I can’t seem to find anything in a sidebar or sticky thread that talks about the moderation / rules of the news community. I’m very interested in coming to this community to learn about news, but right now it seems whats being posted tends to be relatively low (lower?) quality.
Examples of common rules
- Use the same titles as the article itself
- No blog spam, link to the source
- Political news, should go to the political community
- No dupes of same topic
As an example, take a look at other news aggregators that focus on news.
My goal here isn’t tell people what to do but its start a conversation on the topic.
From a combatting misinformation perspective:
If we’re drafting rules here, I’d like to suggest a rule that the original article URL should be the one used for the post, even if it’s to a paywalled source. It helps immensely in vetting sources without first having to click into an obfuscated archive link. I’m all for sidestepping paywalls, but I think it would be beneficial to have the archive link in the post body instead.
Part of my media literacy protocol is establishing that the source is trustworthy, and it gets annoying / tedious clicking into an archive link only to find out the source is “Jimbob’s REEL TRUTH NEWZ”.
I’m also on the fence about linking to YouTube (and similar) videos as news sources.
I’m all for this as a soft rule, but so many articles have terrible headlines that it can’t be a fixed one.
Also, a lot of the news sites I follow do A/B testing on every title. So every article has two titles.
I agree with this. Either that, or the name of the publication should be in the title in brackets like “Example Title (Source Name)”.
Except the part about youtube videos in general, given that news channels post youtube videos or become news stories in and of themselves.
we’ll sticky this for a bit and sort of gauge where people are at, then go from there
I’m a mod at /truenews @reddit
It’s hard to keep a healthy news sub because of so much polarization, and so much subpar stuff that’s called “news”. I can point to 2 successful examples that handled it differently.
At truenews https://www.reddit.com/r/truenews/We simply ask for quality sources. You can read the sidebar for the rules. Basically we demand that all news posts are actually from reputable news sources. We provide an explanation of what that means and tons of valid examples. Then we mod to remove non-valid sources, and work with posters to help them understand the rules. If a user is having trouble getting used to the rules, we ask them to stick to the 2 dozen recommended sources we provided.
Another example is neutralnews https://www.reddit.com/r/neutralnews/This is a very clean sub because it went a very strict way. Not only are all posts expected to be from valid sources, but any comment is expected to contribute something useful (so no jokes or venting), and all claims in comments have to be substantiated. This sub is very hard to moderate and it can also be hard on participants because so many comments get deleted until users get the hang of the rules. But the benefit is that it enables real discussion from any angle of politics because people are blocked from repeating party lines and memes, and instead have to argue their point with sources. Some of the most useful political discussions I’ve seen have happened in this sub, due to the requirement for good faith arguments with sources.
Thanks for sharing. I was hoping people with hands on modding experience would talk a bit about what they have seen. It’s interesting to hear all the different viewpoints.
Avoiding dupes is, I think, an important one. We’ve had multiple instances on Beehaw of the same story showing up more than once. If you try to post a duplicate link, Lemmy will let you know (by showing the previous copies to you as crossposts). It’s harder to make sure you’re not posting the second or third story from a different source on the same topic. Perhaps we can just encourage people to search before posting.
I’d like the rules to at least ask people to add an image description in their original post. https://beehaw.org/post/686974 would be good to link to here.
And given the nature of many posts in the news, I think it would be good for this community to remind people to be(e) nice in their discussions.
I would say that if it’s the same exact copy/link it’s one thing. Or doing something like HackerNews where you remove a post but put a pinned/top level comment explaining its a dupe and here’s the source.
But there are times that different coverage of the same story can carry different insights and details. Which can be useful to gain a more complete picture.
But there are times that different coverage of the same story can carry different insights and details. Which can be useful to gain a more complete picture.
we try to strike a balance but i will note that so far this has mostly gone the way of “flooding the front page with several minimally distinct copies of the same story”
Of course. And I think it’s worth stating you all do a good job there. Just wanted to point out there are times where the initial reports are lacking in detail or outright incorrect in the rush to be first to press. So some way of linking later threads/posts that aren’t minimally distinct, can really bring the quality up.
I know the mod tools are lacking so there’s also the “you gotta work with what you can” too
I agree. I think letting people post links to additional articles in a megathread works well, like for the submersible story.
