I’ve seen a few complaints over the past few weeks about there being a lot of psuedoscience, and there has been a fair amount of reports.

I figured it would be a good idea to update the rules on the sidebar to clearly lay out what is and isn’t allowed.

I think a tagging system might help to keep down on the spam and elevate real scientific sources. These are just a draft and more rules could be added in the future if they are needed.

Current draft (work in progress, add suggestions in comments):

A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.

Submission Rules:

  1. All posts must be flagged with an appropriate tag and must be scientific in nature. All posts not following these guidelines will be removed.
  2. All posts must be peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal, unless flagged as news or discussion. No pseudoscience.
  3. No self-promotion, blogspam, videos, or memes. See list of unapproved sources below.

Comment Rules:

  1. Civility to other users, be kind.
  2. See rule #1.
  3. Please stay on the original topic in the post. New topics should be referred to a new post/discussion thread.
  4. See rule #1 again. Personal attacks, trolling, or aggression to other users will result in a ban.
  5. Report incivility, trolling, or otherwise bad actors. We are human so we only see what is reported.

Flag Options

  1. [Peer reviewed]
  2. [News]
  3. [Discussion]

List of potential predatory journals & publishers (do not post from these sources)

List of unapproved sources:
  • Psypost
  • Sciencealert
  • (any other popsci site that uses titles generally regarded as clickbait)
Original draft:

A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.

Submission Rules:

  1. All posts must be flagged with an appropriate tag and must be scientific in nature. All posts not following these guidelines will be removed.
  2. All posts must be peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal, unless flagged as news or discussion. No pseudoscience.
  3. No self-promotion, blogspam, videos, or memes.

Comment Rules:

  1. Civility to other users, be kind.
  2. See rule #1.
  3. Please stay on the original topic in the post. New topics should be referred to a new post/discussion thread.
  4. See rule #1 again. Personal attacks, trolling, or aggression to other users will result in a ban.
  5. Report incivility, trolling, or otherwise bad actors. We are human so we only see what is reported.

Flag Options

  1. [Peer reviewed]
  2. [News]
  3. [Discussion]

List of potential predatory journals & publishers (do not post from these sources)

I’m not on 24/7 but I’ll try to update these when I get a chance.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
    12·
    1 month ago

    It might be a good idea to make explicit rulings on some of the borderline sources.

    If it were me, I would ban ScienceAlert, for example. “A Physicist Reveals Why You Should Run in The Rain” or “NASA Reveals Spooky Eyes in Space, And They’re Staring Straight at You.” They have a lot of good articles, too, but some of it is clearly just stuff for clicks. Psypost is also a little dubious. Maybe if it’s something a scientist in that field would ever read and take seriously, including reliable journalism sources that are talking about science, then it’s good, but if it would be viewed as pop-science clickbait, then we need to talk about it.

    These are just ideas. I’m just saying that clarifying by name some of the things near the border, maybe after checking with the community, might be good.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 month ago

      Yeah, Clickbait has no place anywhere, even if the article itself is fine…

      I swear to god the next time I see “side hustle” in my Google News feed…

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      7·
      1 month ago

      good idea. I’ll add these to an unacceptable source list in the sidebar. Most of the reports have come from posts like that so I think a majority of people would agree with limiting posts from them.

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
        6·
        1 month ago

        Yeah. If there’s an explicit list, then it’s easy to extrapolate, too, if some source comes in that’s not on the list. I’m sure there will be little disagreements about particular sources, but it’s easier if there’s a clear guideline to follow.

      • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        15 days ago

        Explicitly mention in the rules, that if someone finds an item on some not-allowed-source interesting,

        then they should go look-for a proper-science article giving the same core-meaning

        & that would be acceptable.

        There’s a principle that the most-famous-convict-in-the-world held-to, that Science is supposed to also hold-to…

        “it doesn’t matter who says it: if it’s True, then it’s True, end-of-story.”

        I’ve seen “authorities” assert that there is “no scientific evidence” or “no valid evidence” for some supplement, then simply gone on PubMed & found 800-ish peer-reviewed articles on exactly that supplement, so the “authorities” are just pushing ideology/prejudice, since evidence has been contradicting them for years, before they made their “authoritative” declaration…

        I’m kinda fed-up with Scientism masquerading & gaslighting as Empiricism, you know?

        ( & this doesn’t even touch the nobody will do the experiment, therefore there’s no “evidence” because nobody “can afford” to assert the evidence bullshit…

        A South Korean experiment, iirc, years ago, did a single-plutonium-atom-in-each-of-some-mice experiment, letting the mice reproduce, & then cracking whether there was any statistically-significant-cancer-rate-difference in the plutonium-adulterated lineages, vs the others…

        & discovered that there is…

        But, of course, if THAT were replicated, then … ALL nuclear-safety-regulations would be trashed, because the multiple-generations-tests are NOT done, because we CAN’T afford to know that!!, right??

