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.
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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.
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
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 would also say that a Twitter post is not news, but unfortunately a lot of politicians have not gotten that notice yet.
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.
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 don’t know but, Remember to… beehave … you know is like a bee but that does things like the queen orders …
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, locking the post and here’s the source/original post and comments to keep discussion from being fragmented.
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.
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.
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
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What about light weight rules like ‘no politics’. Ie, a post like this (https://beehaw.org/post/792997) should go to politics?
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Agreed. Also to be clear, my goal isn’t to suppress this information. My goal is just to make sure the article ends up in the right spot so that the audience that is interested can find it. Example, https://beehaw.org/c/politics
In the United States (at least) the whole point of a free press is to keep politicians in check. You can’t separate the news from politics.
I disagree with that definition of news. Keeping politicians accountable is certainly one of the functions of the press, but there are a lot of possible news items that don’t refer to politicians. “Winter storms hit [location]” is news, but not related to politicians unless it talks about steps local politicians are taking to prevent storm damage (which is not necessary for a good article). Or “Physicists find [particle they were looking for].” That one could be in Science rather than here, but it is definitely news, and I personally think it’s hard to shoehorn politics into a discussion of particle physics without losing track of what actually happened. Very few politicians involve themselves in that kind of research (though, to be fair, it might be news if they did).
Whether it’s possible to have a purely apolitical news forum is a different question, and I am sure it’s possible to put a political spin on almost anything if you want, but I just don’t think it’s true that news must be political to be news.
