questions each time (particularly in movies where you can just go through the different genres), or just collate the most common questions
  • Also, have a list somewhere of previous times a question has been asked, and then have a "cool down" period before a question can be asked again. Maybe a wiki-style list that people can edit and add links to previous threads?

Of these suggestions, I think the first two would be the most effective and also the simplest to implement. Adding some visual indicator for a megathread would be a simple CSS change, and apparently the code already exists for pinning threads. Just a couple thoughts!

I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

When something big happens, there are often a lot of different posts, which results in the conversation being scattered all over the place. Is there any policies on users creating megathreads for these big events, or if there will be some kind of megathread system build into ~ in the future?