• We really should moderate the titles more. I just realized that every article I ignored I basically accepted as truth. Or, at least, my brain accepted as truth in the background. I’ll see the same lie twice a day everyday and start processing as fact.

    • Hi, if you see any examples of this, please report them. I can’t promise that we’ll always take action, but we do try to. The mods here are all volunteers and don’t always have the ability to pick up on this type of thing - we rely on reports to draw our attention to things that might need action on our part.

      Another difficulty is that Lemmy offers a very limited set of tools when it comes to something like this. I can’t tag or flair an article as having a deceptive headline - there’s no tag/flair feature. Mods can’t edit post titles, and we can’t even sticky a comment within a post; only posts can be stickied. Our only tools are commenting or messaging the OP asking them to change the title (and if it’s a federated post there no guarantee that the edit would federate in a reasonable amount of time, if ever) or remove the post. Often when we get reports there is already a good discussion in the comments about why the headline is bad, and personally I am always reluctant to remove posts that have good, ongoing discussion in them (as long as no one is being harmed anyway).

      In the end of the day I agree that we should moderate titles more. I think we ought to moderate a few things more closely. But Beehaw’s mods are just normal users who, in their spare time, do their best to try and keep things nice. In particular, !Technology is our largest and most active community, and it is essentially impossible for us to stay on top of every post and evaluate it for accuracy, even if we might like to.

      Sorry for the early morning ramble. I’m not disagreeing at all with your comment, just trying to give some perspective on why it might be a bigger ask than you realize.

        • Mod tools weren’t a priority the last time we heard anything from the Lemmy devs about it. It’s possible that has changed since then but I doubt it.

          We have had a few people from beehaw working on contributing some things, but from what I have gathered (as someone who isn’t a software engineer) the lemmy codebase is very difficult to work with.

      • I understand the sentiment. By saying we, I meant myself and the other users. We should take more responsibility for what we share. Maybe we can try to make that part of the culture. The title should be the information we personally want to spread or call to attention.