        Same with the “we don’t know what could be causing The Cold Blob™ off of Greenland, but we won’t include Greenland ice-melt in our climate-models, so therefore there’s NO SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE that that’s what it is!!” gaslighting…

        NOW they’ve done that inclusion, & discovered that AMOC began shutting-off around 1950, & this-decade will see about 1,000,000+ fewer cubic km of flow, than the 1940-1950 decade ( Nature Geoscience for that article, it was linked from Earth.com, a few days ago )…

        Won’t-do-the-experiment is itself pseudoscience!!

        Feel free to delete my comment from this discussion, since it contradicts consensus/Scientism’s establishment…

        Here’s the AMOC-is-shutting-down, will be down 33% at 2C, article:

        https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01568-1

        Here’s The Cold Blob whose source hasn’t been scientifically established, to use their phrase:

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_blob

        ( seriously: what ELSE could be its source??

        Greenland’s nearly-6k-cubic-km in the last few years icemelt HAS to go somewhere, right?

        Isn’t considered-reasoning part of The Scientific Method, anymore?

        )

        _ /\ _

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    1 month ago

    One suggestion I’d like to see as a differentiator from the Science subreddit… The subreddit really seemed humorless to a degree where it felt like the mods were joyless scholars with giant sticks in a really uncomfortable place (What? Like the back of a Volkswagen?)

    I get the need for standards on post quality, I just hope there isn’t a heavy hand on comment quality.

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      7·
      1 month ago

      I completely agree.

      I liked askhistorians, as I felt like the moderation added to the quality a lot, but /r/science never seemed to achieve that level of quality. Though when they did start with the heavy moderation/clear rules with tags (I think flair was a later addition) it was a marked improvement off what it was before.

      I’m open to suggestions, and I’ll just leave the draft rules up for awhile to get feedback.

      • AwesomeLowlanderEnglish
        1·
        23 hours ago

        Suggestion: Have an auto / bot created top level comment pinned on each post, and all joke comments should be left as children of that TLC. That way those who aren’t interested in bad humour can minimise / block it, and the clowns can clown away.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        9·
        1 month ago

        I hope there is a heavy hand on moderation. It’s extremely tiring when I see an astronomy article about Uranus with 15 comments, and they’re all very juvenile jokes.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
          2·
          1 month ago

          Yeah, I like a light-hearted approach to life but that one particular “joke” should be shot on sight. I’m convinced it plays an actual role in why we haven’t seen much serious discussion of sending a probe there.

  • sushimi@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    Must be because of what i posted.

    instead of the article being scrutenized (and educating people on how to detect pseudoscience) the post got removed.

    At least i got a nice reply showing what was someone’s reason for doubting the scientific process of that publisher… before it got moderated.

    Maybe it’s possible to use a flags of some sort, to indicate that, even though it’s a scientific publication and was peer reviewed, that this Lemmy community thinks it’s a bad piece. (but not by up/downvote as a downvote means it goes to the end of the pile, and the education effect is lost)

    Like, i want to put this article under your attention, so that i get an idea of what others think about it https://bmjpublichealth.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000282 But i’m afraid to post it, because of the possible backlash(i.e. moderation and maybe banning?)

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 month ago

      I don’t really know which journals are good/bad beyond the big names ones, nature, plos, elsevier, etc.

      You won’t be banned for posting journal links. The only time that would happen was if it happened continuously and had a pattern and multiple reports. I don’t think there has ever been a permanent ban here.

      Id recommend looking up your topic in a big name journal just to play it safe. Better science, less misinformation.

      I’d like to build/find a list of the best journals to add to the sidebar.

    • Kaiyoto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 month ago

      It typically was because people kept posting their youtube or stream spam. I never 100% understood it either because what if it was an actual relavant video, then why not allow it?

      • ZephyrXero@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        But spamming and self promotion are two separate things. Of course spamming should be banned, regardless of source

        • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          15 days ago

          Spamming & self-promotion are 2 separate things you say, but try telling that to Dr. Al Sears, who’s a shill…

          _ /\ _

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      2·
      18 days ago

      Yeah that would be the hard part. I don’t know how to do that either. Reddit used to have auto-mod tools but nothing like that exists here to easily automate it.

      I may just archive the flag idea until a newer version of Lemmy software adds those capabilities.

  • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    All posts must be peer reviewed

    There’s a joke in here about recruiting Lemmy expert shitposters to peer-review post drafts themselves (as opposed to the scientific paper they link to), but I need somebody to suggest better phrasing.

    • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      15 days ago

      Ah, but are we not professional shitposters, monsieur??

      & through our professionalism, as shitposters, our … lack of scientific credentials … can be excused, oui?

      : p

      _ /\ _

    • laverabe@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      2·
      18 days ago

      This was just a proposed discussion of rules, they’re not active yet so submit however you’d like currently.