Thank you again for all the hard work you’ve been doing as a volunteer!
Sure, no argument there. There’s a choice to be made between “post the second story as a comment to the first one” and “post the second story a a separate topic”. I’m in favor of the first approach to keep discussion in one spot, but it’s not something I feel super-strongly about.
Maybe a time lag would be useful? Something along the lines of: “versions of a story appearing within a week of the first post should be attached to the original as replies, versions a week or more afterwards [that present substantial developments] can start a new thread”? It likely wouldn’t be possible to enforce a substantial development rule, but there can be dramatic changes to the story over time. The Titan submersible business was a different story on the Thursday than it was on the Monday of the same week, for example (which breaks my own rule, of course, but I think it’s an easy example) and there will probably be another story once some more analysis has been done. I agree that it would be better to have fewer threads to get a richer conversation, but I think there are limits to what actually fits in a single thread.
One of the rules I liked from the /r/games community was one of the rules you mentioned here: “Use the same titles as the article itself.” I think all the rules you mentioned here are definitely good ground rules as well.
Personally, I would also like to see people adopting the body portion of Lemmy posts to summarize the article, or quote a meaty part of the article; but that could also be used for misleading purposes, so I’m not sure if that’s a good idea without some level of oversight.
I would like fo the country to be added to the title (or as tags if that exits on lemmy), like [USA], [FR] or [World]. We are an international community so it’d help filter out the news of country you are not interested in.
I don’t think tags exist yet, but I do think I remember there being an issue on GitHub for them.
EDIT: Found the “original” issue, there’s quite a few duplicates. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/317
they’re unlikely to exist for awhile unless someone is actively working on the PR for them, unfortunately
What do people think of a “journalistic integrity” rule? I know that’s also subjective, but I’m trying to think of how to phrase a rule that is basically “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”. I guess the rule could just be “don’t post intentionally incendiary crap”, with some examples of what that means and community opportunities to in some way indicate that an article is incendiary crap.
Sorry about the duplicate comments. Not sure if it was the server or the app I was using, but I didn’t think they posted until it was too late and I re submitted it.
Anyway, I agree to this idea in theory, but only if there are extremely clear thresholds before the rule is invoked. For example: a limit on authors’ statements of opinion. Ways that are unacceptable for the article to refer to its subjects.
Basically I think we should debate the rules we want, but once we have consensus I wouldn’t want us also fighting about what does or doesn’t break the rules. Let’s please make the rules clear and measurable.
For example: a limit on authors’ statements of opinion.
What did The Economist ever do to you?
Seriously, a hard rule (zero) on that excludes that pub and would exclude almost everything, but would still be far easier to implement than drawing a subjective line for each post that satisfies no one.
Personally I’m not opposed to journalists having an opinion and using it to shape their work. I think it’s essential.
I suggested this hypothetical rule as an example of a rule that is measurable. Also it’s about the discussion on what kind of news community we want here and I’m thinking about newspapers and the distinction between the news and opinion sections. Does that example make more sense?
I’ve written, edited and laid out both news and opinion, starting in the days of paste-up. The distinction is easy with a bit of learning and years of experience and involves very few hard lines.
The issue is with making rules for people who don’t know what news is. I understand the desire for hard, measurable definitions of news, but you’re going to need one hell of a shoehorn to make that feasible.
The problem I have with this is that sometimes anger and being explicitly angry is valuable and justified (or may be), as in for example opinion pieces about the responses to the recent refugee boat disaster vs the submersible story, or the news stories about, like, a known Nazi or child abuser running for political office, or about racism in policing, and so on.
At the end of the day, what counts as “incendiary” versus “reasonable reaction to a situation” is a subjective judgement that may be wrong sometimes, in both directions.
I also personally prefer news sources that are open about their biases, because biases still exidt even in publications that pretend to be neutral (looking at you, New York Times transphobia department).
My preference would be for flairs/tags like reddit has, so that individual users could filter out posts like “Opinion” and so on if they wish. But lemmy doesn’t allow this yet.
And maybe a rule against altering the original hedline of the article, since more often than not that’s used to rephase headlines to include the opinion of the poster.
Most places that follow an industry code of ethics prominently (in relative terms with dynamic layouts and such) display their affiliation on the site. If SPJ’s a bit too uppity for somewhere, they’re making a bad marketing decision or you’re rolling dice.
