• Synnr@sopuli.xyz
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    8 months ago

    Unfortunately it’s election season in the US, so any sources of conversation will be overtaken by bad actors. That means any politics subs, news subs, and especially US Politics subs. A whitelist could work but it would take a lot of work and make a lot of users mad, they tried on Reddit for a few subs and the list of allowed sites was huge. Then you also have people asking, can Fox News be blacklisted? And if it’s not, the propagandists will shift their strategy from fake websites to websites with low integrity like Fox and make the article fit their ‘opinion’… It’s a neverending cat and mouse game where the only strategy that works is well-trained moderators, and only if the bots (read: bot farms, humans) aren’t vying for a mod position as soon as it opens, which they will be.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, I really liked /r/neutralnews, which had a whitelist (for posts) and a blacklist (for comments), and anything else was taken on a case-by-case basis.

      And the problem isn’t just because it’s election season (but it’ll get worse), it was also a problem when I joined last summer. It’s a “tons of leftists on lemmy.ml” problem posting sketching sources that serves whatever their agenda is.

      That said, I don’t think we should necessarily have a blacklist (and certainly not with lemmy as-is), but a bot with a large whitelist of sources pulled from /r/neutralnews that provides alternatives would be awesome (bonus points if it also archives the relevant pages). It would basically do a search with the given search terms, pull links from the first 10 or so relevant results, and randomly choose 2-3 that have a high correlation with the posted source (and a link for a search query on DDG or similar for more results).

      Maybe I’ll hack on that, idk. I’ve wanted something like /r/neutralnews since coming here, and I haven’t found anything remotely similar.

      • Synnr@sopuli.xyz
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        8 months ago

        If you do end up hacking on it, and can remember to come back and say so, please let me know the name of the sub. Or if you make one now I’ll subscribe and hope to see it show up at some point.

        • sugar_in_your_tea
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          8 months ago

          Sure thing. I’ve saved this comment in case I get around to it (may have some time next week).