Resolution:
Tldr: nothing has changed
Thankyou to everyone who has contributed to this thread over the last couple of days. In keeping with the advice offered by some our more prominent members, we will hold off on this until there has been sufficient growth and it is discussed again. However, feel free to make use of the !news@aussie.zone community if you wish and make sure you subscribe to it if you don’t use our local feed.
I will keep this post stickied for a few days, the original proposal is below for historical purposes
Proposal
At this stage in the growth of this community I think we should begin to consider moving general news content into the dedicated !news@aussie.zone community as well as focusing political content onto !australianpolitics@aussie.zone and environmental content in !environment@aussie.zone. And use this community mostly for opinion pieces and discussing stuff which doesn’t necessarily fit into politics or the environment or any other community here.
To make things clearer here are some examples of posts I believe would belong in the news community:
- Burger giant Wendy’s signs deal to open 200 Australian stores by 2034
- These Australians are happy to get on their hobby horses — and they’re keen for others to do the same
- Australian government lifts humanitarian intake cap to 20,000 visas
- Mushroom mystery: family lunch leaves Australian town reeling after three deaths in suspected poisoning
These would belong in this community:
- Foreign interference through social media is an active threat. Here’s what Australia can do
- Why are so many boys and men feeling alone and in the cold?
- Families distressed after ‘highly misleading’ video used by anti-Voice campaigners goes viral
These would belong in the politics community:
- WA Premier Roger Cook announces repeal of Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Laws
- Australia has a dose of ‘long Morrison’, and it’s nothing to sneeze at
These would belong in the politics community but would be well served by a cross-post to environment:
- NSW Labor accused of ‘fundamental breach of trust’ over logging in promised koala national park
- Thousands of Labor members take climate challenge to Albanese
Why?
The main reasons why I want to do this are:
- Establishing a distinction in content now is easier from a moderation perspective while there are relatively few people posting news stories - if we do this now it will become clear to new users where content belongs making maintaining the distinction easy.
- It makes room in this community for longer-running discussions that people can easily keep track of so less arguments are repeated, since it can become difficult to keep track of many posts.
- Users can tune into what they want and out of what they don’t want to hear about. E.g. if you don’t want to know about politics you can completely ignore that community.
Other discussions
There has been a discussion of this issue in this post and in reply to this comment.
Why the long post?
I want to know what everyone’s opinion on the matter is and how this system could be improved or whether it’s worth pursuing at all.
I agree with @kerr@aussie.zone. This community (in the broad sense) is small enough already, splintering off prematurely doesn’t seem good for it to me.
But further than that, I’m also not sure the lines are clear enough to be worth trying to fight anyway. Of the three articles you listed as belonging in this community (as in !australia@aussie.zone), the first and third are ones I’d have expected to go to !news@aussie.zone. The hobby horses is one I’d think would go here, and the humanitarian intake is clearly politics, to me (it literally has “government” in the title!). I’m not trying to start a fight over whether I’m right or you are, but merely trying to point out that the fact that we disagree over what belongs where is potentially problematic if we’re trying to start rules for restricting what gets posted where.
I’m not trying to start a fight over whether I’m right or you are
And I’m not looking for one, it’s good to get a variety of opinions on things like this. My general thinking was that anything to do with major things like referendums belong here, since people will want to discuss them. And articles from the conversation are more so analysis than news which tend to lead to larger discussions. But I can definitely see how this could be problematic and difficult to implement
I’m so confused, I literally thought that the “what goes where” section headers were around the wrong way.
I also agree with your point about not being too strict when we’re wanting the community to grow.
Probably a dissenter but I like having all those stories in one place now. I think the community is too new to start subdividing it up too.
I think there’s something to be said for having everything in one place for smaller communities, too. You get to develop relationships with other users and hear perspectives that might otherwise not be shared. This is how it used to be with forums, where tons of stuff would just go under the Off-Topic section and you’d get a very wide range of threads and opinions.
I agree with the division you propose, but I don’t think we’ve got the traffic here yet.
It was a happy day for me when I could stop posting news articles in /r/AusGuns, but it was when we reached like 1500 subs and there was about a dozen random posts a day occurring.Thanks for your advice, we will hold off on forcing anything until the community wants it