I would also say that a Twitter post is not news, but unfortunately a lot of politicians have not gotten that notice yet.
It’s more nuanced than that. A tweet can be news:
[insert Twitter citation in all caps about the Big One hitting somewhere in Southern California]
But a story we’re going to have enough to discuss is going to need to wait a bit.
Also, I’ve seen a lot of tweets with links to relevant news where the reaction before the link is the news or the link requires the context provided by the tweet to make any sense.
r/politics also had rules on what sources were allowable; might be reasonable to do that here as well.
R/politics was hardly level-headed overall, though. Even though I’d often agree with them, it felt like a lot of people who agree shouting at each other uselessly and getting mad together a lot of the time.
I wouldn’t be opposed to blacklisting sources, but whitelisting sources instead might needlessly exclude local newspapers, I’d think? And non-US and non-UK sources.
No editorials or articles which are little more than third party editorials.
Editorials usually end up as:
Someone has an opinion, this isn’t news.
Articles which are little more than:
This bloke has an opinion and I’m going to write about it! (which is often a negative topic) also isn’t news and something that worldnews on reddit struggled with. The sub was constantly flooded with topics which were just: Joe Blowhard thinks everyone sucks and some other right wing nonsense.
There was no news there either than a third party stating that someone else had an opinion.
Using the same title as a linked article is a good rule. I don’t necessarily believe all submissions should have to be linked to an article though. If someone is at the scene, as it happens, then their first hand account is valuable too.
Rules make for great starting points, but consider that people are at different levels when it comes to their understanding of what news is.
Use the same titles as the article itself
Good rule unless the hed is useless or sensationalized. This likely means you have the wrong source, but now we’re in the realm of editorial discretion, which is not historically the strongest skill the public at large has developed.
No blog spam, link to the source
Subjective. Doctorow’s piece on enshittification was a blog post.
Political news, should go to the political community
Again, expecting people to know the difference is a big ask outside of a newsroom.
No dupes of same topic
Same URL, sure. But tick-tocks are not the same as analysis and generally garner a different sort of discussion.
Varying levels of user sophistication is definitely something to consider, thanks for mentioning it. I personally would rather see some dubious articles than chase away people who don’t understand why I consider those articles dubious. I think that also covers articles with bad heds. “The title tells me something about this story” is a good starting point for a discussion about source reliability. Rephrasing a title also expresses an opinion, and it sounds like we’re not looking for the poster’s commentary. (I could go either way on that, myself).
I’m not sure I’m with you about “blog spam,” though. I agree that it’s a subjective characterization, but in my opinion, Cory Doctorow’s piece on enshittification is not news. It’s certainly not spam, and it is worthy of discussion, but it doesn’t serve the informative purpose that a news article does, and I don’t think it’s meant to. That piece is an analysis of patterns of events over the course of many years, and its purpose is to identify and describe a pattern shown by those events, not to present a detailed, factual account of any of them.
I do think there are blogs that contain news, if that’s what you’re getting at, and I am open to the idea that certain kinds of commentary might belong in a news forum even if they don’t count as news, but I personally would stop short of grouping high-level conceptual pieces with standard news items. I also don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with blog posts, but I do think they’re usually commentary or personal anecdotes rather than straight news, so if we’re looking to avoid commentary and anecdotes, prohibiting blogs might be a step in that direction. (As with commentary by OP, I could go either way on discussing editorials/commentary).
See the philosophy posts that are in the sidebar of the main feed. More specifically, The spirit of the rules.
I don’t disagree with this philosophy. Its more that I believe a few simple rules could go a long way to raising the quality of this community. For example if I walk into a library there is the notion of being nice (quiet, polite, respectful of others) - but I still assume the shelves are well organized.
I have no issue if people disagree, but maybe consider at least a note in the sidebar talking a little about what this community is about?
I have never moderated a community, so I don’t know the ins and outs of certain rules, but a rule for the same title as the article itself I think is a solid idea.
A politics rule seems like it would be hard to me, as there are a lot of stories that could fall into a grey area?
Everything is related to politics in one way or another, a better rule would be no campaign news.
I don’t know but, Remember to… beehave … you know is like a bee but that does things like the queen orders …