Thank you for all the feedback you provided, using your feedback, we’ve come to these new rules:
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- Be civil. Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only.
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- All posts should contain a source (url) that is as unbiased and reliable as possible. Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blacklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods.
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- No bots, spam or self-promotion. Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
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- Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title is wrong / incorrect, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
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- Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days. No opinion pieces, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed.
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- No duplicate posts. If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
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- No link shorteners, the auto mod will contact you if they are detected.
Once again, we are asking for some feedback. This can be anything from spelling / grammar checks to fundamental changes. Let this be a place to make these rules as perfect as possible.
Please keep in mind that the blacklist is currently still in development. We are looking for some sites we should block, so if you know some, let us know.
Thank you for your help everyone!
For rule 2, I would suggest two changes:
- Rename “blacklist” to “blocklist” in the spirit of inclusivity
- Focus on reliability and accuracy rather than political bias
My guess is the purpose of rule #2 is to prevent opinion pieces and misinformation from being published as “news”. If the goal is to limit opinion articles presented as “news”, then perhaps the rule should instead clarify A) whether opinion pieces are allowed (and how that is defined) and B) if they are allowed whether they should be marked as such.
If the goal of rule #2 is to achieve some sort of “political neutrality”, I would challenge whether that should be a goal. This community has an inherent political bias that manifests in which articles people share and how they upvote or downvote. I don’t think that removing sources on the basis of political affiliation per se minimizes harm, and I strongly prefer a focus on removing posts that contain verifiable inaccuracies. Of course, it will ultimately be up to the moderation team to decide what actually constitutes misinformation (and there is bias there too), but I hope that shifting the focus toward that goal explicitly will mean that they will more carefully consider their own biases when exercising the moderation power.
Edit: typo
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Good idea, I’m not a linguistic expert or an expert on racism, but I feel like it’s not a big problem to change it, and if it makes anyone feel better, it’s worth it.
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As main rule we focus on “reliability” and “Unbiasedness”. We then further explain that obvious biased posts, which are the most often “Bad thing” we see in this community, will be deleted. We don’t expect perfect articles, because they don’t exist, but we just want to make sure that posts which are only there to support a particular political movement, do not overtake this community.
Rule 5 states that opinion pieces are not allowed. We will have to judge posts that get reported because of rule 5 on a case-by-case basis, and we will make sure to communicate if there’s ever a post which is ambiguous.
Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns (:
Oh thank you for pointing out rule 5. I missed that one. Regarding rule 2, perhaps change the word ordering to put “reliable” first?
I will do that (:
Thank you for the suggestion.
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Where can we find the ‘guidelines for bots’ as stated in #3, “Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.” ? It would be good to have a link to those guidelines in the Rules.
They are instance rules: https://lemmy.world/post/1860512
Since the amount of bot devs is pretty small, we’ll probably not include it in the rules.
And since you need approval from us anyway, we can always send these rules again.
Re #4: Can you clarify if the title should be the same as the page title, the article headline or either? I think either should be acceptable. Especially when the page title can be clickbaity or misrepresent the aritcle, but it’s the one that auto-generates when posting.
I strongly feel that we should not use clickbait headlines.
I strongly feel people should be able to fix them if they’re able to, but I don’t know if I would be comfortable with a post getting removed because it used the original article’s clickbaity headline. Like, clickbait-iness is a little subjective, and re-writing a headline well can sometimes be tough if the story’s complex.
As mentioned in rule 4, we will only delete titles that are wrong or incorrect. Maybe we should rephrase that to “misrepresents the article”. Would that work?
I think that sounds better, yes.
Regarding Rule 6, this seems to say that the same story with a different source is okay. I don’t think this should be the case. The same story regardless of source should not be reposted unless it adds new information.
It’s not meant like that. But the automod won’t leave a message if you use a different source.
The final rules will be collapsed, so you would only see:
rule 6: No duplicate posts
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
So what does “a source” mean in this rule? So long as the article text isn’t a 100% copy of a story that’s already been posted (like with AP articles that get reprinted in dozens of papers) we’ll be ok to post it, right?
Getting multiple perspectives on a story is a big part of why I come to forums like these, and I worry that it’s just going to get ugly if we have a situation where you’re removing the NPR article about something because someone posted the Wall Street Journal coverage of it first (or vice versa).
The bot will only check that you don’t post exactly the same URL, so don’t worry (:
Very good, thank you for clarifying that!
So it’s okay for people to post the same story from different sources or not? It’s still not clear to me.
We discourage spamming the same story over and over again, but sometimes different sources bring different perspectives on a story. So it will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
The bot can ofcourse not detect those duplicates, so moderating it will be more difficult.
“moderating it will be more difficult”. So does that mean it is allowed or not? If you “discourage spamming the same story over and over again”, do you mean from the same person, or from everyone? So if ten different people posted the same story from different sources, is that allowed or not? The rules are not clear, and your further explanation still isn’t clear to me.
If it ever comes to a point where the same story get’s spammed to an annoying degree, we will communicate that we won’t accept any more of those posts.
But we probably won’t moderate before that.
We can always alter the rules later if that turns out to be a problem.
I disagree, different perspectives from different reporters almost always add at least some new information and seeing how many outlets are reacting to a story gives me a sense of how “big” the story is. I’d make an exception if the article text is 100% identical because it’s an AP reprint or something, but otherwise I think the mods should leave this alone.
e; apologies for double post, having some site/app instability at the moment
I think unless there’s a demonstrable factual inaccuracy in an article or if the source is on the blacklist a post shouldn’t be removed under rule 2. One person’s obvious ____ wing source is another person’s unbiased reporting.
I also think there should be some kind of notice when a site gets added to the blacklist where you lay out your reasoning and users can either challenge or support the decision.
I’m not trying to support the spread of misinformation and there are definitely some publications out there I don’t think anyone should ever read again, but this kind of rule can get out of control quickly and can create a lot of bitterness and chaos in a community if it’s not handled carefully imo.
We’ll try to be reasonable with which sites we ban, but we are not perfect. So we invite discussion in the comment section of the blacklist post.
We would love to do that, but we simply don’t have the time. As mentioned, we won’t delete the posts that have url’s in the blacklist automatically, so when you get the message of the bot, and you find it unreasonable, you can discuss it with us.
Ah, I must have missed the part about things not being automatically deleted, that makes all this feel a bit better.
We would love to do that, but we simply don’t have the time
That is totally fair, and thank you for all the time you already spend on this! So long as the blacklist is in the sidebar or some other prominent place that’s a reasonable time saving compromise.
The blacklist will be available in this post: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130
I would suggest editorializes titles from the journalist themselves or even opinion journalism be removed. There is a lot of articles that get posted as factual but they’re literally just twisted titles that no one reads and it spreads disinformation because the journalist is editorializing the titles just to get clicks from their base.
I think it would be nice to have a rule that reminds people to post for a global audience. This community tends toward news that is only relevant to people in the United States. I believe that having active moderation effort to encourage more non-US-centric content would be good for the community.
I agree that this sub can be very US-centric at times, but I feel like that is a product of people’s interests. Wouldn’t it be a little bit misplaced to put a “rule” to restrict the amount of US content / encourage non-US-centric content? I’m not sure, so I’ll need some further input on that (:
Agreed. I mean, since https://lemmy.world/c/world already restricts itself to non-US news, /c/news seems to be the next largest logical community where both US and non-US news can be posted together. For a similar comparison, I appreciate r/news’ description: “The place for news articles about current events in the United States and the rest of the world.”
